“Kirk, huh?”

I initially feared that Cece would abysmally fail at fake-girlfriending. For one, she’s way too beautiful. Her wide-apart eyes, pointy chin, and Cupid’s-bowy lips might be unconventional, but she looks like the sexiest, most stunning bug in the universe. Secondly: she’s the opposite of a blank slate. A thing of nature who pees with the door open and eats Chex Mix as cereal, full of lurid anecdotes about dead linguists’ sex lives doled out with a charming lisp. I barely let any of my personality come through, but she bombards people.

And it did turn out to be a problem: clients like her way too much.

“What do you tell them when they ask you to date for real?” she asked me one night. We were splitting a bag of Babybels while watching a Russian silent movie in eight parts.

“Not sure.” I wondered if the guy who offered me seventy bucks to have sex in his nearby parked car qualified. Probably not. “It’s never happened.”

“Wait—really?”

“Nope.” I shrugged. “No one ever asks me out, really.”

“No way.”

I let the cheese melt in my mouth. On-screen, someone had been sobbing for twenty-five minutes. “I don’t think people see me as dating material.”

“They’re intimidated. Because you’re a genius. And pretty. And nice. Hedgie loves you, and she’s the best judge of character. Also, you know lots about the Tadpole Galaxy.”

Fact-check: none of this is true—except for the last bit. Sadly, listing random facts about star clusters four hundred million light-years away is not considered love interest material.

“Kirk the Scientist asked if he could hire me again,” Cece says now. “Next week. I said yes.”

I try to sound casual. “Faux has a one-date policy.”

“I know. But you broke it, too, for Greg.” She shrugs, trying to look casual. Lots of casual going on. Hmm. “Of course, I might cancel, since by next week you’ll have your fancy MIT job, and I shall retire from the fake-dating scene to become your kept BFF.”

I sit back in my chair and—I want it bad, so bad, I moan. My way out of fake-girlfriending. Above all, my way out of the crappiest, lamest circle of academia: the one of adjunct professors.

I know that I sound dramatic. I know that the title conjures lofty images. Professor? Has prestige, nurtures minds, wears tweed jackets. Adjunct? Pretty word, starts with the first letter of the alphabet, reminds one faintly of a sneeze. When I tell people that I’m an adjunct professor of physics at several Boston universities, they think that I made it in life. That I’m adulting. And I let them. Take my mom: she has lots to worry about, between my idiot brother and my other idiot brother. It’s good for her to believe that her daughter is a fully operational human being with access to basic healthcare.

Not good for her? To know that I teach nine courses and commute between three different universities, translating into some five hundred students sending me pics of the weird rash on their crotch to get their absence excused. That I make so little money, it’s almost no money. That I have no long-term contract or benefits.

Cue mournful violin sonata.

It’s not that I don’t like teaching. It’s just that . . . I really dislike teaching. Really, really, really. I’m constantly drowning in the ever-swallowing quicksand of student emails, and I’m way too screwed up to shape young minds into anything that’s not aberrant. My dreams of physics academia always entailed me as a full-time researcher, a blackboard, and long hours spent pondering the theories on the equatorial sections of Schwarzschild wormholes.

And yet here I am. Adjuncting and fake-girlfriending on the side. Teaching load: 100 percent. Despair load: incalculable.

But things might be turning around. Adjuncts are cheap labor, the gig workers of academia, but tenure-track positions . . . oh, tenure tracks. I shiver just thinking about them. If adjuncts float like buoys in the open sea, tenure tracks are oil rigs cemented into the ocean floor. If adjuncts open Nickelback concerts, tenure tracks headline Coachella. If adjuncts are Laughing Cow wedges, tenure tracks are pule cheese, lovingly made from the milk of Serbian Balkan donkeys.

Point is, I’ve been academia’s disposable fake girlfriend for a while now, and I’m exhausted. I’m all done. I’m ready to graduate to a real relationship, ideally something lasting with MIT—who’ll put a 401(k) and a ring on it.

Unless they choose the other physicist they’re interviewing. Oh God. What if they choose the other physicist they’re interviewing?

“Elsie? Are you thinking about whether they’ll hire the other candidate?”

“Don’t read my mind, please.”

Cece laughs. “Listen—they won’t. You’re the shit. All those years in grad school spent thinking about multiverses and binomial equations and . . . protons?” I lift my eyebrow. “Fine, I have no idea what you do. But you forsook a social life—and oftentimes personal hygiene—to elevate yourself above the sea of mediocre white men that is theoretical physics. And now—one job opening this year, one, and out of hundreds of applicants, you’re in the final round—”

“Two job openings. I didn’t get an interview for Duke—”

“Because Duke’s a nepotistic swamp and the position was already earmarked for the chair’s cousin’s son’s girlfriend’s llama, or whatever.” She hops off the counter and sits across from me, reaching out to cup my hand. “You’re going to get the job. I know it. Just be yourself during the interview.” She bites her lip. “Unless you can be Stephen Hawking. Is there any way you could—”

“No.”

“Then yourself will do.” She smiles. “Think of the future. Of your livable salary, which will allow us to hire some brawny lad to come lift the top part of the credenza onto the bottom part of the credenza.” She points at the hutch in the corner of the living room. Cece and I hit a wall mid-assembly. Three years ago. “And of course it will keep me in the cheese lifestyle I am accustomed to.”

It’s easy, with Cece, to smile and let myself believe. “Unlimited pecorino romano.”

“And all the insulin your worthless pancreas desires.”

“Concrete bricks. To squash the Raid-resistant crab-hornet spiders.”

“A little plasma TV for Hedgie’s terrarium.”

“Matching ‘academia sux’ tattoos.”

“A golden toilet.”

“A golden bidet.”

We gasp. Then laugh. Then I sober up. “I just want to be paid to contemplate cosmological models of the observable universe, you know?”

“I know.” Her smile softens. “What does Dr. L. say about your chances?”

Laurendeau—or Dr. L., as I’d never dare to call him to his face—was my Ph.D. advisor and is the person to whom I owe every single bit of my academic success. He’s just as involved in my career as he was before I graduated, and I’m constantly thankful for it. “Optimistic.”

“There you go. How many days is the interview going to be?”

“Three.”

“You start today?”

“Yup. Informal interview dinner tonight.” I think about the chair wanting to meet me early. Is it promising? Inauspicious? Weird? No clue. “Teaching demonstration tomorrow. Research talk and a final reception the day after. Various meetings with faculty members scattered throughout.”

“Did you prep?”

“Is ‘prep’ rocking myself? Contemplating my own mortality? Sacrificing a live creature to the gods of academia?” I glance at Hedgie, who looks dutifully cowed.

“Have you stalked the search committee online?”

“I haven’t been given their names or a detailed itinerary yet. It’s just as well—I need to answer emails. And buy pantyhose. And call my mom.”

“No, no, no.” Cece lifts her hand. “Do not call your mom. She’ll just dump all her problems on you. You need to focus, not listen to her bitch about how your brothers are punching each other over the last hot dog.”