Dear Reader,
This month’s short story is dedicated:
To all the unrequited crushes,
And all cues we missed.
There is a higher plan at work,
A grander story unfolding,
Turning us into
The people we’re meant to be.
All things made beautiful
In their proper time.
~Dark Energy~
“So the expansion of the universe has not been slowing due to gravity, as everyone thought, it has been accelerating. No one expected this, no one knew how to explain it. But something was causing it… More is unknown than is known…It turns out that roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy… Unfortunately, no one understands why the cosmological constant should even be there, much less why it would have exactly the right value to cause the observed acceleration of the universe.”
—NASA, “Dark Energy, Dark Matter”
She forgot about the dinner party. This is why, when Willow opened the door to her apartment after hours of studying in the library, she stood in the threshold blinking. There were too many people inside.
“There you are. Just in time,” Hawthorn called. He unfolded his gangly limbs from a hard wooden chair and came over to greet her.
“Hi!” Willow put on a smile, trying to cover her surprise. The small table in the kitchen had a few dishes of food, a salad, and in the oven there was a mac and cheese with cut-up hot dogs. A veritable feast on a college budget. Of course, she had watched her roommate, Britany, prep the food last night while Hawthorn helped slice salami and cheese for the appetizers.
The idea to host a dinner came up a week ago. The three of them, friends since freshman year, had been hanging out in their new upperclassmen housing. Britany complained that she never met anyone new. It was their final year at college, and she needed to make the most of it.
“What do you think?” Hawthorn had asked Willow, whose nose had been stuck in a textbook. “Do you need to meet more guys before we graduate?”
“Hmm? Yeah, sure,” she had said. She had been reading about the orbital patterns of planets and it demanded all of her attention. Hawthorn said he would invite some new friends. Britany had been thrilled.
Willow had been so tired from a week of classes and studying, preoccupied with her own schedule, that it hadn’t really clicked in for her: today was the dinner.
Their guests sat on the standard blue couches the college supplied to everyone in these tenements. Feeling their gaze on her, Willow trained her eyes on Hawthorn. He was a head taller than her with curly brown hair. His wiry arms pulled her into a hug.
“I’m so sorry, I completely forgot, let me just put my things down,” she muttered when he pulled back. She gave a sweeping acknowledgement to the crowd in her apartment.
“Hello! I’ll be right back.”
There were five new faces in the room: one woman and four men. Britany must be thrilled. She was perched on the couch in conversation with them, the perfect hostess. Two of the men had the scrawny underdeveloped look of new academics only a couple years out of high school, still very much children (albeit intelligent ones).
The last two did not have this babyish roundness to their faces. They seemed more defined, harder in the skin, as though the world had already roughed out the soft years of childhood, leaving behind a depth and texture not found in books.
One of these was staring at her.
Willow edged past the kitchen table into her bedroom as an embarrassed heat rose in her face. Once the door was closed behind her she dropped her bag, yanked off her coat, and opened her closet. Was she supposed to be dressed nicer? But then, everyone had already seen her, so wouldn’t that just be awkward, like everyone knew she changed specifically for them? The eyes of the stranger flashed through her mind. She hadn’t gotten a good look at him, but she thought… He probably hadn’t been staring at her, just looking like everyone else.
She needed to observe, collect more data. It would be foolish to make assumptions based on limited information. Her honey blond hair was in a tangled bun. She pulled a brush through it so the darker shades shone and mixed more evenly with the highlights. Her blue plaid looked frumpy, so she settled it more evenly and folded up the cuffs. “Bones like a bird,” Hawthorn had said once, wrapping his thumb and forefinger around Willow’s wrist.
When she reentered the living room, she noticed everyone else was wearing ordinary clothes: jeans and unremarkable shirts. She was fine. She got herself a plate of appetizers and took an open seat.
“I’m Willow,” she introduced herself, shaking hands with the woman next to her and then the younger men (all of whose names she quickly forgot), working her way around.
“Yewen,” the last said, a southern lilt in his voice.
Willow listened to the conversation and asked questions, not focusing too much attention on anyone, specifically Yewen. Through the ebbs and flow of banter, she covertly examined him more closely. He wasn’t tall but built sturdily. His dark hair was wavy, brushed to the side, and a Van Dyke goatee circled his mouth, emphasizing his square chin. It turned out Yewen was a freshman despite being older than everyone else in the room.
“What do you study?” the girl next to her on the couch inquired.
“Physics,” Willow said just before stuffing a cracker with cheese into her mouth. She was starving. Yewen had just started explaining how he came to college later than most. Something about travelling across the country that snagged her attention. Her entire life was lived in the confines of a rigorous academic schedule, from one class to the next, more and more often in the white laboratories of the science building. If she wasn’t in a class or lab, she was in a library, studying or writing papers. Academic types were the only people she knew.
What was it like to live outside those boundary lines, complete freedom, no structure whatsoever? She shuddered at the thought.
“Interesting, that’s a broad field. Is there a specific area of physics you’re drawn to?”
“Astrophysics,” Willow said, pulling her attention back to the girl.
Ever since her first astronomy class last year, she’d been enamored. It was as though all the foundational concepts she had studied for the last three years (mechanics and waves, multivariable calculus, electricity and magnetism, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics) were finally cohering around something truly fascinating: the cosmos was coming into focus.
“It studies the nature of celestial bodies,” Willow summarized. To spare the girl the obligatory follow up questions that would probably bore her guest, she asked, “What is your major?”
She stopped trying to listen to the story Yewen was telling, and simply focused on being a good hostess to the girl beside her. She’d likely never see him again anyway.
When Willow let herself dream, she envisioned herself as the head of some fully funded lab, doing groundbreaking research on black holes, dark energy, or galaxy collisions. Most of the time, however, she assumed she would go into some sort of physics career. Since this was a male dominated field, she figured should learn to embrace her inner ‘roar.’ Thus, when looking over literature course options (to fulfill a gen-ed requirement she’d been putting off), she had chosen Modern Feminist Voices.
The first day of her fall semester she had squared her shoulders before walking into the classroom. She processed advanced math: she should be able to handle a few words on a page. They were in English after all, even if she had never done well in high school English classes. Unfortunately, her memories had not deceived her. Literature was not determined by plain mathematical and measurable variables.
It was unruly. It was art.
The stories were guided by rules no one explained but apparently everyone else understood. Seemingly unrelated events all tied together, crafting an overall “message” through a “theme,” whatever those were. Characters never did what she expected. Why didn’t they just say what they meant, rather than multiplying words around the point?
The feminist angle was a whole other nest of knots; every time characters appeared to be heading towards one objective, one goal in the story, Willow had the feeling that there was something else entirely driving the plot and the character’s motivations. It was like dark energy and the expansion of the universe: there, moving things forward, but inexplicable and unseen.
She walked down the long corridor behind the science building, her eyes trained on The Awakening by Kate Chopin open in her hands. The protagonist, Edna Pontellier, seemed pallid and flakey to Willow, not well depicted. She couldn’t get a hold of the character: Edna kept sliding off the page, away from her. It was as though all the vitality and life were sucked from her character and into her husband’s, a man who had a very clear idea of how his life was supposed to go, and Edna’s role in it.
“Hey!” a voice called, and Willow almost walked into someone. She abruptly realized the person had called to her a couple times. She gave a startled ‘sorry,’ and saw a Van Dyke goatee smiling at her, a sly twinkle in his eye.
“Good book?” Yewen asked.
“Well, I don’t know, we’ll see,” Willow said, trying to be diplomatic.
“Are you headed to lunch? You can tell me about it,” Yewen said.
“Oh, um—” she slowed her speed, and now they were walking towards the center of campus. Yes, she had an open block in her schedule for lunch, but she had been booking it to the library to get this reading done. She would eat a snack in her next class, all part of her tightly planned schedule. Willow hesitated; she didn’t need to go to the library right now.
“Yeah, sure, let’s go. But I haven’t read enough to really tell you much about it.”
Yewen shrugged, as if he’d already forgotten the reason he’d asked her to eat with him. Willow’s heart stuttered. Had he just asked her to lunch? Did this count as a date? No, probably not; just two new acquaintances getting to know each other.
She tucked the book closed beneath her arm and ignored the mild anxiety of leaving her strict schedule in the dust. She had some down-time this evening where she could catch up. She had planned on using that time to do some research for Professor Burg’s project on the “Evolutionary History of the Galaxies.”
She admired Dr. Burg. The professor had encouraged her to apply to work on her research project after Willow finished her astronomy class last year. She pointed out that participation in the research project and more lab hours would help her when she started applying to grad school programs for astrophysics. Willow hadn’t considered grad school until Dr. Burg mentioned it. Astrophysics… The idea had thrilled her. But the research for Dr. Burg could wait for today.
“Thanks,” she said when Yewen opened the door for her. It was a relief to get inside the warm commons. They hesitated in line until it was their turn to swipe their meal cards.
“So,” Willow said once they were seated with food, “tell me your story, missed the details the other day.”
“I already talked about me. I want to hear about you,” he demurred. He cocked her a grin, knocking the waves of his dark hair back as he did.
“No, please, come on, I want to hear it. You said something about travelling?”
He gave her a pointed look. “Okay, but you understand this means I’ll be doing a lot of talking,” he said with his southern lilt, blending charm with candor.
Willow’s eyebrows shot up in surprise, impressed. Very nice. She nodded and smiled, eating a sweet potato fry. “So, you’re twenty-five,” she prompted him.
“Yep, and I barely graduated high school. I mean, for real, I was a terrible student, never did the reading—”
“Why not?” she asked.
“I was bored with it, I wanted something more interesting, adventure, real life experiences. So after I graduated, I decided to see the world. Turns out that takes more money than you would think. I hitchhiked a lot. You meet some of the coolest people on the road, and some truly not cool people.”
Willow tried to imagine it: Yewen with his hand stuck out, thumb up looking for a ride, in a grimy raincoat, wearing a worn backpack.
“The weather can make it hard,” he said.
“How did you manage it?” she asked, meaning ‘how did you survive?’
“There’s something bracing about having no safety net to catch you if you fall. Makes you resourceful, because now everything matters. In 1519 an explorer named Hernán Cortés arrived in the new world and burned his ships. It was a little like that for me: no turning back, do or die. When you don’t have a choice, you just do what you have to.”
She watched him, brows furrowed, the burger forgotten on her plate. He laughed.
“Honestly it was more fun than not, I worked a lot of odd jobs. Wrangled cattle for a bit, learned how to bartend—the tips make it worth it.”
Willow took a bite of her food. You had to be a certain kind of person to rough it like that for so long—not a hobo but a nomad of sorts—to say it was fun. He was an adventurous spirit, someone who did a thing for the hell of it, simply to say he did.
That way of living, amorphous, thriving on potential energy of the unknown, felt antithetical to everything she’d been working toward. She saw herself inventing, researching, building, and that sort of life required vast amounts of space and undisturbed time. Yewen, to the contrary, seemed to come alive at the possibility of flux and inconstancy.
“So then, why are you here now? It sounds like you really loved it.”
“When you serve so many different types of people all over the country, you learn to adapt to situations. I figured out I had a knack for understanding different points of view, and expressing opposing ideas diplomatically. I want to see more of the world, interact with different cultures, so I decided to come back to school, major in International Relations, and learn a language.”
Major in IR and learn a language, like he was picking up needlepoint.
“What language?” Willow asked, narrowing her eyes.
“After English, French is one of the most strategically powerful languages. I could work for the United Nations, for the International Red Cross, or the World Trade Organization. There are almost 30 countries whose official language is French. Learning French, a whole other side of the world opens up to me.” Yewen took a bite of his burger.
“Barely graduated high school,” Willow repeated. He grinned.
Willow floated through the rest of her day, on a high.
“What’s this? You’re not late, or moaning about the studying you need to get done?” Britany asked, watching Willow as she pulled out the bag of microwave popcorn.
Britany and Willow were unlikely friends; her roommate was loud, extroverted, and loved working with people. At a party or a crowded table, she was the ringmaster. It was perhaps no surprise when she announced psychology as her major. They had been assigned roommates freshman year, and instead of repelling each other, Willow’s quiet academic intensity and Britany’s vivacious engagement with people had balanced each other. Willow could be a part of the crowd and enjoy the energy from the edges, protected by Britany’s personality. Meanwhile, Willow was a safe space for Britany to unwind, not perform, not be the life of the party, and get some studying done.
Fingers like tweezers, Willow pulled the popcorn bag open, leaning away from the steam as it floated up. She grinned at her friend and emptied the bag into a plastic bowl. Friday evening was their standing movie night because Britany claimed that her roommate, “the machine,” needed a mandatory pressure valve release, or her brilliant brains would boil in her skull.
“You look happy,” Hawthorn said, sitting up from his spot on the couch. She salted the popcorn and walked over, hiding her face with a handful of the buttery white puffs. She passed him the bowl and plopped down next to him.
She had met Hawthorn in a freshman math class. He was quick to raise his hand, and she noticed that he calculated the answers nearly as quickly as herself. Willow always had a knack for advanced math; it was why she didn’t often speak up in class. She solved the problem on her own and waited for her peers to figure it out. Nobody likes a know-it-all. But every once in a while, when the professor asked a question, the hall stayed silent. Seeing that no one had an answer, she would speak up.
When she noticed Hawthorn started sitting behind her, she thought he was copying her work. Covert observations revealed that he got to work straight away on a problem, and then looked over to see if she was done. He was racing her. One day, instead of sitting the row behind her, he sat next to her. She asked the obligatory college “get to know you” questions, and learned he majored in Theology. However his passion for numbers and equations had led him to a minor in mathematics. This fascinated her: here was a person who studied the crossroads of human behavior, philosophy, and history—a died in the wool humanities academic—who nurtured a love for advanced math. They had been friends ever since.
“Course I’m happy, we’re watching The Midnight Sky. I wanted to see this one,” she said. That satisfied Britany, who was getting them drinks, but Hawthorn’s eyes narrowed as he watched her.
“No, that’s not it. Usually, you’re late. And I have to hide your textbooks,” he said.
She ignored him, eating her popcorn, eyes glued on the screen. He would lose interest.
He closed the laptop.
“What? It’s nothing,” she objected.
“Spill,” Hawthorn ordered.
Willow huffed. “Fine. You remember Yewen?” She explained that he had asked her to lunch, and how well it had gone.
“I think he likes me,” she confessed, feeling her face redden. Telling her friends felt a little like jinxing it, but at the same time made it more real: something worthy of saying out loud. Britany’s eyes widened while Willow spoke and she squealed with delight. Hawthorn’s expression hadn’t really shifted, only a slight furrowing of the brow as he concentrated on her words. When she finished, he smiled politely and opened the computer back up.
“What?” she asked. He shook his head and pulled up the video. Willow closed the laptop on his fingers. “What?” she demanded.
“I just don’t think it means what you think it means. It was just lunch,” he said.
“Come on, he asked her out. That was a date,” Britany insisted, shoveling another handful of popcorn into her mouth.
“A date on a meal plan already paid for?” he asked. “Look, I know him a little better than you. Yewen is just a really friendly guy. It’s his personality, southern charm and all that.”
“I don’t think so. He seemed pretty intentional to me. We exchanged phone numbers.” Willow frowned.
Hawthorn shrugged. “I just caution you; I don’t think he means anything by it. I wouldn’t want you to get your hopes up and then find out he wasn’t interested. He’s new to this campus, I bet he’s just making friends closer to his own age than the freshmen.”
Hawthorn reopened the laptop and pressed play, but Willow didn’t see the movie. Had she misread things again? Imagining fantasies where there was nothing but friendliness? Her spirit sank, embarrassed at having brought it up to her friends. She probably looked like such an airhead: there goes clueless Willow, always misreading the signs.
The first two years at college had been a string of crushes, usually determined by who happened to be in her classes that semester (and once, who made her regular latté at the campus coffee shop). The earlier crushes were longer, lasting a semester or two, but shortened as she wised up and realized the interest was completely in her mind, one sided. The last two years she resolved to keep her head in the books until someone came along and made his interest obvious.
Weeks passed. Yewen didn’t reach out.
P.S.
Dear reader,
This is not the end of Willow’s story. However, the text and illustrations got so long I could not send it to you in a single email. “Dark Energy-Part 2” will arive in you in box in one week, on May 8th.
In the mean time, check out this bundle of free reads, and share this newsletter with all your friends. See you soon!