Dear Reader,
As a writer, if I’m being honest, I hope when you finished reading part 1 of “Dark Energy,” you were frustrated with me:
“What? Is that it? What happened next?!”
Over the last four months, talking with a few of you and receiving your feedback—that you want the next installment from a particular short story, that you wish they were longer, that it could be a novel-length story— has encouraged me beyond what I can describe. Thank you for your words.
If there’s no audience, there’s no point. The reception of the work is the completion of the artistic act, the fruition of it. Thank you for being such an excellent audience.
Due to overwhelmingly positive feedback, I will soon be taking a short story I wrote previously, Refurbished, and lengthening it into a monthly installment. (Think TV episodes before Netflix gave us the gift of “binge”). These episodic installments will be available to paying subscribers of my newsletter. The cost is $5 a month, a total of $60 a year. If you have already been supporting this newsletter, THANK YOU. Again, it means the world to me, and it’s about time you got something extra for all the extra support. I will give more details the closer I come to launching this subscriber-only story option. I will continue to publish this free illustrated newsletter, with stories across genres.
For now, I will get out of the way and let you get back to Willow’s story.
~Dark Energy~ (Continued)
The literature class continued to kick Willow’s butt and remind her why she had chosen to study science. Science was clear, objective, concise. You weren’t expected to understand the nuances of human interaction, the difference between the meaning of intonations smaller than a split atom. One set of behaviors must be tied to a cause, but the transformation between cause and effect made absolutely no sense to her.
Take Yewen for example. He seemed happy to eat with her, but was that because he liked her, or because that’s how southern manners raised him? Did he ask for her number because he was romantically interested, or because he wanted more friends close to his age? Hawthorn must be wrong. But why wasn’t Yewen reaching out?
It was with tired relief that she retreated to the observation deck in the evenings and adjusted the telescope to look at the stars for her Observations and Data Reduction Techniques in Astronomy class. They may be far away, but at least they made sense to her. Their meaning didn’t keep shifting. Stars never moved, never abandoned their constellations or paths across the sky. They always followed a pattern.
Paths… the stars followed a predictable path through the sky. Similar to students and their schedules; they had routes they traveled from one class to the next, to the dining hall, to the library, even extracurriculars. The first time Yewen had invited her to lunch, their paths had crossed because she had taken an unusual route, heading towards the library. She knew they had a block open for lunch at the same time, but she hadn’t seen him. Was it because she didn’t go that way anymore? But still, she should have seen him in the dining hall. Had his path changed?
Then she remembered what the last few years of college were like: feeling overwhelmed all the time, barely keeping your head above water to get assignments done, all the while hoping that you did well. Maybe he was relearning how to be in school. Maybe he was staying later in classes to study, or maybe he’d found a quicker route. They simply hadn’t run into each other was all. He had forgotten to reach out because his course load was insanely difficult. Learning a new language while majoring in International Relations was a lot.
A plan began to form in her head.
She rerouted her course and took an unnecessary path to her next classroom, far out of the way of her usual shortcut, in the place she had run into Yewen the first time by accident. She walked slowly, doubts and feelings of foolishness plaguing her. What if he didn’t actually take this path and it was a fluke on both ends? What if he did, but decided to skip class to study today? Or what if she did bump into him and he knew she had gone out of her way. What if she looked ridiculous and desperate?
Willow rehearsed her most casual surprised greeting. The outdoor corridor was long and windy in the growing cold of the season, but she saw Yewen. His shoulders hunched under a black backpack, trying to keep his head warm, on a mission to his next class.
“Oh, hey!” Willow said. It was definitely too joyful, but she was excited to see him. Yewen blinked at her, startled. “How’ve you been?” she asked.
“Good, you know—lots to learn and all that…”
The Van Dyke grin was weak. There was an award pause as she realized he didn’t want to talk to her, that his mind was elsewhere, on whatever assignment he was hurrying off to complete. He was leaning forward, as though he expected the greeting to be brief but didn’t want to be rude and brush past.
“Well good luck, you’ve got this,” she said. He nodded and she continued on, face burning against the cold. She took the long way to the dining hall so he wouldn’t see her backtrack the way she had come, berating herself the whole way. Hawthorn was right; he wasn’t interested.
As the weeks passed, Willow’s ego stitched itself back together. She’d had a lot of practice detaching her interest (like with latté guy: just order and go, no banter. Textbooks were waiting).
One afternoon in November, Dr. Burg pulled Willow aside and asked which grad programs she was applying to. Not ‘if’ she was applying, ‘where,’ as though it was assumed. When Willow stuttered out she wasn’t sure, Dr. Burg had waved her long hand, nails painted an elegant red, dismissively through the air.
“Of course, Stanford has one of the best science departments overall, but it’s really MIT you should pay attention to. The kind of money they’re pouring into the physics department? That matters; you want to know your work will be supported. Plus, I have a contact in the faculty. Well, anyway, send me the emails, I’ve got the letter all written in my head.” She tapped her temple with an elegant red fingernail, and then swayed off, tucking her graceful hands back into her white lab coat.
She had forgotten about grad school, assuming that wasn’t in her future. It just seemed unrealistic since no one else in her family went on for further education for a career in science fields. But after Dr. Burg, it was as though the woman had given her permission to reach out and grab for her dreams. A web search told her the deadlines to apply were only weeks away, and the adrenaline panic of researching schools, gathering letters of recommendation, and composing a statement of objectives, pushed all nonessential concerns out of her mind.
The evening before she flew back home for the holidays, Willow and her friends went to the dining hall for a goodbye meal. It was decorated with wreaths and noise echoed off the high ceilings as students let off steam, relieved finals were over. Willow went to fill her cup at the soda fountain. Someone tapped her on the shoulder.
“Hey!” Yewen beamed at her. “Long time no see. We should hang out!”
His goatee charm-factor was turned up to eleven. No more pressing assignments, now that finals were over, she guessed. Nonetheless, she held her emotions in check.
“Yes, that would be great,” she said, forcing a smile to cover her surprise. “After break, I’m in.” She returned to the table with her friends. If he was interested, he’d reach out.
“What was that about?” Hawthorn asked.
“I don’t know. Nothing. Are you still good to pick me up at the airport when I get back from break?”
He nodded, still frowning as he watched something behind her.
“I just don’t get it,” Willow said as she adjusted the lens on the telescope.
The stadium lights over the football field were still on, impeding their view of the cosmos. But they would be turned off soon. She and Hawthorn had the observation tower to themselves this evening.
Every few weeks Willow ran into Yewen, in the dining hall, or walking between classes. He would say some version of “we should hang out,” and Willow agreed, and nothing happened.
“So he has your number, but there’s no follow-through,” Hawthorn summarized.
He had been pestering her to take him up some evening, show him the stars and explain the constellations. Now that their final semester was halfway over and spring gave the occasional warm breeze, she had made time. But Hawthorn was good at reading her moods, even in the dark of the observatory tower, and wouldn’t let up until she explained what was bothering her. Yewen had invited her earlier that day (for the umpteenth time) to “hang out.”
“I don’t know, I can’t read him. Maybe I just can’t read people.” She focused on adjusting the lens, moving the telescope over. Hawthorn was silent, arms folded over his chest. “What?”
“Nothing, it’s just reminding me of a proverb I read recently: what is too amazing for me, what I cannot understand, the way of a young man with a woman,” he quoted.
Her fingers froze on the telescope dials. She couldn’t see his face in the dark, only his silhouette.
“Exactly!” she said.
Proverbs were supposed to be wise sayings, so if even the writer of proverbs couldn’t understand the way men behaved with women, well—it made Willow feel a little better. She tinkered with the adjustments and checked the star app on her phone to confirm which constellations would be visible this evening.
Science made sense to her, like the equation for the Law of Motion between two orbiting objects. Throw another object in there, however, and everything went wonky. There was no equation for their magnetic movements, one object pulling the other into its gravitational pull until the third object interrupted. Understanding people had always been like this to her. Put her in a room with another woman, like Britany, and Willow knew where she stood. But mapping out interactions with men… it was math too advanced for her, some unseen energy charging and conducting the encounter.
“There should be a textbook for this,” Willow grumbled. “I literally study astrophysics, and I can’t figure it out. In science, there’s a cause and a logical effect.”
“There is a scientific class for this,” Hawthorn said. “It’s called psychology.”
Huh. He made a good point. Willow thought of Britany, who seemed to understand the dynamic between people far better than Willow did. Maybe she could ask… no, too embarrassing. She should have taken a psychology class at some point over the last four years. Too late now.
“Any other sage theological advice you can offer me? Any scriptures on how to date?” Willow joked. Hawthorn laughed.
“Yes actually, a whole book on it, The Song of Songs. It’s a poem between two lovers.”
“Wait really? What does it say?”
“I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles or the does of the field, that you do not stir up or awaken love until it pleases.”
The stadium lights turned off.
“Racy, I know,” he said, and Willow heard the grin in his voice. “But I think it means we have to be careful, because we could fall in love with the wrong person, if we push matters.”
“What do you mean, ‘wrong person’?” Willow asked, leaning over the telescope and centering it on the correct constellations as her eyes adjusted to the dark. “Baring people that are generally not right for you, or aren’t safe, I always assumed you were just supposed to find someone decent and make it work. You wouldn’t fall in love with the wrong person.”
“I think you can though, if you spend enough time obsessing over them. Someone could be right in the general sense, but wrong for you specifically,” Hawthorn said. “We’re all wired differently. Good at different things, interested in different things.”
The literature class had been like pulling teeth for Willow. The very first astronomy lecture had done the opposite: it felt right. Even the confusing parts of how celestial bodies behaved only grew her curiosity.
“I think that’s because there’s a unique purpose for each of us. Something we were put on this earth to do and be,” Hawthorn said.
She hadn’t really thought much about a divine intelligence orchestrating the universe, even with Hawthorn as a friend. Sure, she had seen and grasped things that gave her goosebumps; things which made her certain there must be some sort of organizing consciousness. The more you knew about the universe, the harder it was to ignore that. But to her it had always felt removed, impersonal. Could it be possible that the force which composed all matter out of the same basic elemental blocks, had paid as much attention to constructing her life?
“Who we choose to spend our time with,” Hawthorn went on, “our friends, but most of all who we choose to partner our life with, can determine the course of our years. What if that person doesn’t have the same calling as you? What if their purpose isn’t even complementary to yours? The two of you will always be pulling on each other, not living up to your calling. Or one of you will cave so that the other can do what they were made to do.”
He seemed to sigh to himself. Willow gestured for him to look through the telescope. He stepped forward and cupped his hands around the lens, leaving the rest unsaid, but Willow thought back to her feminist literature class. For Edna Pontellier, trying to fit a mold she was never made for had driven her insane, and ultimately destroyed her.
Things were changing; the feminist movement had ensured that. But was she one of those women who could hold to her course even if she was bound in a relationship with someone whose path diverged from her own? She wasn’t sure.
“Okay, so tell me what I’m looking at,” Hawthorn asked.
Willow pointed out the big dipper, part of Ursa Major, then Ursa Minor.
“From where we stand, certain stars look brighter to us than others, and that’s how we compose constellations. But the brightness could have to do with either how close it is to the earth, or how big it is. For example,” she explained, “the sun and moon look to be about the same size, but the moon is 400 times smaller. However, it’s also 400 times closer. Two stars very close to each other may not look close at all because one is so much larger than the other, and so appears brighter to us.”
They worked their way around the sky, pointing with her finger to connect the dots.
“We chart constellations from these bright stars, while the stars themselves are many miles apart from each other, having no idea that to our eyes, they make a shape, tell a story, and chart the skies so we know where to go. To us, they’re connected, but from their point of view, they’re alone in the dark,” Willow breathed.
Who were the people in her life who mattered, a part of the constellation of her truest being? And who were the near neighbors, present, but not a part of the grander narrative? Who was just a comet, blindingly bright one moment, and forgotten the next?
“There are actually stars everywhere, so the whole sky should be lit up,” Willow said, pulling herself to be present and make this worthwhile for Hawthorn. “You see those black spots? Those are the places where the light from the stars have not reached us yet. They’re too young.”
She looked at the empty places, pools of black in the sky between the pinpricks.
They’re out there, we just don’t see them yet.
As the final months of her undergraduate work raced to a close, Willow split her time between the observatory and the library, composing the paper on the research she’d done for Dr. Burg’s “Evolutionary History of the Galaxies” project. Acceptance letters from graduate schools started filtering in. The day she heard back from MIT, she froze.
“What is it?” Britany asked.
They had pushed open their apartment windows to let in the spring air. All of campus had a buzz about it, the levity of the weather filling students with just enough energy to lean into the finish line. Both Willow and Britany were done with finals, though Hawthorn’s thesis was due at the end of the week. It was on something about the role of choice and free will in pre-destination. To Willow, the two seemed mutually exclusive, but after their conversation a month ago, she was curious to read it when he was done. He was hunched over their kitchen table, furiously typing, but his fingers paused.
“I—I got into MIT,” she said. Tears sprang to her eyes. She hadn’t realized how much she’d wanted it until she read the line “We’d like to extend a seat to you in our program…” and the pressure lifted off her chest. She flicked the tears away and kept reading to confirm she hadn’t imagined it.
“What? Congratulations!” Britany whooped and dove beside her, cramming in close to read the email. She shrieked and gave Willow a tight hug. Once they were done squealing, Willow noticed Hawthorn had packed up his bag.
“You’re leaving?”
“Got to finish this, need to concentrate,” he gave her a tight smile. “But congratulations, that’s really great news.”
He was gone the next moment, letting the door swing shut behind him. Hawthorn, who was always the last to leave a party and could study in the middle of a crowded cafeteria.
“What just happened?” Willow asked. Her hands were trembling, her body still coming to grips; she felt like she was flying. But something had just transpired that she didn’t understand, and it was like a slap in the face. Britany sighed and picked at the hem of her shirt, avoiding eye contact. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“What?”
“Oh come on Willow,” she said. Her eyes met Willow’s, sad but apparently unsurprised at the shock in her face.
Understanding, for once, clicked into place. No… it couldn’t be.
“Why didn’t he say anything?” she asked.
“After four years, watching you have all those crushes, maybe he figured you really weren’t interested in him.”
“No, you can’t be right about that.” Hawthorn knew how clueless she was.
Britany raised an eyebrow: between the two of us, who’s more likely to understand people.
“Alright, you’re probably right about that. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because it was clear you weren’t interested. Plus, I’m not getting between the two of you and ruining our friend group. He should have told you.”
“Why didn’t he, if I wasn’t getting the hint?”
“Would you have said yes?” Britany asked. “Let me ask you this, now that you know, will you do anything about it?”
Bird song trilled out their window. Apartment air conditioners whirred. Relieved students laughed as they walked outside, enjoying the spring. She was going to MIT, across the country, and Hawthorn just got accepted to Moody in Chicago.
They were great friends, but they were both at the beginning of graduate school, at the foot of their careers. All the work they’d accomplished up to this point was only a drop in the bucket compared to what came next. Their lives were going in different directions. That was why he had sighed. That was why he left. Were they right for each other—right specifically?
Maybe someday, but not right now.
“No.”
A week before graduation, before all the parents descended on campus to watch their children walk across the stage in cap and gown, Willow, Britany, and Hawthorn ate a late Sunday brunch together. It was the kind of luxurious unhurried meal old friends have when they know everything is about to change and they won’t see each other for a very long time, and likely not altogether. No one mentioned Hawthorn’s abrupt exit a week earlier. A few days after, he had given Willow a wrapped MIT scarf as an early graduation present. She had hugged him and helped him hunt for apartments in Chicago.
Other students filtered in and joined their table. She listened to Hawthorn tell Britany his plans for the summer and didn’t notice when the seat next to her filled.
“Hey, how’ve you been? We should hang soon,” Yewen said, the Van Dyke Goatee accentuating his huge smile. Blazing. Bright. He’d do well in Paris.
Willow looked him dead in the eye.
“You have my phone number. You let me know when and I’ll be there,” she said.
It was almost a challenge. Yewen closed his mouth, nodded, and sat back. Finishing their brunch, Willow and her friends gathered their things and left.
P.S.
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