Organic chemistry quickly became a game. Zoe found herself preparing the most esoteric theoretical questions to ask during lecture and familiarizing herself with the most esoteric experimental applications that she knew Jack would ask about so she could ask a follow-up question as though his initial questions had been common knowledge. She was dumping far too much time into the class. The problem of whether or not Jack also saw it as a game did nag at her at first, because he seemed so detached, but he never failed to engage, to signal with two fingers then meander through some long-winded but brilliant nonquestion, and anyway she was aloof, too, which was part of the game. So it stopped bothering her, because how could he not be playing, everyone saw it for what it was. Indeed, the rest of the class sat through their gymnastics with grim irritation. Even Professor Norton had grown bored of the performance.
But the sparring brought her such unexpected pleasure.
And in the back of her mind, though she’d never admit it, was the thought that if she impressed him enough, he might introduce her to Fen.
The day of the first midterm Zoe was not nervous. She was, because of the game, overprepared. She sat in her usual midterm seat, which was different from her lecture seat: to the right, on the aisle, about halfway back. And she watched the doors, curious about when Jack would arrive and where he would sit.
The answer was that he didn’t. The head TF, Ben, walked in with a stack of exams and began handing them out at two past the hour, and Jack was not present. Zoe almost asked Ben where he was but caught herself and took a packet. She wrote her name neatly on the front and signed the honor code attestation.
“Okay, guys. You can get started.” Paper shuffled. The air, when it met the back of her throat, was tinged with college kid anxiety.
Zoe hesitated, eyes on the door, before flipping into the test. She liked her games fair.
The first question was difficult, so she skipped it, and then she skipped the second, too. She felt off-kilter and kept glancing up at the clock. Fifteen past. Eighteen.
She was staring at the door again when it opened and Jack walked in. He didn’t even have the decency to look rushed. When they made eye contact, she thought the left corner of his mouth turned up just slightly. He took an exam from the table at the front of the room and then walked up the aisle to sit somewhere behind her.
Twenty-two past. She thought, Your time is really going to have been wasted if you bomb this exam because you’re distracted by his antics. So she stood up, mouthed, “Bathroom?” to the TF, put her cell phone face down on the table at the front (it was switched off, anyway), and left the lecture hall. This was her favorite trick for refocusing during an exam. She’d read somewhere once that doorways do a peculiar thing to your brain, which is why you might go into another room to retrieve something and find yourself there with no idea what you needed. Walking through a doorway is like a brain reset switch. When she reentered the lecture hall, she’d solved question two and had a rough idea of where to start on question one.
She finished writing just as time was called, confident that she was handing in a perfect paper, and allowed herself to glance back, like scratching an itch. He was already gone.
When she’d thought of the exam as a round of the game, she hadn’t thought of ways to break a potential tie. But Jack had. Time.
She begrudgingly adjusted the scoreboard. Plus one, Jack.
The next class, he wasn’t there.
He had never been late to a lecture, so when Professor Norton walked in before he did, she was surprised. And by fifteen past the hour, she knew he wasn’t going to show at all.
“Questions?” Professor Norton asked after he’d filled the first two blackboards. She thought about asking hers, but it felt stupid and shallow without her target audience, so she played with her pen instead, twisting it apart, pulling out the spring, putting it back in, screwing it together.
“Zoe? No?” Professor Norton looked amused.
She felt herself blush. “Well, I was wondering . . .” She asked her question. It would have been more embarrassing not to.
She sank into the grubby upholstery of the flip-down stadium chair, breaking one of her mother’s cardinal rules. (“No slouching. You should be proud to be a tall woman.”) She felt a buzzy anxious something in her chest. And the class was unbearably boring again. They got their exams back after class the next Tuesday. Hers was perfect, but it gave her none of the usual thrill.
As she walked out into the sunshine, too bright off the windows of the labs across the way, she wondered if he had dropped the class. Which was stupid, she chided herself, because regardless she had other goals to attend to, significant ones, which would in fact be much better served by her focus now that she wasn’t in a ridiculous organic chemistry arms race with a boy. She pulled her notebook out of her bag and, still walking, began jotting down a list of professors to reach out to about lab work. She should have done this weeks ago. She wrote Daniel Fen at the top, out of habit, but then scratched it out. If he didn’t want her, she would go elsewhere.
She barely glanced over her shoulder before stepping out onto Oxford Street. A car had to brake for her. It is a crosswalk, she thought.
“Dumb bitch!” a man standing on the other side of the road yelled.
She didn’t look at him. But as she passed through the grand brick gate, “Enter to Grow in Wisdom” across the top, she glanced down at her clothing. Took note of the short skirt she was wearing. Thought, first, that she should stop wearing it, and then that she should keep wearing it, and then that she might productively mull over the problem of appearances.
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From Notes on Infinity by Austin Taylor. Copyright © 2025 by the author and reprinted with permission of Celadon Books, a division of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
