The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood

If I am bad at doing activity A, my chances of
HYPOTHESIS:
asked to engage in activity A will rise exponentially.
being
Chapter Twelve
Campus felt strangely empty with Adam gone, even on days in
which she likely wouldn’t have met him anyway. It didn’t
make much sense: Stanford was most definitely not empty, but
teeming with loud, annoying undergrads on their way to and
from class. Olive’s life, too, was full: her mice were old
enough for the behavioral assays to be run, she’d finally gotten
revisions for a paper she’d submitted months earlier, and she
had to start making concrete plans for her move to Boston next
year; the class she was TA’ing had a test coming up, and
undergrads magically began to pop by during office hours,
looking panicky and asking questions that were invariably
answered in the first three lines of the syllabus.
Malcolm spent a couple of days trying to convince Olive to
tell Adam the truth, and then became—thankfully—too
discouraged by her stubbornness and too busy trying to
meditate away his own dating drama to insist. He did bake
several batches of butterscotch cookies, though, patently lying
that he was “not rewarding your self-destructive behaviors,
Olive, but just perfecting my recipe.” Olive ate them all, and
hugged him from behind while he sprinkled sea salt on top of
the last batch.
On Saturday, Anh came over for beer and s’mores, and she
and Olive daydreamed about leaving academia and finding
industry jobs that paid a proper salary and acknowledged the
existence of free time.