Chapter Text
4.
One night, when she is bored, Jillian goes into her mother’s study and asks what she should do. Her mother laughs airily and tells Jillian to ‘count all the bricks in the patio’ and doesn’t look away from her work. Jillian learns the word dismissive a few years later but she’s known the meaning much longer. Despite that, she goes and counts all the bricks in the patio. She gets lost several times and has to restart because she gets distracted by the ants crawling up the wall to the kitchen window, and then the buzzing noise which she figures out are the fireflies at the back of the garden, and then her dad needs her help, but eventually she counts all 78 of the bricks and goes back inside to report back to her mother. Her mother snorts and tells her to count all the plates and this time it only takes her two tries, and when she goes back to her mother after that she actually disrupts the work her mother is usually so preoccupied with. Her mother looks down at her over her desk and sighs. She rips a page from a notebook and scribbles onto it a list, a line with a blank space left after each point.
“Here. When you’ve counted how many there are of each thing, write down the number beside it above the line. You remember what all the numbers look like, don’t you?” She hands Jillian the notebook. Jillian frowns, lines digging deep into her brow. Of course she knows all the numbers, she’s not a baby. She’s four and she knows what all the numbers look like. She knows that it’s called the numeral system and she likes numbers almost as much as she likes playing with lego but her brother won’t let her play with the legos anymore because he thinks she’s gross all of a sudden. Jillian thinks her brother is being mean, because he doesn’t even play with the legos.
But she still takes the notebook and the pencil and runs to count the first thing on the list - how many screws are there in the doors?
5.
Jillian’s dad comes to school not long after she starts to talk to her teacher. She’s playing with the building blocks at the other end of the room like she’s been told to, and she was building a mansion but she knocked it over so she could look at the pieces. They aren’t the same as her legos - she got a whole box for her fifth birthday! - because they don’t stick together, which she thinks is disappointing because it means she can’t build the same things she usually does. She frowns, staring at the pieces and trying to figure a way to hold the blocks together the way she wants. She sits cross-legged with her elbows digging into her knees and her fists digging into her cheeks, pout etched onto her face as she glares at the blocks. She wants to make them better.
“Jill?” She looks up at her dad, and she thinks his face looks weird and she doesn’t like it. “Honey, I said your name four times. You haven’t moved in ten minutes.”
Jillian makes a show of throwing her arms up and then pitches backward, rolling over her head and ends up kneeling on the floor, ignoring the fresh carpet burn on her knees as she does jazz hands. He smiles and she looks past him at her teacher, who has the same expression she always has when she looks at Jillian. She doesn’t know what to call it or what it means, but she knows none of the other kids get looked at like that.
“She’s just a little quirky.” Her dad says. “Do you have a problem with my daughter liking maths?” Jillian stops listening because she’s caught sight of the building blocks again and she has an idea. When her dad comes over to tell her to pack up he stops and looks silently at what she’s built.
“Jill, how long did it take you to build this?”
“I don’t know.” She answers honestly. She never looked at the clock. As much as she likes numbers, she thinks clocks are silly and that time is confusing, because sometimes it moves faster than others.
* * *
When he’s driving her home after talking to her teacher, Jillian’s dad doesn’t take the normal route. Jillian watches the other cars on the road and wonders where he’s going, but doesn’t ask. He’s singing to the song playing and she knows when he’s singing he doesn’t like to be interrupted. He parks and tells her to get out and she does, waits for him on the sidewalk while he times his exit onto the road. She counts the number of seconds it takes each car to go by and she never counts higher than fifteen.
“Alright kiddo, take a look.” He points at a storefront and she turns around, and in that moment the trajectory of Jillian’s life changes. One day she will realise it was this very moment where she took her first step towards becoming Holtzmann. Her dad checks his watch but she doesn’t notice.
“The store closes in forty-five minutes. You have thirty to find everything you want and ten to negotiate what I’ll actually buy for you.” He says. She tugs on his jeans.
“That’s only forty.” She says.
“The last five are for actually buying the stuff.” He says, messing up her hair. “Go on, time’s wasting.”
She ends up bringing home half the shop.
7.
Three things happen when she’s seven. The first is that Jillian has her first crush. She doesn’t realise that it is what it is until she talks to her dad about it.
“Dad,” She says, clambering onto one of the stools at the kitchen island so he can see her while he makes brownies for her brother’s soccer team’s bake sale.
“Yes?”
“What does it mean when your stomach flutters when you look at someone?” She asks. He chuckles.
“Well, that could mean a lot of things. What else happens when you look at them?” His hands have slowed down but not quite stopped, and he’s looking at her, not what he’s doing. She counts the tiles on the wall behind him while she thinks.
“I feel like talking to her but I can’t think of anything to say.” She says, pleased with her answer. “Sometimes my faces feels hot.” She adds.
“She?” Her dad repeats. Jillian nods. Her dad is quiet for a moment. He’s looking at the mix, and Jillian wonders what he does when he’s trying to think.
“Dad?” She asks, growing impatient. She has homework to do before she can keep reading about the process of building the Apollo space shuttle.
“It sounds like you have a crush, kiddo.”
“Oh.” She frowns. She knows what a crush is, of course, but she didn’t realise this was what it felt like. “Okay. Thanks, daddy.”
“Is that all?”
“Yep!” She jumps out of the seat and thunders upstairs to her room, ignoring when her mother yells for her to be quieter.
* * *
The second thing is that she starts taking things apart and putting them back together again. She trades her next two weeks of dessert for her brother’s remote control car. She takes every single piece of the remote out and sets it out on her desk, which she has because her dad thought she should have one because, according to him, all the best scientists have a place to work. She writes down a detailed list of all the different components and then puts it back together again. When she slips the batteries back in and the car doesn’t move she takes the controller apart and rebuilds it a second time, differently. She keeps doing that until it works, and her brother never knows what she did with it at all. She does the same with her alarm clock one weekend, and her dad catches her in the middle of dismantling it. He takes a deep breath like he does right before he yells and she speaks up before he can.
“If I can’t fix it I’ll do all the chores for a month. If I can…” she chews her lip, thinking about something she really wants, “you’ll teach me about the car engine.”
“You can’t just break things like this, kiddo.”
“I’m not breaking it.” She insists. “I’m fixing it.”
“I’ll teach you about the car engine anyway.” He says. “I can get you books on mechanics. On engineering.” Jillian hasn’t looked away from the clock since before he came in.
“I’d rather you told me.” She says, poking a wire component. She keeps working as he watches her for a moment.
“Then I guess I’d better start reading.”
* * *
The final thing is that she starts having people notice that she’s different. Jillian knows that she’s different. She’s pretty sure no one else counts while they work on other things. She’s pretty sure other people just do what they’re doing while they’re doing it, and when they’re done doing that they move onto the next thing. She’s pretty sure no one else thinks so quickly that doing two things at once helps them focus. She doesn’t like how people notice, though. They notice by saying mean things, and leaving things in her desk for her to find during class. She usually doesn’t mind what they leave - the dead mouse was a nice surprise, actually - but that only makes them say more mean things. Jillian realises she doesn’t have any real friends when she’s seven. She thinks she’s okay with it, because people are less interesting than trying to figure out how much energy it would take to jump high enough to get through the average second storey window and if the velocity would be survivable or not. And when people try to talk to her she’s usually in the middle of something really important, like drawing blueprints for a miniature catapult in the dirt with a stick, and they disrupt her process and she has to start all over again.
She was pretty sure people weren’t worth the time or effort anyway, so when they start being mean to her she comes to the conclusion that she was right.
12.
They move from Lake Placid to NYC for her mother’s work, and her dad hands her a small stack of brochures for a variety of different programs for gifted individuals in assorted areas of science to read during the five hour drive to their new house. Her eye is immediately caught by the most difficult program to get into and spends most of the ride thinking about how she can get in. She knows she would need to build something, but the question is what she would be building. Jillian knows it has to be spectacular. Ground-breaking. Something never seen before. She’s jolted out of her focus when the music suddenly changes to something she vaguely recognises as Vivaldi and breathes out long and slow through her nose when she realises that her dad’s playlist of 1980’s pop music has been swapped for her mother’s choice of classical. Her mother loves to tell her how it’s been scientifically proven that Mozart and Beethoven improve productivity but you can’t move to it like you can to Michael Jackson or A-ha. They stop for lunch a little later and the first thing Jillian does is hand her dad the pamphlet for the program she wants to be in. He smiles at it.
“I thought you might’ve picked this one. What are you going to build?” He asks. She grins, wide.
“If I tell you, you’ll say no.”
* * *
Jillian was already familiar with having to scrounge for parts, but it’s a gleeful moment when she realises how much crap people throw out in the big city. Her mother doesn’t like her going out on her own but she’s busy and her dad is busy and her brother never gets off his Nintendo 64 so she waits until everyone is engrossed in what they’re doing before she goes out anyway. Her idea had been a long shot and the blueprints in her room had been for a project even she had acknowledged was probably going to be impossible, but the components she finds are compatible with the technology she’s thinking of, so she throws on her safety goggles and gets busy at her official workbench, a metal table she dragged into the garage when her dad was getting groceries. She has Rumors playing as loudly as the cassette player allows, and while she works she dances. Her mother had left a chair for her to use but Jillian prefers to stand while she works and the table isn’t the right height for her to sit while she uses it anyway. She has three days to work on it before she starts at her new school and the more she gets done the better.
Sometime after lunch on Sunday she flicks a switch and her contraption comes to life. She lifts her goggles, grinning as she punches her arms into the air.
“Eureka!” She yells, jumping onto the chair and dancing completely apart from the music. She jumps back down and flicks the switch to turn it back off, but the device crackles and she brings her arms up in time to protect her face from the BANG that follows. When her lowers her arms there are scorch marks on the workbench and her invention is smoking. It looks quite lifeless and she sighs and looks back at her blueprints.
“Switch faulty, only upon deactivation.” She sucks air in through her teeth and hisses it back out again, counting the number of scratches in the table. “Potential degradation of wiring and/or parts due to operation?” She blows her hair out of her face and switches the music off so she can think better, and so she doesn’t pick up the device. She’s learnt not to touch things when they go wrong for at least five minutes so they can, at the very least, cool down. She shuts her eyes and mutters to herself. “Second-rate parts unable to handle activation - eleven, twelve, thirteen - miscalculation of the quantity of produced energy - twenty-five, twenty-six - flawed blueprints?” Her eyes snap open and she scans her blueprint. Finding no problems in her calculations there she pulls on her safety gloves and pokes the contraption. When she’s satisfied it won’t blow up in her face she pops the exterior casing off and huffs at what she finds.
“Confirmed deterioration of parts.” She sighs. “Conclusion; I need a bigger allowance.” She adds, pulling her goggles down and whacking the stereo back on as she began to gut it again.
* * *
“Kiddo, you know the agreement. I won’t pay for any parts unless you tell me what you’re making.” Her dad has his head buried in the car engine as he says this. Jillian taps his shoulder and points at the problem in the engine and he thanks her before ducking back in.
“I got all of it right, I just need higher quality elements.”
“Then I’ll take a look at the specs and get your stuff as soon as this is done.” He says. “You know the rules, Jill.” He keeps working while she stares at him, and after a long moment she walks up to her bench and snatches her blueprints up from where they’re rolled up and holds them out to him once she gets back to the front of the car. He sits up and wipes his hands on his jeans before he takes them from her, and whistles when he sees it.
“This works?” He asks, still looking. Jillian rocks up onto her toes with her hands clasped tightly together behind her back as she replies.
“Does a fridge run?”
“You made a laser?”
“I did, yes.” She says, grinning and breathless. “That is what I did.”
“That’s incredible.” He says, standing up. “I need to show your mum.” She taps the heels of her Docs together as he rolls the plans back up and hands them to her. “But first I need to fix the car so I can get the parts.” He stands and pulls her into a hug. “My precious mad scientist.” He murmurs, holding her tightly. She hugs him back. When he lets go she steps back and blows her hair out of her face.
“Hey,” he mumbles, “let me take a look at that.” He crouches slightly and spins her on the spot and starts trying out different hairstyles.
* * *
She starts school the next morning with her hair off her face and her mind on her half completed laser at home. She counts the tiles in the hallway as she strides up to her locker, weighing up whether or not she should stick to the aluminium shielding or not when a boy bumps shoulders with her.
“Watch it, short stuff!” He shouts. She stops and looks up at him.
“Observation of my height used as an insult. Interesting.” She smiles and keeps walking to her locker, letting his shout out ‘freak!’ roll off her back without a first thought, let alone a second. She's just opened her locker when a girl wearing thick spectacles appears.
“You just stood up to Jack?”
“Is Jack the one who walked into me?”
“Yeah,”
“Then yes, I suppose.” She begins to pack her books into her locker.
“I'm Serena.”
“Holtzmann.” She replies, without a second thought.
“That's your name?”
“My surname.” Holtzmann clarifies. “I like it.”
“I like it too.” Serena says. Holtzmann stops and looks at her. Serena is smiling shyly, and Holtzmann decides she likes it when Serena smiles.
* * *
Because she has to divide her time between school and homework now, it takes her a little longer to complete the laser the second time. She's screwing the outer casing on when there's a knock at the door to the garage. Holtzmann thinks nothing of it, then remembers that no one in her family ever knocks, so she gets to her feet and goes to the door. When she opens it Serena is standing behind it, appearing somewhat sheepish. Her expression changes to one of bewilderment, which Holtzmann guesses is to do with how she looks, her goggles still sitting over her eyes and her work clothes two sizes too big for her. She reaches up and pulls her goggles down so they're hanging around her neck.
“You're here.”
“Yeah,” Serena says, uncertain. “I asked if I could come over and you gave me your address.”
“Huh.” Holtzmann murmurs. “I'll be finished with this in approximately three minutes.” She points at the chair with her screwdriver, which is still in her hand. “You can sit there.” She goes back to her bench and puts the finishing touches on the laser. She pulls her goggles back up and almost flicks the switch, but stops when she remembers Serena is there.
“You might want to hide behind something, the was a small explosion last time I tried this.” Serena’s eyebrows lift until they're hidden by the frames of her glasses. She slowly eases off the chair and hides behind the car.
“Good choice.” Holtzmann says. She rolls her sleeves down and hits the switch. There's a moment where nothing happens, and then the laser appears, hitting the shielding and stopping.
“Holy smokes,” she whispers, tearing her goggles off. After a second she throws her fists straight and screams with delight.
“How did you do that?”
“Refinement of light particles phased through custom made lenses, powered by a small, tiny, little generator that, yes, I did design myself a-thank-you-very-much!” Holtzmann squeals and then takes a deep breath, grasping at the air in her excitement. A moment later she notices Serena reaching out for the beam of light and she hollers and pushes her back.
“Hey, ow!” Serena yelps. Holtzmann glares are her.
“Don't touch the merchandise!” She snaps. “Watch this.” She grabs an old receipt and moves it through the laser, cutting it in half. “Very dangerous stuff, please don’t touch.” She looks at Serena, who is staring, wide-eyed. She considers telling her to take cover again but decides to slide off her goggles and hold them out to her.
“Don’t you need these?”
“Nah.” Holtzmann lies. She flicks the switch, trying to appear nonchalant. The laser powers down.
“Whoa.” Serena breathes. Holtzmann smirks.
* * *
Holtzmann bursts into her room triumphantly and throws herself onto her bed. Serena lingers at the door, looking around the room carefully. The only things that have been removed from boxes are books and clothes, and her room looks like a dump. She steps in and picks up the first book she finds and frowns.
“Have you unpacked at all? You’ve been here a week, haven’t you?”
“Only the essentials.” Holtzmann says, rolling over. Serena looks at the book in her hands.
“Problem Book in Relativity and Gravitation is an ‘essential’?”
“Sure.” Holtzmann says, sitting up. “Give it here.” Serena does, and watches as Holtzmann flicks through it. “I’m taking my time with it, skipping the ones that look too hard.”
“They all look impossible . What is this, anyway?”
“Particle physics.” Holtzmann replies, looking over one of the questions. She gets a notebook out of her bedside table and flicks it open as Serena perches herself on the edge of the bed. “This is mostly theoretical stuff, which is good but not as fun as practical.” She wrinkles her nose. “But practical is dangerous when you don’t know theory, so I eat my vegetables.”
“This all looks like vegetables to me.” Serena laughs. Holtzmann crosses out an answer with notable determination and flicks to a new page before double checking the question in the textbook.
“It’s not all nuclear physics in here - there’s some stuff on munitions, cryptids, cars… ” She pauses with a grin. “It’s mostly physics, though.”
“Nuclear physics?”
“Ya-huh.”
“Was that laser powered by nuclear energy?” Serena asks. Holtzmann looks up from her paper.
“No, of course not.” She answers. “Dad won’t buy me parts for that and it’s not really something people leave lying around.”
“I guess not.” Serena says. “Are you going to do that the whole time I’m here?”
“I was planning on it. Do you mind?”
“A little, yeah.”
“Oh.” Holtzmann slides her pencil to the binder and closes the notebook. “Okay.” She sets the notebook into the textbook and then closes that, creating a hideous book-turducken. She puts it on her bedside table and crosses her legs, boots on the comforter. “What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know.” Serena shrugs. “How did you get into science?”
* * *
She qualifies for the physics sector of the program. Holtzmann is excited because she'll finally have a more suitable workspace and actual lectures, so no more having to decipher college textbooks on her own. Holtzmann is excited because maybe she will finally meet someone like herself and she'll have a proper friend, because Serena doesn't like talking about science and their friendship, which had initially appeared to Holtzmann as having unlimited potential, came to a grinding halt shortly after Serena had visited her house.
Except all the kids are boys and boys are gross, and boys are especially gross when they play spot the difference and Holtzmann knows that already because she is always the difference. She doesn't let it bother her. In a few short weeks they move her out of the middle school group and into the high school one, and this time she isn't the only girl there but she is the youngest, but no one seems to care very much about that.
13.
Holtzmann has never much liked feelings or having them or thinking about them, because if she does she gets sad, and also they waste time. She has no memory of a conversation she had six years earlier. She's only barely able to walk up to her dad.
“Dad?” Usually when she counts it staves off any of that business but she can't seem to escape this train of thought. He looks up at her from where he's cleaning the oven and freezes, recognising the severity of the situation.
“Jill?”
Holtzmann bursts into tears.
Her dad moves so quickly he hits his head against the roof of the oven but he still has Holtzmann wrapped up in his arms in a second. She’s finally tall enough that while he’s hugging her on his knees it’s awkward but she folds into him and sobs loudly, all the energy she’d been using to keep it in spilling over - fallout. She doesn’t remember it happening, but her dad moved so she was cradled into his lap, being rocked back and forth carefully as he shushes her that way parents do when their children cry, one arm around her waist and the other curved up so her can run his fingers through the loose hairs below her bun, and she’s comforted. When she finally pulls away there’s a wet patch on the shoulder of his shirt, but he says nothing of it.
“What is it, Jill?” He asks, calm. She swallows, considers lying but can’t think of something else to say in place of the truth. Holtzmann doesn’t know where to look - his face? Over his shoulder? At the floor? - so she presses back into him again, closing her eyes with her chin on his shoulder. She hesitates a moment now, trying to guess what happens next.
“I think I’m gay.” She whispers, her hands twisting and gripping the back of his shirt, her watching the patterns behind her eyelids move. For a moment nothing happens, then he hugs her more tightly for a moment, fiercely, but not so tightly it hurts. He doesn’t say anything.
Holtzmann, later, withdraws, and when she looks at his face he talks.
“I would like to talk about this, kiddo, but not for any bad reasons. Is that okay?” She nods, and he nods back. “Okay. Do you want tea?” She nods again. “Alright. Get up, go wash your face, and by the time you’re back I’ll have the kettle on, how’s that sound?”
Holtzmann knows it’s not a proper answer to the question but she nods a third time and gets up, brushes herself off and retreats from the kitchen.
* * *
She freezes up when she’s in the bathroom, takes as long as she can by washing her hands twice and doing her hair again and counting all the little tiles at the bottom of the shower and only then does she go back out and sit at the dining table, where her dad is waiting. Her tea is ready, inside her mug on top of her coaster. He waits for her to take a sip before he speaks up.
“You said you think,” He starts, “which is odd, because I don’t remember the last time you said something you weren’t certain of. Did you say think because you aren’t certain, or because you were worried about how I would react?”
“I’m certain.”
“Okay.” He rubs his chin for a moment. “You’re kinda young to be figuring this out.” He says. Holtzmann shrugs.
“I’m kinda young to be studying nuclear engineering, too.”
“You’ve got me there.” He murmurs. “Do you want to tell mom?”
“No!” She folds back into her seat as soon as the word escapes her mouth. She looks away and keeps her hands tight around her mug.
“It’s alright kiddo, I won’t tell anyone if you don’t want me to.” Her dad seems comfortable, more comfortable than Holtzmann herself, who waits before she says the thing truly bothering her.
“Is it okay?” Deep down, Holtzmann doesn’t think there really is anything wrong with it, but she isn’t certain. The results are inconclusive. Her dad sighs.
“I think it’s fine. A lot of people agree with me - a lot of people don’t.” He searches for her eye contact but she keeps looking away. “I believe it’s totally unimportant, either way.” He reaches across the table and pokes her hand, and she looks at him. “You know what I think is more important?” Holtzmann doesn’t reply for a moment so he continues. “You are a scientist. You’re my daughter. These two things are the most important things about you. If anyone ever tells you otherwise, they’re full of shit.”
“You swore.” Holtzmann says, a small smile creeping onto her face.
“I did. Don’t tell your mom.” He winks and her smile grows into a grin.
* * *
When the door to the lab swings open, Holtzmann doesn’t flinch. She notices, but she’s busy. The contraption she’s working on is highly volatile, and she spent ages convincing the head of the physics department in the program to let her do it and she’s not going to blow it. Partly because of her efforts, partly because if she screws this up that could be a very literal description of the consequences. She continues to work as the woman who entered looks around at what every in the room is doing - passes Holtzmann twice before finally stopping and watching over her shoulder. The woman has the courtesy to wait until after Holtzmann has finished a task before she clears her throat. Holtzmann stops, sets her tools down and turns, enormous grin plastered to her face as she pushes her goggles up. The woman is wearing glasses, and looks like she’s seen things more impressive than a thirteen year old working on a practical application of nuclear physics. After a long moment of silence, Holtzmann holds her hand out.
“You are?” She asks. The woman shakes her hand.
“Dr. Abigail Yates.”
“Holtzmann, Jillian.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirteen.” Holtzmann says. The safety coats don’t leave the labs, so Holtzmann looks almost comical with the jacket reaching halfway down her calves. The gloves aren’t hers either, so the only things she has on that fit are her own clothes and her goggles. The woman considers her for a moment.
“Why are you here?”
“Why are you here?” Holtzmann responds, with good reason. Holtzmann spends most of her free time in this lab. Abby is the outsider.
“I just finished my PhD and I’m looking for interns interested in working with me.” Abby says. Holtzmann nods slowly, looking around.
“Okay, why are you here?”
“Talking to you?” Abby asks. Holtzmann nods. She assumes Abby knows she can’t take a thirteen-year old as an intern, but they’re still having a conversation.
“Well, I wanted to see what you were doing. Why are you here?”
“I like science.” Holtzmann says. “I like physics, the study of the movement of bodies and space. I like to know how things work.”
“You’re a little younger than everyone else.”
“Yes,” Holtzmann agrees. “I make things better. Optimise.” She reaches back without looking and pats the device. “Actualise.” At that, Abby perks up somewhat.
“What do you think of ghosts?”
Holtzmann frowns, thinks it might be a trick. She knows ghosts aren’t real, but she knows that lots of people think they are. She knows that Giordano Bruno was right when he thought stars were suns and had their own exoplanetary systems but lots of people thought he was wrong so they executed him. She counts the number of buttons in Abby’s outfit while she thinks of an answer.
“I think there’s insufficient data.” Holtzmann settles on her answer, and Abby seems to like it, hands her a card.
“Keep this.” She instructs. “Call me when you graduate.”
“From high school or college?” Holtzmann asks.
“I don’t really think it matters.”
15.
“What does it do?” The professor, Dr. Rebecca Gorin, is a woman with wild curly hair and Holtzmann thinks she’s the best thing she’s ever seen. The grin hasn’t left her face since she walked in.
“It’s a magnet.” Holtzmann answers. Gorin looks down at her over her glasses. Holtzmann sees her glance at the head of the program who nods excitedly.
“Just a magnet?”
“Pfft,” Holtzmann puffs. “Nothing I build is ‘just’ anything.” Gorin looks unimpressed, so she launches into a speech about how she designed it and what should happen when she turns it on.
“Excuse me, but have you only theorised what will happen when you turn it on?”
“I had to make some adjustments from the last time I tested it.” Holtzmann explains. Gorin nods stiffly.
“Well, get on with it then.” She says. Holtzmann keeps grinning as she turns the machine on.
* * *
“There’s good news and bad news, kiddo.” Her dad says it quietly, nervously glancing at his wife as he talks. “The bad news is you’re out of the program and they’ve contacted basically all of the alternatives, so… You’ve been blacklisted from any gifted youth physics programs in the city.”
Holtzmann is lying in a hospital bed. Her brother is sitting in the chair closest to the door, eyes glued to his Gameboy. Her mother is standing behind her dad, and her dad is holding her hand - the one at the end of the arm that didn’t get broken.
“The good news is no one else got hurt and the people who own the building aren’t going to press charges because you gave up the magnet to the police. The better part is, that professor who was there to see your machine?”
“Dr. Gorin?” Holtzmann’s heartbeat speeds up.
“Yes, Dr. Gorin. She reached out to me. She wants to tutor you in particle physics.”
* * *
No longer having access to the program, Holtzmann returns to dumpster diving for her parts, and at some point while she’s doing this she starts thrifting for her clothes. She’s in the Bronx - much too far from home for her mother to be comfortable but she has a metro card for a reason - when she passes a Goodwill and goes inside on a whim. The first thing she sees a vest, obviously meant for a man, looking like it belonged in the 1930s. She purchases it on the spot, with the last of the money she had made that week tutoring. She ends up altering it herself, but is pleased with the result.
* * *
Dr. Gorin teaches her theory and observes her inventions, encourages her to correctly document her process and gives suggestion however infrequently it’s needed. However, a roadblock is eventually reached.
“You need to activate the device eventually, Jillian.” Gorin sighs. Holtzmann frowns.
“It’s not fully optimised.”
“You shouldn’t be afraid of what you create.” Gorin says. “Though I must admit, your interest in munitions doesn’t fill me with confidence.” Holtzman scowls at the device in question, an attempt at an invisibility cloak, and shakes her head.
“Alright, Jillian. How about we try something else?” Gorin asks. Holtzmann nods.