“Group 8 they let in six white women, three Black men, and an Asian man. The rest of the thirty-five? All white men.”

“I know that, too,” Joan said.

“She’s saying we’re outnumbered,” Donna said. Joan looked at her. “NASA is run primarily by men. If we want to go up there, we have to convince a man to choose us. We have to be somebody the men here want to work with. We have to be smart.”

Studying Donna, Joan realized that she was actually fully aware of how people saw her. That Donna knew they all knew she was dating Hank. And that her coyness about it, her complete denial of it in front of any of them, was her only shot at self-preservation. It was Donna, then, who was keeping it a secret. Not Hank.

And if Donna was smart enough to know that seeing Hank would hurt her career and did it anyway, well, Donna must really love him.

“I will never be Jimmy,” Joan said. “Or Marty. Or Teddy. I don’t want to tell jokes at other people’s expense, and pretend I’m never afraid, and refuse to ask for help. I don’t want to hold in how I feel, or hide it if I’ve been hurt, or try to prove to anyone that I don’t cry. Because I do cry sometimes.”

“Oh, me too, hon,” Donna said. “But you know we can’t show that.”

“We can never, ever show that,” Lydia said.

“I…” Joan shook her head. “I don’t want to prove I can be like them. I don’t want to be like them. I’m not going to do it.”

“But what you do affects all of us,” Lydia said. “Because they are looking at every woman here. There aren’t enough of us in this program yet for us to only represent ourselves. You cry in front of them and they are going to say, ‘Women can’t handle being in the hot seat.’ And then I get screwed over. You’re not just here for you, Joan—we all succeed or fail together.”

“I don’t know if that’s true,” Joan said.

“It is true,” Donna said. “I don’t know exactly what to do about it. But it is true.”

“So, we let them say crude things about us and we don’t push back?”

“I mean, I tell them to fuck off,” Donna said. “You should try it.”

“But Lydia laughs like it’s funny.”

“Sometimes it is funny,” Lydia said.

“The only reason you think it’s funny is because we’ve been told our whole lives it’s okay to make fun of us,” Joan said. “But I’m not doing it. You want to talk about how it reflects on all of us the way one of us behaves? You laughing at those jokes makes them think it’s okay to keep doing it.”