All around us, people are talking quietly on their cushions, but I’m sure their conversations are more normal. I don’t know how to have normal conversations. I try, but I never get the references. Who has time to watch all those videos and memes? How do people keep up?

The room is small and warm and smells like cedar. I thought places like this were only for Mom and Hannah. There are seventeen people here. All college-aged, a mix. Most of them have arms covered in tattoos, but some are pretty clean-cut. I am certainly the only person wearing a vintage eighties polka-dot sweater, complete with shoulder pads.

“So.” Ben scooches closer. “You go on mental space walks?”

“Yes. Well, that’s what my dad calls it.”

“So catch me up.”

F = Gm1m2/r2

I pretend to adjust my cushion, but really I’m turning six inches into twelve inches. “Usually people just let me go on them. By myself.”

Hint. Hint.

He shifts his cushion closer, ignoring all obvious hinting. “But I want to come with. So.”

He takes my hand. It is warm. Thermodynamics. I’m not great with those equations. Yet. But that’s all it is. Heat is an energetic exchange that’s—

“Where are we going?” he asks, soft.

Ben Tamura is relentless. Typical scientist.

“I’m … I’m working on a theory. That … that…” I pull my hand away. I can’t tell him about gravity because this is NOT a date. “Human interaction can be expressed mathematically. I’ve applied Coulomb’s law to Hannah and I—the results were surprising. And it’s making me wonder if there is an equation for other things, like emotions. Grief. What is the mathematical expression of grief? Can you quantify it? And if so, can you solve it?”

He looks at his hands, frowning. At first I think he’s disappointed in this particular space walk, but I realize this is Ben’s thinking face, and I like it. I like his face. All of his faces. The whole periodic table that plays out across the valley beneath the ridge of his nose and the planets of his eyes and the craters beneath them, dark circles from late study nights and early mornings at the coffeehouse. I want to be the Neil Armstrong of Planet Ben, plant a flag.

I AM IN SO MUCH TROUBLE.

Oxytocin and vasopressin. Attachment chemicals. This is what this is. He is an evil genius, convincing me to come here, to be around him more, and now he’s not just dopey dopamine, which I could have handled, now it will hurt, it will hurt—

“You could maybe look at an equation for the moment of inertia,” he finally says. “Does grief feel like that? Like not moving?”

Wow. He … wow.

But his hypothesis is incorrect.

Losing and the fear of loss—they feel the same. So fast. Rushing. Rising and cresting until it covers you completely.