We celebrated all week. Donnie splurged on expensive rum, and I broke out my top-shelf bud. We repeated experiments, recorded the transdimensional mouse, daydreamed about the Nobel Prize, and for a while it was high times in that lab. Donnie worked on wave/particle equations, leaving me to mess around with new programming. I worked to isolate anything we had biology on: a single strand of fur from Donnie’s golden retriever let me track infinite parallel versions of his dog throughout the multiverse. Things were going great, but as we broke through the fabric of reality, all I could think about was Erin cheating on me with that woman at her stupid teachers’ conference. I took bong hits after work and watched YouTube clips of cats riding skateboards to keep from dwelling on it.

We’d met at the campus Film Club three years earlier, and when I first saw Erin it was like we were two alternate-timeline mice finally together in the same cage. I invited her back to my place to smoke a bowl, and we made out until early morning. By winter we were spending every day together, and by the end of the school year she invited me to move into her apartment. It was tight, but we made it work, pulling tubes and watching dumb horror flicks late into the night. There wasn’t room for my equipment, so I worked on programming at the lab, cracking the codes of time and space while Erin studied education reform at home. Then her dissertation year started and she stopped puffing altogether. I’d crawl into bed after work, ready to tell her about our latest breakthrough, but she’d just take my hand in hers, sniff it, and tell me I better not touch her with my resin fingers. As if that wasn’t bad enough, after six months of no sex, she went and cheated on me with some rando. So, yeah, I was super bummed when I should’ve been celebrating the mouse successes.

Erin was in bed reading when I came home from the two hundredth lab test. I went into the kitchen and looked for food but dinner was already cleaned up. “Any leftovers?”

“Didn’t make enough for two,” she said, and looked up. “Please tell me you didn’t just walk into the kitchen with your boots on.”