Love, Theoretically

Elsie continues to struggle through adjunct teaching as she waits for a call from MIT and tries to stop thinking about what Jack told her. Cece drags Elsie to a movie she has lied about liking, and Elsie quotes a review she read online about it to convince her. Elsie hears someone call her name as they are leaving the theater and immediately knows it’s Jack. Elsie is unable to speak when she and Cece meet with Jack and the beautiful woman he is with. The woman, however, somehow knows of Elsie as the woman who dated Greg and introduces herself as Georgina Sepulveda, or George. George mentions that she works with Jack, or will be working with him the following year, as she just signed her contract for the MIT position that morning. Elsie does not know how to process this news and begins to walk and then run away from the group.

Elsie continues running until Jack catches up to her and physically stops her. He tells her that her interview was in bad faith, as George had always been the one that MIT planned to hire. Elsie is furious with Jack and insinuates that he’s happy because he gets to humiliate a theorist and hire George, whom she thinks is his girlfriend.