Below Zero
PRAISE FOR
The Love Hypothesis
“Contemporary romance’s unicorn: the elusive marriage of
deeply brainy and delightfully escapist. . . .
The Love
Hypothesis has wild commercial appeal, but the quieter
secret is that there is a specific audience, made up of all
the Olives in the world, who have deeply, ardently waited
for this exact book.”
—New York Times bestselling author Christina
Lauren “Funny, sexy, and smart. Ali Hazelwood did
a terrific job with
The Love Hypothesis.”
—New York Times bestselling author Mariana
Zapata “This tackles one of my favorite tropes—
Grumpy meets Sunshine—in a fun and utterly
endearing way. . . . I loved the nods toward
fandom and romance novels, and I couldn’t put it
down. Highly recommended!”
—New York Times bestselling author Jessica Clare
“A beautifully written romantic comedy with a
heroine you will instantly fall in love with,
The
Love Hypothesis is destined to earn a place on
your keeper shelf.”
—Elizabeth Everett, author of
A Lady’s Formula
for Love “Smart, witty dialogue and a diverse cast
of likable secondary characters. . . . A realistic,
amusing novel that readers won’t be able to put
down.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“With whip-smart and endearing characters, snappy prose,
and a quirky take on a favorite trope, Hazelwood
convincingly navigates the fraught shoals of academia. . . .
This smart, sexy contemporary should delight a wide swath
of romance lovers.”
—Publishers Weekly
Titles by Ali Hazelwood
The Love Hypothesis
LOATHE TO LOVE YOU
Under One Roof
Stuck with You
Below Zero
Below Zero
Ali Hazelwood
JOVE
NEW YORK
A JOVE BOOK
Published by Berkley
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
penguinrandomhouse.com
Copyright © 2022 by Ali Hazelwood Excerpt from
Love on the Brain copyright © 2021 by Ali
Hazelwood Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse
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Random House LLC.
Ebook ISBN: 9780593437834
Jove audio edition: April 2022
Jove ebook edition: July 2022
Cover illustration by lilithsaur Adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen This is a work of fiction. Names,
characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used
fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or
locales is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
Cover
Praise for The Love HypothesisTitles by Ali Hazelwood
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Epilogue
Excerpt from Love on the BrainAbout the Author
For Shep and Celia. Still with no polar bears, but with lots
of love.
Prologue
Svalbard Islands, Norway Present
I dream of an ocean.
Not the Arctic, though. Not the one right here in
Norway, with its close-packed, frothy waves constantly
crashing against the coasts of the Svalbard archipelago. It’s
perhaps a bit unfair of me: the Barents Sea is perfectly
worth dreaming of. So are its floating icebergs and
inhospitable permafrost shores. All around me there is
nothing but stark, cerulean beauty, and if this is the place
where I die, alone and shivering and bruised and pretty
damn hungry . . . well, I have no reason to bitch.
After all, blue was always my favorite color.
And yet, the dreams seem to disagree. I lie here, in my
half-awake, half-unconscious state. I feel my body yield
precious degrees of heat. I watch the ultraviolet morning
light reach inside the crevasse that trapped me hours ago,
and the only ocean I can dream of is the one on Mars.“Dr. Arroyo? Can you hear me?”
I mean, this entire thing is almost laughable. I am a
NASA scientist. I have a doctorate in aerospace
engineering and several publications in the field of
planetary geology. At any given time, my brain is a jumbled
maelstrom of stray thoughts on massive volcanism, crystal
fluid dynamics, and the exact kind of anti-radiation
equipment one would need to start a medium-size human
colony on Kepler-452b. I promise I’m not being conceited
when I say that I know pretty much all there is to know
about Mars. Including the fact that there are no oceans on
it, and the idea that there ever were is highly controversial
among scientists.
So, yeah. My near-death dreams are ridiculous
and
scientifically inaccurate. I would laugh about it, but I have
a sprained ankle and I’m approximately ten feet below the
ground. It seems better to just save my energy for what’s to
come. I never really believed in an afterlife, but who
knows? Better hedge my bets.“Dr. Arroyo, do you copy?”
The problem is, it calls to me, this nonexistent ocean on
Mars. I feel the pull of it deep inside my belly, and it warms
me even here, at the icy tip of the world. Its turquoise
waters and rust-tinted coastlines are approximately 200
million kilometers from the place where I’ll die and rot, but
I cannot shake the feeling that they want me closer. There
is an ocean, a network of gullies, an entire giant planet full
of iron oxide, and they’re all calling to me. Asking me to
give up. Lean in. Let go.“Dr. Arroyo.”
And then there are the voices. Random, improbable
voices from my past. Well, okay:
a voice. It’s always the
same, deep and rumbling, with no discernible accent and
well-pronounced consonants. I don’t really mind it, I must
say. I’m not sure why my brain has decided to impose it on
me just now, considering that it belongs to someone who
doesn’t like me much—someone I might like even less—but
it’s a pretty good voice. A+. Worth listening to in a death’s
door situation. Even though Ian Floyd was the one who
never wanted me to come here to Svalbard in the first
place. Even though the last time we were together he was
stubborn, and unkind, and unreasonable, and now he
seems to sound only . . .“Hannah.”
Close. Is this really Ian Floyd? Sounding
close?
Impossible. My brain has frozen into stupidity. It must
really be all over for me. My time has come, the end is
nigh, and—
“Hannah. I’m coming for you.”
My eyes spring open. I’m not dreaming anymore.
Chapter 1
Johnson Space Center, Houston, U.S.
One year ago
On my very first day at NASA, at some point between the
HR intake and a tour of the Electromagnetic Compliance
Studies building, some overzealous newly hired engineer
turns to the rest of us and asks, “Don’t you feel like your
entire life has led you to this moment? Like you were
meant
to be here?”
Aside from Eager Beaver, there are fourteen of us
starting today. Fourteen of us fresh out of top-five graduate
programs, and prestigious internships, and CV-beefing
industry jobs accepted exclusively to look more attractive
during NASA’s next round of recruitment. There’re fourteen
of us, and the thirteen that aren’t me are all nodding
enthusiastically.
“Always knew I’d end up at NASA, ever since I was like,
five,” says a shy-looking girl. She’s been sticking by my side
for the entire morning, I assume because we’re the only
two non-dudes in the group. I must say, I don’t mind it too
much. Perhaps it’s because she’s a computer engineer
while I’m aerospace, which means there’s a good chance
that I won’t see much of her after today. Her name is
Alexis, and she’s wearing a NASA necklace on top of a
NASA T-shirt that only barely covers the NASA tattoo on
her upper arm. “I bet it’s the same for you, Hannah,” she
adds, and I smile at her, because Sadie and Mara insisted
that I shouldn’t be my resting-bitch self now that we live in
different time zones. They are convinced that I need to
make new friends, and I have reluctantly agreed to put in a
solid effort just to get them to shut up. So I nod at Alexis
like I know exactly what she means, while privately I think:Not really.
When people find out that I have a Ph.D., they tend to
assume that I was always an academically driven child.
That I cruised through school my entire life in a constant
effort to overachieve. That I did so well as a student, I
decided to remain one long after I could have booked it and
freed myself from the shackles of homework and nights
spent cramming for never-ending tests. People assume, and
for the most part I let them believe what they want. Caring
what others think is a lot of work, and—with a handful of
exceptions—I’m not a huge fan of work.
The truth, though, is quite the opposite. I hated school at
first sight—with the direct consequence that school hated
the sullen, listless child that I was right back. In the first
grade, I refused to learn how to write my name, even
though
Hannah is only three letters repeated twice. In
junior high, I set a school record for the highest number of
consecutive detention days—what happens when you
decide to take a stand and not do homework for any of your
classes because they are too boring, too difficult, too
useless, or all of the above. Until the end of my sophomore
year, I couldn’t wait to graduate and leave all of school
behind: the books, the teachers, the grades, the cliques.
Everything. I didn’t really have a plan for
after, except for
leaving
now behind.
I had this feeling, my entire life, that I was never going
to be
enough. I internalized pretty early that I was never
going to be as good, as smart, as lovable, as wanted as my
perfect older brother and my flawless older sister, and after
several failed attempts at measuring up, I just decided to
stop trying. Stop caring, too. By the time I was in my teens,
I just wanted . . .
Well. To this day, I’m not sure what I wanted at fifteen.
For my parents to stop fretting about my inadequacies,
maybe. For my peers to stop asking me how I could be the
sibling of two former all-star valedictorians. I wanted to
stop feeling as though I were rotting in my own
aimlessness, and I wanted my head to stop spinning all the
time. I was confused, contradictory, and, looking back,
probably a shitty teenager to be around. Sorry, Mom and
Dad and the rest of the world. No hard feelings, eh?
Anyhow, I was a pretty lost kid. Until Brian McDonald, a
junior, decided that asking me to homecoming by opening
with “Your eyes are as blue as a sunset on Mars” might get
me to say yes.
For the record, it’s a horrifying pickup line. Do not
recommend. Use sparingly. Use not at all, especially if—like
me—the person you’re trying to pick up has brown eyes
and is fully aware of it. But what was an undeniable low
point in the history of flirting ended up serving, if you’ll
forgive a very self-indulgent metaphor, as a meteorite of
sorts: it crashed into my life and changed its trajectory.
In the following years, I would find out that all of my
colleagues at NASA have their own origin story. Their very
own space rock that altered the course of their existence
and pushed them to become engineers, physicists,
biologists, astronauts. It’s usually an elementary school trip
to the Kennedy Space Center. A Carl Sagan book under the
Christmas tree. A particularly inspiring science teacher at
summer camp. My encounter with Brian McDonald falls
under that umbrella. It just happens to involve a guy who
(allegedly) went on to moderate incel message boards on
Reddit, which makes it just a tad lamer.
People obsessed with space are split into two distinct
camps. The ones who want to
go to space and crave the
zero gravity, the space suits, drinking their own recycled
urine. And there’re people like me: what we want—
oftentimes what we’ve wanted since our frontal lobes were
still undeveloped enough to have us thinking that toe shoes
are a good fashion statement—is to
know about space. At
the beginning it’s simple stuff: What’s it made of? Where
does it end? Why do the stars not fall and crash onto our
heads? Then, once you’ve read enough, the big topics come
in: Dark matter. Multiverse. Black holes. That’s when you
realize how little we understand about this giant thing
we’re part of. When you start thinking about whether you
can help produce some new knowledge.
And that’s how you end up at NASA.
So, back to Brian McDonald. I didn’t go to homecoming
with him. (I didn’t go to homecoming at all, because it
wasn’t really my scene, and even if it had been, I was
grounded for failing an English midterm, and even if I
hadn’t been, fuck Brian McDonald and his poorly
researched pickup lines.) However, something about the
whole thing stuck with me. Why would a sunset be blue?
And on a red planet, no less? It seemed like something
worth knowing. So I spent the night in my room, googling
dust particles in the Martian atmosphere. By the end of the
week, I’d signed up for a library card and devoured three
books. By the end of the month, I was studying calculus to
understand concepts like thrust over time and harmonic
series. By the end of the year, I had a goal. Hazy, confused,
not yet fully defined, but a goal nonetheless.
For the first time in my life.
I’ll spare you most of the grueling details, but I spent the
rest of high school busting ass to make up for the ass I
hadn’t busted for the previous decade. Just picture an ’80s
training montage, but instead of running in the snow and
doing pull-ups with a repurposed broomstick, I was hard at
work on books and YouTube lectures. And it was
hard work:
wanting to understand concepts like H-R diagrams or
synodic periods or syzygy did not make them any easier to
grasp. Before, I’d never really
tried. But at the tender age
of sixteen, I was confronted with the unbearable turmoil
that comes with trying your best and realizing that
sometimes it simply isn’t enough. As much as it pains me to
say it, I don’t have an IQ of 130. To really understand the
books I wanted to read, I had to review the same concepts
over, and over, and fucking
over again. Initially I coasted on
the high of finding out! new! things!, but after a while my
motivation began to wane, and I started to wonder what I
was even doing. I was studying a bunch of really basic
science stuff, to be able to graduate to more advanced
science stuff, so that one day I’d actually know all the
science stuff about Mars and . . . and what then? Go onJeopardy! and pick Space for 500? Didn’t really seem worth
it.
Then August of 2012 happened.
When the
Curiosity rover approached the Martian
atmosphere, I stayed up until one A.M. I chugged down two
bottles of Diet Coke, ate peanuts for good luck, and when
the landing maneuver began, I bit into my lip until it bled.
The moment it safely touched the ground I screamed, I
laughed, I cried, and then got grounded for a week for
waking up the entire household the night before my
brother left for his Peace Corps trip, but I didn’t care.
In the following months I devoured every little piece of
news NASA issued on
Curiosity’s mission, and as I
wondered about who was behind the images of the Gale
Crater, the interpretation of the raw data, the reports on
the molecular composition of the Aeolis Palus, my hazy,
undefinable goal began to solidify.
NASA.
NASA was the place to be.
The summer between junior and senior years, I found a
ranking of the hundred best engineering programs in the
U.S. and decided to apply to the top twenty. “You should
probably extend your reach. Add a few safety schools,” my
guidance counselor told me. “I mean, your SATs are really
good and your GPA has improved a lot, but you have a
bunch of”—long pause for throat clearing—“academic red
flags on your permanent record.”
I thought about it for a minute. Who would have figured
that being a little shit for the first one and a half decades of
my life would bring lasting consequences? Not me. “Okay.
Fine. Let’s do the top thirty-five.”
As it turns out, I didn’t need to. I got accepted to a
whopping (drumroll, please) . . . one top-twenty school. A
real winner, huh? I don’t know if they misfiled my
application, misplaced half of my transcripts, or had a brain
fart in which the entire admissions office temporarily forgot
what a promising student is supposed to look like. I put
down my deposit and approximately forty-five seconds after
getting my letter told Georgia Tech that I’d be attending.
No backsies.
So I moved to Atlanta, and I gave it my all. I chose the
majors and the minors I knew NASA would want to see on a
CV. I got the federal internships. I studied hard enough to
ace the tests, did the fieldwork, applied to grad school,