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Trashley: Thirty-One
Mokay, Girl!
Ashley and I were in Florida visiting my family for a week, and I had enlisted my sister and her husband to help me determine if Ashley was lying about going to MIT and being a Physicist. After combing the beach for shark teeth and watching my sister throw a beached shark back into the ocean, the four of us grabbed a late lunch at Taco Lu’s, which has the best queso in northern Florida.
Over bites of tortilla chips and a round of margaritas, Drew brought up MIT, and I remembered how genuinely curious he had been about physics when Ashley and I had visited Alaska the previous summer. “So Ashley, why did you choose MIT over another school, like Cal-Poly?”
“Cal-Poly doesn’t really compare when it comes to research programs and advanced degrees,” Ashley scoffed, “and their Physics department is basically a joke. And I thought it was important to leave California, especially having grown up in Pasadena. I needed something new and away from my family.”
“Yeah I get it, there’s nothing like the East Coast,” Drew said. “I actually spent a lot of time in Boston during my off-season. What part of town were you in?”
“I pretty much never left Cambridge. My entire twenties were spent in a manic Physics blackhole, solving equations and scribbling notes on the walls of my dorm, just like Kerry in…
