Chapter 1 ⊰ 1 ⊱ Known Variables

⬩ 𝓜aisie ⬩

I wouldn’t go as far as saying I’m depressed. I’m not depressed. I just… feel like I have no sense of direction. Like I’m running at a million miles an hour towards a place I don’t know and will never reach. 

Does that mean I’m depressed?

I don’t know… It’s stupid. All of this.

Depression is such a ridiculous concept.

‘Cause why the fuck are you so fucking sad all the time? What is so wrong with you that you’re stuck in your own fucking head? You’re self-obsessed. Like that sappy Lewis Capaldi song says, “No sense of self, but self-obsessed.”

So I keep running. I keep chasing the thing that numbs me just enough because it somehow makes everything make sense. It makes everything tolerable. It makes me appreciate life like it’s as beautiful as we all pretend it is.

It’s the one thing that lets me forget that I’m not utterly alone. 

The watch on my wrist reads 6:02 AM. The balcony is bathed in the soft eerie glow of the warm streetlight, casting shadows on the pathway of the apartment complex’s courtyard. The sun is just beginning to peak over the horizon, a sight that feels nostalgic now.

I take one last hit of the joint between my fingers, feeling the effects of the marijuana in my bloodstream. It’s Monday morning, and it’s my first day of grad school. For the past 8 years of my life, this has been routine. I wake up before dawn, come outside, smoke a joint, and get ready to start my day.

The rest of it isn’t relevant, not really. As long as I get my high, the day is bearable.

The morning is the same as every morning. Coffee I drink black because anything added to it feels like a compromise. A shower I take too hot because I can’t stand the lukewarm middle ground of anything. An outfit I pick without thinking about it because I decided years ago that spending cognitive resources on what I look like was a waste of processing power I could put toward something worth caring about.

Heather—my roommate—is already gone by the time I’m ready. She works early shifts at the tattoo parlor on days she doesn’t have clients. Something about setup, sterilizing equipment, making the place smell less like a doctor’s office so people don’t panic before they let a stranger put a needle in their skin. 

I don’t know. I’ve never asked. 

But there’s a half-eaten granola bar on the counter and a sticky note on the coffee maker that says ‘good luck today!!’ and I feel something warm for approximately three seconds before I throw the note in the trash and pick up my bag.

She means well. That’s the thing about Heather. She means everything.

By the time I’m done gathering my things—and myself—it’s 7:30am, and I’m out the door.

The statistics building is a fifteen-minute walk from the apartment, which I appreciate. Not because I enjoy walking—I’m neutral on it—but because it’s fifteen minutes where no one expects anything from me. No eye contact, no small talk, no performance of being a person.

I’ve been a student my whole life. It’s the only context in which existing makes any kind of logistical sense.

Some people ask me why pursue a PhD in Statistics. It’s always people who don’t understand it—which is most people. They picture spreadsheets and bar graphs and think I’ve chosen a glorified accounting track. Like I woke up one morning and decided I wanted to spend my life color-coding data sets for some Fortune 500 company.

That’s not statistics. That’s Excel.

Statistics is the science of uncertainty. It’s about making decisions with incomplete information, which is—and let me be very clear about this—the only kind of information that has ever existed. The world doesn’t hand you full data. It hands you noise and gaps and things that happened once and might mean nothing, and your entire job is to figure out what the signal is underneath all of it. 

How likely is this? How confident can we be? What does the pattern actually say versus what we want it to say?

I like that. I like that the answer is never yes or no. It’s always probably, with a number attached.

Most fields can’t say that. Most fields pretend they can, which is worse.

And it’s hard. In a way that actually matters—not the performance of difficulty, not the kind of hard that just means memorizing more things. 

It’s the kind of hard where you’ve been staring at a problem for two hours and you realize the entire framework you built it in is wrong and you have to go back further than you thought. 

It’s the kind of hard that doesn’t have a ceiling.

I like ceilings that don’t exist.

It’s not like I need the degree. I’m clear-eyed about that. Cade—my half-brother, who I met six years ago and initially categorized as a rich man paying off a guilt debt he didn’t owe me—is finalizing paperwork to sign over a percentage of Sinclair Enterprises to my name. Military weapons manufacturing. Multi-billion dollar. 

He also gave me more money than I’ll spend in two lifetimes the moment he found out I existed, which I didn’t ask for and he didn’t explain beyond the obvious: he felt guilty about something that wasn’t his fault.

Anyway. The PhD isn’t about money or a career. It’s about the ceiling that doesn’t exist. It’s the only thing I’ve found that keeps my brain from eating itself.

That’s reason enough.

The lecture hall for STAT 601 holds about forty people and smells like industrial carpet cleaner and someone’s coffee that isn’t as good as mine. I take a seat near the back—not the very back, which is where people sit when they want to be invisible, and I don’t need to be invisible, I just prefer to have a full sight line—and I watch the room fill up.

PhD students. All of them with the same look: that particular combination of exhaustion and smugness that comes from having survived the application process. There’s a guy in the front row with a laptop already open, fingers hovering. Ready. Eager. He’s going to answer every question the professor asks in the first two weeks and then burn out by October. I can already see it.

The professor walks in at exactly 9:02. Dr. Weston. Mid-fifties, corduroy blazer, reading glasses he takes off to look at us and puts back on to look at his notes. He writes his name on the board in handwriting that’s neater than I expected, then pauses before turning around—like he’s reminding himself what kind of first impression he wants to make.

Careful. Practiced. A man who’s given this opening lecture enough times that he knows which jokes land and at what point in the preamble to make them. Probably been doing this fifteen years. Probably good at it, actually. Not the kind of professor who resents students for not knowing things yet. 

He opens with a question.

“How many of you, when you tell someone you study statistics, get the response: 'Oh, I hated that class'?”

Half the room raises their hand. I don’t, because I’ve never told anyone what I study in a context where their opinion of it mattered.

He nods like he expected it. “Right. Here’s the problem with that response—and this is the last time I’ll be diplomatic about it—that class they hated wasn’t statistics. That was arithmetic with a normal distribution bolted onto it. What we’re doing here is different. What we’re doing here is asking what it means to know something when you can't be certain.”

He writes on the board: uncertainty quantification.

I write it down too. Not because I don’t already know what it means. Because I want to see where he goes with it.

He goes somewhere good.

By twenty minutes in he’s put an example problem on the board—a Bayesian inference question, posterior distribution, updating our belief about an unknown parameter given new evidence—and I’ve already worked it before he finishes writing the last line. I sit with the answer while the room catches up. 

There’s something that happens in my brain when I’m waiting. Not impatience, exactly. More like standing at a window. Watching things move at their natural speed from somewhere slightly above it. I’m not frustrated by it. I’m just not in it.

I used to think that was a character flaw.

I’ve revised that. It’s just a fact. Some things process faster than others. Water is still water whether it’s moving or not.

The closest I’ve gotten to something that doesn’t yield to that—something that holds its shape instead of resolving when you press on it—is death. Specifically the question of it. Not the mechanics, not the biology, not the mortality statistics I could recite in my sleep. The meaning of it. What it is, exactly, that ends.

That one I can’t solve.

I’m aware that’s not a normal thing to sit with. I’m aware most people prefer to walk in the other direction. I’ve just always found it more... interesting than frightening. There’s a door at the end of a hallway and everyone’s moving away from it and I keep stopping to look back. I don’t want to open it. I just want to know what’s behind it.

One day, I suppose, I will.

I close my notebook and decide that was enough philosophy for a Monday.

Dr. Weston wraps things up at exactly 9:20am, and I’m off. I spend the next few hours at the library. Not studying. Just headphones in, eyes fixed on a point on my laptop screen, enjoying the lingering haze of the joint I smoked this morning before it fades.

My phone buzzes at 11:17 AM.

Naomi Sinclair is on the screen. A picture of her new phone. A voice memo. Forty-three seconds.

I stare at it for a moment.

Why does an eight-year-old have a cellphone?

Why?

What could she possibly need to communicate that requires a personal device with—I tilt the screen as I look at the photo—a custom case with her name on it in rhinestones. That’s a smartphone. With rhinestones on it. For a child who is eight years old.

Way to fuck up her attention span, Cade.

I know what the voice memo is going to be. Forty-three seconds of a small person talking very fast about the new phone her father just bought her, and something that happened at school, or a dog she saw, or a show she watched, with at least two tangents and an ending that doesn’t conclude so much as just stop. 

And I’ll have listened to the whole thing and still not know what to say back, which is the same problem I run into every time, because I genuinely don’t have the software for it. 

Kids require a kind of full-presence, constant-translation energy that I have never possessed. They say things that don’t connect to anything and expect you to follow the thread anyway, on faith, which is not how I follow anything.

It’s not mean. It’s honest.

I lock my phone and put it in my bag.

I’ll listen to it later.

Probably.

The walk home is quieter. The afternoon has gone gray around the edges, that particular autumn light that makes everything look slightly more serious than it is. I cut through the courtyard of the complex because it’s the faster route, headphones in, not listening to anything—just wearing them so people don’t talk to me.

By the time I’m at my door, keys in hand, I’m already calculating.

Option one: go inside, smoke, stare at the ceiling, think about the Bayesian problem from this morning until I’ve rebuilt it three different ways and proved myself right each time. Standard Monday.

Option two: Cade texted yesterday. Something about dinner to celebrate my first day of grad school, an open invitation, no pressure. Elysian made food. Naomi would undoubtedly be awake past her bedtime and have opinions about it.

I stand there for longer than a person with a 145 IQ should need to make a simple decision.

The ceiling will be there tomorrow. It’s not going anywhere.

I put my keys back in my pocket.