#hamilton things

She fixed John with a querying look, as though this name might mean something to him. It did not. John did a head-shake-plus-shrug.

“Hamilton’s a senior in the neuroscience department,” Angelica said. “You can see him pictured in a few of the banner photos on the university site. He’s supposedly some sort of undergrad superstar.” 

John flipped open his laptop and Googled the name. Sure enough, the first result was a page listing Alexander Hamilton among the members of the Washington Group in the neuro department. Hamilton’s icon showed a boy with doe-big brown eyes, dark hair pulled back in a painfully tight knot, and a deadpan expression. The brief profile didn’t tell John much more than Angelica already had: same year as John, neuroscience major, involved in research on “neural plasticity in the visual cortex.” Whatever that meant. 

“Apparently, he’s coauthor on some soon-to-be-published paper, which he’ll present at a conference in a couple months,” Angelica said. “And apparently, it’s a pretty big deal.” Angelica lifted her hands, palms up, as though to say that the logistics of scientific academia were just one of the great mysteries of the universe she couldn’t be bothered to fully understand. 

“How did you hear about him?” John said, copying Hamilton’s information from the school site into a Word document and returning to Google. A cursory scroll through the first page of results turned up LinkedIn and ResearchGate profiles, but no social media accounts. Odd. 

“Eliza,” Angelica said. “Hamilton came into the Writing Center during one of her late-night shifts sometime last year, all worked up about getting a draft of this research paper in good enough shape to show his…lab manager, or whoever—”

“His PI,” John corrected unthinkingly, as he scanned the fifth page of Google, which still held no sign of a non-professional web presence for Alexander Hamilton. 

“His what?” 

John glanced up. “His PI, like, principal investigator? Washington. The one who leads the research group.” 

Angelica blinked. “Why do you know that?”

John shrugged, not much in the mood to discuss his own principal investigator of a father, who could never understand why John would deign to do something like journalism, why he couldn’t be more like Henry, whose graduate research on molecular machinery actually made all that undergraduate tuition a worthwhile investment—

“Anyway,” Angelica said, “the first draft of that manuscript must have been truly awful, because he kept coming back for Eliza’s help for months, and you know Eliza. Never one to leave a stray out in the cold.” Angelica rolled her eyes, albeit fondly. “So now the paper is actually slotted for publication in…” Angelica checked her computer. “…Nature Neuroscience. He’s presenting the work at a Society for Neuroscience meeting in November, Eliza says.” 

John quirked an eyebrow. “Did you say his paper is coming out in Nature?”

“Nature Neuroscience,” Angelica corrected. “Why?”

“Because it’s—” John stopped himself just in time from saying “high impact.” That would have made John sound like his father, and that would have made John hate himself a little bit. “It’s a pretty well known publication.” 

John switched over to Google Scholar and found Alexander Hamilton’s name tacked on to some half-dozen publications since 2014. He whistled. 

“Glad you find your subject suitably impressive,” Angelica said with a wry smile. “This piece should be an interesting new challenge, given the, ah, science-y angle.” 

This was true. John had showcased club service trips, investigated frat expulsions from campus for brutal hazing rituals, spotlighted a group of students who attended the Women’s March on Washington—but nothing, as Angelica put it, remotely “science-y.” Which, John thought, a prickle of excitement in his stomach, actually injected a new kind of thrill into the work. Maybe he’d finally produce a piece that even his quantum physicist father would deem substantive (compared to “all that teenage fluff” John usually wasted his time on). 

“The thing is,” Angelica said, and John could tell they’d reached the crux of her initial reticence to assign this story, “Eliza says Hamilton can be a piece of work.” 

John raised his eyebrows. “Piece of work” was basically Eliza for “total dickhead.” 

“Mmm-hmm,” Angelica confirmed gravely. “She’s come home a fair few nights ranting about his ego, his stubbornness, his neuroticism.” Angelica waved her hand in an et cetera gesture. 

“I can handle it,” John said easily. Egoists typically made the best interviewees; it was the self-conscious ones with whom extracting quotes was like pulling teeth. And John could practically list “tolerating intolerably stubborn people” on his résumé, after living with his father and brother for eighteen years. As for neuroticism, there was plenty of that to go around right here in the newsroom. 

Did Angelica really think so little of John that she didn’t think he could handle a difficult subject? He’d managed to wring several good quotes out of tight-lipped administrators when the Kappas had gotten booted off campus. That had taken a good amount of grit. Why was she babying him about this? 

Something of John’s stung ego must have shown on his face, because Angelica shrugged. “A five-page spread on this guy is going to require a lot of interviews and observation days. I want you to attend this conference in November, too, since it’s only a two-hour train to D.C.” 

She eyed John a moment longer, and her expression softened. “Look, you’re a thorough reporter and the best writer we’ve got on staff,” Angelica said matter-of-factly. “The nuts and bolts of his research are going to get tricky. I wouldn’t entrust the story to anyone else.” She paused. “But you’re also a Nice Guy, John, and I don’t want you getting steamrolled.”

That, John thought, may have been the sweetest thing Angelica had ever said to him.

“If I can’t wrangle a difficult source, then I’m probably not cut out for journalism,” John said. 

“He gets a rise out of Eliza, John.” 

Point taken. Still. John stood up before Angelica could keep piling on more reasons for him to be apprehensive. It was going to be fine. “First draft deadline?” he said promptly. 

Angelica spun her chair to inspect the calendar tacked on her back wall. “First draft…Let’s say, first of October. No offense, but if this piece is going to have a bunch of science-y stuff in it, I expect revisions to get hairy. We’ll want to have something solid by the time you get the conference news hook in mid-November, so we can go to press the next week. Okay?”

“Okay,” John agreed, hovering by the door. “Oh, and Angelica?” 

“Hmm?” Angelica hummed around the pen cap in her mouth as she scribbled John’s deadline on the calendar.

“So you know, for when you’re editing, the technical word for ‘science-y is ‘scientific.’” 

Angelica twisted around to fix him with a flat look, but John saw the corner of her mouth twitch. “John?”

“Hmm?”

“Close the door on your way out.” 

John grinned. “Yes, ma’am.”

Outside Angelica’s office, the student newsroom was uncharacteristically quiet for a Wednesday afternoon. Only a few of the people who seemed to reside there from September to May were scattered about: Lafayette in the digital editing corner, dual screens illuminating his face blue, Peggy lip-syncing whatever was playing in her earbuds as she stocked the printer, Aaron  hunched over his copy chief desk, doing god only knew what, since there was no copy to edit yet. 

Granted, it was only the first week of classes. The inaugural editorial meeting of the school year wouldn’t take place until Friday afternoon—complete with pizza to bribe everyone into attending. There was no real reason for any of them to be here, yet, except perhaps Angelica, who also needed to prepare for her first meeting with the student newspaper staff, for which she was the campus life section editor (and who John knew to have a rolled-up sleeping bag tucked under her desk). 

Still, to see the newsroom—usually thrumming with deadline-driven energy—so empty traced a tickle up the back of John’s neck. 

John rolled his shoulders and wove his way through the maze of cubicles to Lafayette, who was so transfixed with his work that he didn’t appear to notice John’s approach. It wasn’t until John stopped up short in front of Lafayette’s desk, reached an arm over one of his monitors, and waved his hand back and forth across the screen that Laf jolted back and looked up—glare melting into a grin when he saw it was John. 

Lafayette pulled his enormous headphones down around his neck so that John could hear Hannah Montana’s “Nobody’s Perfect” blaring through. It was probably a sign that John and Lafayette spent too much time together—or too much time working on the magazine—that John knew the next song on Laf’s “Frantic Photoshopping” playlist was “Chop Suey,” followed by “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”

“Salut,” Lafayette said cheerfully. “How was your meeting?” 

John, still a bit put out by Angelica’s apparent lack of faith in him, said, “Fine.” He was aiming for airy, but must not have quite hit the mark, because Lafayette’s brow furrowed. “What are you working on?” John said quickly before Laf could ask any more questions. Lafayette couldn’t possibly have magazine work yet. John bent over his screen to get an upside-down glimpse of what he was editing. A flyer of some sort. 

“Herc is helming bio club this year,” Lafayette said, “so he asked me to design some meeting advertisements for the student center.” 

Ah, of course. Lafayette would do just about anything for Herc, his randomly assigned freshman roommate and effective other-half ever since. They were about as inseparable as two people could be, when one lived in the communications building on the eastern edge of campus and the other hardly left the bio building on the west side. 

“I thought Herc had decided not to do that,” John said. He distinctly recalled Hercules announcing last spring—when the then-president of bio club was pestering him relentlessly to take her place once she’d graduated—that he’d sooner declare himself a Flat Earther than assume any more extracurricular responsibilities for the fall. He was already captain of intramural ultimate frisbee and team leader for a contingent of RAs (in the freshman neighborhood of campus, no less). 

“Oh, you know Herc,” Lafayette said, eyes back on his computer screen, rolling his earlobe between his left forefinger and thumb—his version of the Angelica pen-twirl. “Quand le service appelle…” 

It was times like these that John especially resented his father forcing him to drop French sophomore year of high school to pick up AP statistics. He simply nodded as though he understood and agreed; John had learned early on that if he asked Lafayette for translation every time Laf unthinkingly slipped into French, most of their conversations would progress like a car in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Herc must be nearly fluent by now, John thought. 

Laf deftly traced his cursor along the edge of a cartoon cell to carve away the image’s background. “I’m actually meeting Herc for dinner in—” He lifted his eyes to the clock on the upper corner of his screen. “—Fifteen minutes, if you want to join.” 

“Sure.” John hadn’t actually seen Hercules since he’d been back at school. 

“Fantastic. Let me just finish this,” Lafayette said, eyes on his editing. 

John set up shop with his own computer at the cubicle next to Laf’s and opened a new email. Dear Alexander, he wrote, paused, then backspaced the name.

It was tricky business, addressing student interviewees. John never knew how formal to make his first emails. Of course, Alexander Hamilton must be around John’s age, so it wouldn’t be a total faux pas for John to pull a “Dear First Name,” here. But if Angelica was right about Eliza being right about Hamilton’s overinflated ego, then lacing his first email with a bit of flattery probably couldn’t hurt. 

Besides, the memory of Hamilton’s straight-laced lab profile picture gave John the impression that it was probably best to err on the side of professionalism.

Dear Mr. Hamilton,

I’m a reporter for the student semesterly magazine, and I’m writing an exposé about you and your work. The story will have a particular focus on the research you will present at the Society for Neuroscience conference later this fall. 

My first-draft deadline is October 1. I would like to schedule a preliminary meeting with you to arrange interviews on days that I could shadow you in the lab. I’m available any afternoon this coming week, from Monday, September 4 to Thursday, September 7, after 4 p.m. If any of those windows matches your availability, please let me know the best time and place to meet you. If not, please suggest a couple alternatives that suit your schedule. 

Thanks very much for your time. I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely, John Laurens 

Sent. John snapped his laptop shut. Now all he had to do was wait.

And wait, and wait, and wait, apparently, because the rest of the week passed with no word from John’s interviewee-to-be. Each time he opened his inbox, John’s scanned the cache of new emails for the name “Hamilton,” and his stomach did an uncomfortable flip each time he found nothing. 

John usually liked to give his sources several days’ leeway on getting back to him. Especially amidst the flurry of first-week-back activity, he could understand how his email may have gotten lost in Hamilton’s inbox. But at Friday’s editorial meeting, when Angelica asked how his reporting was going—with a look, like she knew John was spinning his tires—the words that tumbled out of John’s mouth were, “Great. Got an interview lined up for next week.” 

The buoying sensation of satisfaction that momentarily swelled in his chest at Angelica’s impressed expression deflated just as quickly when the snide voice in the back of his mind (which sounded an awful lot like John’s father) said, Liar. As soon as the meeting adjourned, John sent a hurried email to Hamilton. 

Dear Mr. Hamilton,

I’m writing to follow up on my previous message about scheduling a time to meet this coming week. Thanks!

Sincerely, John

He also sent an email to Professor Washington to request an interview. John wasn’t sure how well the head of a whole lab might know one of his lowly undergrad underlings, but if Hamilton was as prolific as Google Scholar made him out to be, John expected they must at least be familiar with each other. 

Deciding that he couldn’t wait for Hamilton’s reply to start his reporting, John spent much of the following morning in the library, printing off copies of journal papers coauthored by Alexander Hamilton and trying to slog through the first few pages. Honestly, though, reading even the abstract of each was like trying to clear a forest trail with a table knife. John constantly had to pause in reading to look up words he didn’t recognize and scribble their definitions in the woefully thin margins. Or highlight words that, when he Googled them, he could only find used in similarly dense, indecipherable academic articles. 

By lunchtime, John was resigned to the fact that his only hope of understanding Alexander Hamilton’s work lay in Alexander Hamilton himself. Deeply unfortunate, given Hamilton’s continued silence.

John did get one pleasant surprise on Saturday afternoon in the form of a reply from Professor Washington. 

Dear John,

I’d be happy to speak with you about Alexander. He’s one of my best students, and I’m glad his work is receiving some recognition.

I’ve attached my office hours for the semester. Let me know if there’s a time that works for you, and I’ll block it off. Thanks.

Cheers, Dr. W

Pleased (and relieved) as John was to get this response, he couldn’t help his incredulity at the fact that Hamilton’s professor had bothered to get back to John before Hamilton himself. 

John told himself to be patient, though. His own inbox was flooded with messages, from university bookstore advertisements to welcome-back messages from various school administrators, not to mention syllabi and first assignments from professors. Hamilton probably just needed the weekend to catch up on his cyber-correspondence. 

...Or maybe not, John grumbled to himself on Sunday night as he sat in the library with Hercules and Lafayette, trying not to check his email for the third time since they’d sat down an hour ago. 

“What’s up with you?”

“Hmm?” John glanced up at Hercules from the “How to file a FOIA” webpage his glazed eyes had been trying to focus on for the past twenty minutes. It was deadly boring. 

Hercules pointed his highlighter at John’s hand, which John now realized had been drumming an agitated staccato against their tabletop. Oh. 

“Sorry,” John said, folding his hands together in his lap.

“It’s okay,” Herc said, exchanging a glance with Lafayette, who had looked up from his own work. “You’ve just seemed...tense lately.” Hercules hitched a lightly teasing smile on his face. “And It’s too early in the semester for you to be this stressed about work.” Like he wasn’t one of the hardest working people John knew. 

“I’m waiting for a source to get back to me,” John said, rubbing his eyes. 

“Ah,” Hercules said sympathetically. Although he had no first-hand experience with this particular type of sitting-idle stress, he’d known John long enough to know that awaiting email replies made John feel as though someone was wringing out his stomach like a rag. 

Awaiting email replies was, in John’s opinion, the absolute worst part of reporting. He’d never been the type to enjoy group projects, as he hated depending on anyone else to get his work done. But since he literally could not write stories without sources, journalism sometimes felt like one long, group project. The kind where he couldn’t be angry at anyone for not getting back to him promptly, because they didn’t even know they were in his group until he emailed them, and then they were doing him a favor by agreeing to help at all.

John gave a long-suffering sigh and checked his inbox again. Nothing. 

“Who is it?” Hercules said.

“Oh, just some—Actually.” John sat up straighter in his chair. It was always a long-shot asking anyone if they knew anyone at a state university as big as this, even if they were both life science undergrads in the same year, but Hercules seemed to know everyone. “Alexander Hamilton. He’s a neuroscience student that I’m profiling for my feature this semester. Know him?”

Herc turned to his laptop, presumably to go social-media-spelunking for a photo of Hamilton. “Name rings a bell…” he murmured. 

“You’ll have to look him up on the school site,” John said. “He doesn’t have a Facebook or a Twitter, as far as I can tell.” 

“Weird,” Lafayette said, stroking the stubble on his chin thoughtfully. “Wait, I thought at Friday’s meeting you said you’d already scheduled an interview with this guy?” 

“Ah, yes,” John said. “That. That was a lie.” 

“Why?”

John couldn’t help glancing around, like Angelica might suddenly appear over his shoulder. “Because Angelica made it clear that she thought I’d have a hard time pinning this guy down,” John said.

“Why did she—” Lafayette began, but was interrupted by a drawn-out, “Oh,” from Herc. 

John’s stomach twisted tighter. “What ‘oh’?” 

“I definitely know this guy,” Hercules said. “Or, I don’t know him know him. We were in the same recitation group for a couple of our intro classes. He’s…” John waited for Herc to settle on the right word. “Kind of a dick. And when I say kind of, I mean he is. A dick.” 

Lafayette barely suppressed a snort. John slumped in his chair. 

“Like, he’d show up late all the time and interrupt the TAs and just generally had an air like he thought he was better than the rest of us,” Herc said. “Everyone kind of hated his guts.” 

Well, that made two-for-two negative Hamilton reviews from a couple of the most sociable people John knew. Fantastic.

When he caught sight of John’s expression, though, Herc hurried to add,

“Disclaimer, this was all freshman year. Loads of people come into college as cocky little bastards, right?” Hercules shrugged. “He’s probably chilled out by now.” 

John didn’t bother to correct him with a thirdhand account of Eliza’s experience, because Hercules was now looking slightly guilty for dialing up John’s apprehension. 

“Yeah, probably,” John agreed, and started sending off another follow-up message to Hamilton.

By Monday afternoon, John’s anxiousness had morphed into outright irritation. 

“Go stake out his lab,” Lafayette suggested over lunch, watching John stab grumpily at his salad. 

John chewed his lower lip uncertainly. “You don’t think that’s too…aggressive?” The last thing he wanted to do was actively chase Hamilton away. 

“You’re the one taking the investigative journalism course,” Laf said with a shrug. “Aren’t you supposed to be practicing aggressiveness?” 

John shoved a forkful of lettuce in his mouth in lieu of responding. Lafayette grinned. 

“Laf’s right,” Hercules said, which did not count, because Herc tended to agree with most everything Lafayette said. “You could probably do with some practice, in the assertiveness department.” 

“I can be assertive,” John said indignantly, pulling his shoulders back a bit. 

“Sure you can, John,” said Herc, a little patronizingly, at the same time Laf said, “I would not endorse you for assertiveness on LinkedIn.” Herc gave Laf a light thwack on the shoulder with the back of his hand. 

They were right, of course. Pushing people around just wasn’t in John’s nature. Growing up, it had been John’s father and brother who were the unstoppable forces, and it was John’s only hope was to be as immovable an object as possible.

Still, John figured he didn’t really have anything to lose, at this point. He could do homework just as well in a hallway outside Hamilton’s lab as he could do in the library. So John rechecked the Washington Lab’s room number online and made his way to the neuroscience building at quarter-to-five. 

The lab turned out to be in a subbasement, where the halls were mostly silent sans the hum of overhead fluorescent lighting. As John drew closer to his destination, he could hear the faint sound of voice spilling out of Room 0014’s open door. Bingo. John drew to a halt just outside. 

He was looking into an office suite, the walls of which were lined with half a dozen shut doors. John’s eyes swept over the couches with pilled cushions shoved up against the white cinderblock walls, the kitchenette area with three coffeemakers on the counter, the large round, wooden table in the middle of the room stacked with textbooks and binders. And then, there was a smaller classroom desk jammed in one corner, piled high with open, dog-eared books and loose papers, and had more stray papers slipping out of its cubby. 

There were also two men at the far end of the room, standing shoulder to shoulder with their backs to John, working something out on a whiteboard.

John rapped his knuckles against the open door and they spun around with identical expressions of surprise. John supposed people in subbasement labs didn’t get many unannounced visitors. 

“Hi,” he said, glancing between the two men. They both looked at least a couple years older than John. Graduate students, he presumed. “Sorry to bother you.” 

“There aren’t any classes down here,” the taller of the two said shortly, probably taking John for a lost freshman. 

John bristled. “I know,” he said evenly, which of course was untrue. John had never set foot in this building before, but. Irrelevant. “Is this Professor Washington’s lab?” 

“The offices for it,” the shorter guy said shrewdly. “Washington isn’t in right now, though.” 

“I’m actually looking for Alexander Hamilton,” John said. “I’ve been trying to get in touch with him for several days, but he hasn’t returned my emails.”

To John’s surprise, Taller Guy let out a rather dramatic scoff. “Yeah, that sounds about right. Fucking Hamilton.” 

“Fucking Hamilton,” the other agreed.

“So…he does work in this lab,” John said, stepping into the room.

“Unfortunately,” Taller Guy said flatly. 

“Do you know when he might be in?” 

Taller Guy shrugged. “Most days he’s here nine to three.” 

“Oh,” John said, internally cursing himself for not showing up just a couple hours earlier. “Guess I’ll come back tomorrow morning, then. Thanks.”

“He means nine p.m. to three a.m.,” Shorter Guy corrected, and at John’s appalled expression, added, “Yeah, the kid’s basically nocturnal.” 

“Fucking Hamilton,” Taller Guy muttered again. 

“Can non-neuro students even access the building that late?” John said. 

“Probably not,” Shorter Guy said unhelpfully. 

John pinched the bridge of his nose. It was like Hamilton was actively trying to make this as difficult as possible for John. “Fucking Hamilton,” came out of John’s mouth before he could stop to censor himself—and, remarkably, elicited a smirk from both graduate students. 

“That’s the spirit, ah—what’s your name?” Shorter Guy said.

“John Laurens,” he said.

“James Madison,” Shorter Guy said with a thumb pointed at his chest, then jerked his head at Taller Guy. “And Thomas Jefferson. Third-year doctoral candidates.” 

“What do you want with Hamilton, anyway?” Thomas said, in a tone of veiled interest. 

“I’m a writer for the undergrad student magazine,” John explained, “and I’m profiling him for our fall issue.” 

Thomas snorted. “Just what Hamilton needs—media attention. Washington already lets him think he’s god’s gift to neuroscience.” 

“Well, he’s not going to get any media attention if he’s impossible to reach,” John said, dropping into a chair at the round table and propping his chin on crossed arms. 

“Yeah, he tends to ghost like that,” James said, voice much warmer now that it was clear John was no friend of Hamilton’s. “Very annoying, that.” 

“You guys work with him?” John asked. 

“Not on the same research project,” James said, “but we work with mouse models, too. There’s only a couple of surgical stations in the lab, so coordinating experiment time is key. And difficult, when some little undergrad shit won’t respond to any of our group messages. Even Washington has trouble getting in touch with him sometimes, and Hamilton practically kisses the ground Washington walks on.” 

“When he’s not kissing Washington’s ass,” Thomas added.  

At least, John thought wearily, it sounded like Alexander Hamilton was an equal-opportunity asshole, and that he probably wasn’t ignoring John’s messages alone…although John couldn’t decide whether that improved or worsened his prospects for completing this assignment in a relatively timely or painless manner. 

Well, if John couldn’t get ahold of Hamilton himself just at the moment, he could at least start background reporting. “Did you say surgical stations?” he asked James, casually slipping his reporter’s notebook out of his back pocket and tugging the golf pencil out of its wire spiral. 

“Yeah, for inserting electrodes into the mice’s brains,” James explained, giving himself bunny ears. “So we can measure their brain activity during experiments.” 

John scribbled away. “What kind of brain activity?” 

“We look at what’s going on in the hippocampus,” James said. “Learning and memory. That kind of thing.” 

“What about Hamilton?” John asked. 

“He looks at vision stuff,” James said, with a marked decrease in interest with the subject change, just as Thomas said, “You can see his stuff out in the hall. We should probably get back to…” and jerked his head at the red-stained dry-erase board. 

“Right, right,” John said, disappointed that he hadn’t been able to get at least a sentence of plain-language description of Hamilton’s work from them, but recognizing this as his invitation to leave. “Thanks so much for your help. It seems like you’re doing some really cool work around here.”

This turned out to be just the right amount of cajolery to make James smile abashedly and allow, “Look, we’re probably going to bounce before Hamilton gets in, but if you want, you could leave him a note that you dropped by.”

James pointed at the overflowing corner desk. “That’s his stuff, if you want a post-it to slap on top.” 

John raised his eyebrows at the incredible one-man mess.

“Yeah,” Thomas said dryly. “We had to quarantine his clutter to that desk. Not that that keeps him from re-infecting the big table with his junk every few days.”

“You know what, I think I’m good on the whole post-it thing,” John said. For one, John wasn’t at all sure Hamilton would notice a single sticky amidst his heap of papers, and for another, there was no way John was stepping foot outside the neuro building before he saw Hamilton in-person. “I’m gonna check out the posters. Thanks again.” 

James flicked him a tired salute and Thomas raised a hand in farewell before they both turned back to the whiteboard and left John to his own devices. 

Out in the hall, John walked back and forth, snapping photos of all the posters with A. Hamilton listed as coauthor. The jargon-laden posters were nearly as indecipherable as the papers, but the diagrams did help. A little. 

When he was finished, John meandered down the hall in search of a comfortable place to wait out Hamilton. Finding none, he eventually sat down with his face against the wall and opened his computer on crossed legs. Looked like it was time to file some more FOIA requests. 

The tedium stretched on, uninterrupted—sans James and Thomas loudly debating something down the hall—until eight o’clock, when John’s ears pricked up at the ding of an incoming email. Hamil—? No. Eliza. Possibly the first time in John’s life he was ever disappointed to see a message from Eliza. 

Hi John!

I’m writing the first draft for my first American Lit essay and wanted to see if you’re still interested in being rough-draft-peer-review pals this semester, even though you’ve abandoned me to take Brit Lit instead :( I hear Prof Schmidt’s essay due date sched is p much the same for both classes. We could set up an email exchange? Please say yes! I missed your feedback over the summer. Let me know :) 

Also, want to meet up sometime this week?? I missed your friendship during the summer!!! Hehe. 

E.

John grinned. Eliza was the only person he knew who could use triple exclamation points un-ironically without sounding either sarcastic or simpering. He’d missed her practically heroic levels of cheer over the summer, especially the days he was confined to his gray-walled cubicle for eight straight hours. He replied yes on both counts, suggesting the next day to meet up. Maybe she could give him some tips on Hamilton-wrangling. Speaking of…

John glanced up and down the hall—even though he knew he would’ve heard the footsteps of anyone approaching before they turned either corner—then pulled out his phone and texted Lafayette that he’d be home late tonight and not to wait up.

John was startled from light sleep later by—finally—the sound of soles smacking against linoleum at a brisk clip. John lifted his head off the wall and blinked rapidly, clearing his blurry vision just in time to see someone turning the corner and starting to walk down the hall toward him. The someone was about John’s height, with his hair tied back taut, his head bent low over a textbook. So low, in fact, that he didn’t seem to see John at all. As the boy approached, John glimpsed the earbuds jammed in both his ears, and heard the boy muttering lowly to himself. Whether he was murmuring along to his music or reading aloud, John couldn’t tell. 

Was it—It had to be, right? The hair alone, but. John couldn’t see his face, so he couldn’t quite be sure. 

When the boy drew level with the door of Room 0014, he stopped walking before he even looked up, as though his feet had carried him to this precise spot my sheer muscle memory. John watched him dig in the chest pocket of a baggy trench coat to withdraw a jangling key ring. The boy held his open book against his chest with one hand while maneuvering the key ring with his other. It was only now that John realized James and Thomas must have left and locked up shop sometime after he’d drifted off. John checked his watch. Nearly eleven, now. He looked back up at the boy, whose self-talk had taken on a distinctly disgruntled tone as he fiddled with his keys. 

Definitely Hamilton. 

John stood up and slung his bag over one shoulder, just as Hamilton gruffly shoved open the door and practically tumbled over the threshold. 

John followed. He could still hear Hamilton mumbling when he peered through the doorway. Hamilton had already spilled a cascade of work materials from his backpack onto the round table. John watched him doff his trench coat, under which Hamilton was wearing a ratty gray hoodie. This struck John as slightly odd, given that it was only the first week of September and still quite warm out, even when the sun was down. Most academic buildings were air conditioned to the point of frigidity, but still. 

John was tempted to pull out his phone and note every detail for potential placement in his story, but right now he had smoke to catch. 

“Excuse me,” John said as politely as possible in his still sleep-thick voice. No response. John rubbed the sleep from his left eye. He just wanted to go home. 

“Excuse me,” John said, a little bit louder now, but Hamilton just kept rummaging through the bunch of papers he’d dumped out, talking under his breath. Oh, for the love of—

John shook his head and schooled his exhausted, irate expression into something resembling “professionally determined.” Contrary to what Angelica and everyone else seemed to think, John was not so much of a pushover that he was incapable of doing his job. He marched up to tap Hamilton on the shoulder. 

Hamilton flinched violently under John’s touch and spun on his heels, planting his palms on the table behind him to look at John with wide, almost fearful eyes.

John, for his part, was so shocked by this overwrought reaction that the stern expression fell from his face and he leaned back, hands up. He could see now that Hamilton, who was panting as though John had dunked his head underwater rather than touched his shoulder, still had earphones stuck in his ears. Ah.

For a hairline moment, the sight of Hamilton made John’s chest ache. The school site photo hadn’t done justice to the bruise-dark circles under Hamilton’s eyes or the slight concavity of his cheeks. The boy looked so supremely disturbed to find an unexpected face in his personal space that the next words queued up to leave John’s mouth were, somewhat ridiculously, ‘It’s okay.’ 

But before John could say anything, Hamilton’s panic-stricken expression pinched into an ugly scowl and he wrenched out his earbuds to snap, “What the hell is your problem?”

What…what the hell was John’s…Seriously? 

“My problem?” John said, the pitch of his voice rising higher than was perhaps dignified. “Why didn’t you email me back?”

“What?” Hamilton spluttered. “Who are you?” 

John opened his mouth but stopped up short. Right. In their conversational kerfuffle, he’d skipped clean over introductions. Which only made him angrier at Hamilton, honestly. John was a stringent eleven-to-seven sleeper. So this conversation was happening way too late for him to have his head on straight. He crossed his arms. “I’m the journalist who’s been trying to get in touch with you for a better part of a week.” 

“Journalist?” Hamilton said. He was tapping his foot against the tile agitatedly. Annoyingly. 

John exhaled slowly through his nose. “Yes. For the student magazine.” 

“Oh. That.” Hamilton’s tone was distinctly disdainful now, but John noticed his hands to a weird…jazz-hand-like tremor, where they were hanging at Hamilton’s sides, like Hamilton needed to physically shake the excess energy out of himself. 

“Yes,” John said again, levelly.

“Yeah, thanks, but no thanks.” 

John stared at him. Contrary to the rest of Hamilton, which appeared in constant erratic movement, he didn’t seem to need to blink as much as the average person, giving his gaze a somewhat unnatural intensity. John’s eyes felt dry just looking at him, although that might have been residual stickiness from falling asleep in his contacts earlier. God, he wanted to go to bed. “What do you mean ‘no thanks’?”

“No. Thank. You,” Hamilton repeated, enunciating each syllable with mocking precision. “Go find someone else to write about.” He made a little shooing gesture with one hand, which John saw was covered with black pen ink in truly horrendous handwriting. 

John tamped down on the urge to grip Hamilton’s shoulders and give him a good, hard, shake. “I can’t,” he bit out. “My editor assigned me to write the story about you.”

“Well, I can’t help that, can I?” Hamilton gave a kind of half-smirk and sank into a chair. To John’s supreme irritation, he shifted in his chair to hunch over the table and start picking through his papers, as though the conversation were finished. 

John was far from finished. He yanked out the chair beside Hamilton’s and planted a hand over the page Hamilton was reading. Hamilton jumped. John felt the corner of his mouth twitch and immediately felt disgusted with himself. He wasn’t the kind of person who delighted in others’ moments of weakness. He wasn’t his—

He could be a Nice Guy and still do his job. 

So John peeled his palm off Hamilton’s paper—embarrassed by the perspiration that made it momently stick—and muttered a “sorry.” Which Hamilton did not acknowledge. 

John inhaled, exhaled, and said gently, “Why don’t you want to do it?”

Hamilton was back to leafing through his papers. “I don’t need to explain myself you,” he said. “You’re the one who came to me.”  

If John wasn’t very much mistaken, Hamilton’s tone had tilted toward satisfaction, there, which gave him an idea. Time for a little ego-stroking. “When I publish the profile, it will make the lab look good,” he said. “Could score you some points with the other students and your P.I. He seemed into the idea when I emailed him for an interview.”

“When I publish my research, it makes the lab look good,” Hamilton said shortly. “That scores me plenty of ‘points’ with Washington.” No comment on the graduate students, though, John noted. 

Now that they were sitting down, John could feel Hamilton’s leg bouncing under the table. Did this guy ever sit still?

Meanwhile, Hamilton was wearing an expression like, Is that the best you’ve got?

“Still, it must be tough, being the only undergrad in your lab,” John said casually. “The profile could only boost your…scientific street cred around the department.” 

Hamilton’s eye twitched, but he said quite evenly, “I was the youngest student ever to join this lab and the youngest student in the department ever listed coauthor on a paper. I’m currently the undergrad with the most publications to his name and the highest GPA. Not too worried about my ‘scientific street cred,’” he said, crooking his fingers in pejorative air quotes. 

“Has James Madison or Thomas Jefferson ever been the subject of a five-page magazine spread?”

John knew he’d played an ace the moment Hamilton’s leg stopped bouncing.

“My reporting wouldn’t take up too much of your time,” John hurried on. “I know you’re extremely busy.” 

Hamilton wasn’t look at him now, but John could see him chewing the inside of his cheek. “Did Washington—” he began, in a tone much softer than the one he’d been using with John, and then cleared his throat. The leg jitters started back up again. “He…seemed okay with it?”

“Absolutely,” John said promptly. Come on, he thought. Come on. “He agreed to an interview next week, and it’d be great if I’d already had one interview with you beforehand. Even better if I could shadow you in the lab first.”

Hamilton looked up sharply. “Shadow?” 

“Uh, yeah,” John said. He could feel Hamilton pulling back and rushed to say, “Just observing you work in the lab. Seeing you in your element.” John should really also see Hamilton in his element outside the lab—attending a club meeting, playing a sport, something—but this didn’t seem the moment to raise that point. John would have to casually slip it into conversation at a later date, once he’d pried a little bit of trust from Hamilton’s nail-bitten, twitchy hands. 

For the moment, Hamilton still looked extremely reluctant to let John hover over his shoulder, no matter how professional his purpose. 

“All the time I would spend with you is to make sure I paint a detailed, accurate picture of you and your work,” John said. Come on, come on.

“I—” 

John caught Hamilton’s eyes flick over to one of the office doors and followed his gaze. The nameplate read: “George Washington, PhD.”

Hamilton let out a long-suffering sigh and then said, “Okay.”

John had never felt such relief over such an unenthusiastic response.

Before leaving Hamilton alone, John walked him through the basic outline of when John would need him before the first-draft deadline: a couple hour-long interviews, plus answers to fact-checks and follow-up questions that John would send along by email, a few days to shadow in the lab, a couple other scattered meetings here and there.

“I thought you said this wasn’t going to take much time,” Hamilton grumbled as John flipped his monthly planner to the “October” page. 

“It’s all going to be spread out over a month,” John said, trying for reassuring and sounding exasperated, even to his own ears. It would have been even more dispersed, John thought, if Hamilton had responded to any of his emails—but, again, probably not the time to raise that point. 

“In the meantime, is there anyone else you’d recommend I contact for outside interviews, besides Washington?” 

Hamilton squinted. “Why?” he said, because of course no part of this could be easy. 

“I need outside perspectives to flesh out the profile,” John said. “People who know you well, like friends.” 

“Nope,” Hamilton said, deadpan. 

John’s turn to squint. He couldn’t tell whether Hamilton was saying he didn’t have any friends worth contacting, or whether he didn’t have any at all. The latter seemed unlikely, even for Hamilton. Maybe he meant he refused to allow John to contact his friends. 

“Family?” John tried.

Hamilton just kept wearing that inscrutable expression. 

“Look, if you don’t come up with a short list, at least a couple of people—professors, anyone—then I’m going to fall back on Jefferson and Madison,” John said.

Hamilton wrinkled his nose. “Ugh, fine, fine. I’ll think up a couple names for you.” 

John smiled, triumphant. He was getting pretty deft at using the carrot-and-stick of Jefferson and Madison’s disparagement, along with Washington’s approval, to nudge Hamilton in the right direction. John licked his forefinger and flicked the page over to his November calendar. 

“Oh, and I’ll be attending the Society for Neuroscience with you,” John said, marking the 11th through the 15th with a little star in the corner of each box.

“What? Why?”

“Because when we release the magazine at the beginning of December, it’ll be good to have a recent news hook for the story,” John explained.

“I thought the the story was due at the beginning of October,” Hamilton said.

“The first draft,” John said with affected patience, “is due October first. Then it goes through revisions with my first editor, then a top editor, then through copy-edit—” “Okay, okay,” Hamilton said, shaking his head irately. Just as thoroughly unconcerned with the annals of journalistic publication as Angelica was with scientific publication. “Got it. Anything else?”

“Er.” John scanned his mental checklist once more. “I don’t think so.” He tore a page out of his reporter’s notebook. “I could write out a lit of the details for you—”

“Email,” Hamilton said, waving his hand dismissively.

“Would you actually read this one?” John said dryly. 

Hamilton paused. “I read your other emails,” he said, before continuing to flip through pages of what looked like intro-level homework assignments. 

John stared at him for a few seconds, no idea what to make of that, then decided the only thing to say was, “Okay.” He stood up and pushed his chair in. “I’ll be in touch, then.”

Hamilton lifted a hand in farewell without lifting his eyes from the papers.

The following morning, John met Eliza at the community garden behind the freshman dorm where she was an RA. Eliza had volunteered in that garden practically from the moment she set foot on campus—which meant that John had volunteered at that garden for almost as long. 

Eliza had become John’s first college friend in their shared English class, first semester freshman year. This was back when John was even more reserved than he was now, back before he’d met Laf and Herc, back when he was fresh out of an all-boys high school and it was something of a novelty to have a girl sit beside him in class—let alone ask him, apropos of nothing, how his summer had been.

So on the first Saturday morning that Eliza texted John, bright and early, with an invitation to plant seeds and pull weeds behind her building for a couple of hours, there was really nothing for John to do but say yes. Fast-forward three years, and now he had his own pair of mud-encrusted gardening gloves. 

“John! Over here.” Eliza popped up from behind a row of tomato cages that were bursting with greenery and heavy, red fruit. She waved him over, and John meandered through the squash, zucchini, and pumpkin patches. Eliza brushed the dirt off her ankle-length skirt and wrapped him in a hug.

“How are you?” she said, pulling back but leaving her hands on John’s shoulders to look him up and down. 

Not having grown up with a mother, John couldn’t say for certain, but he got impressions from books and movies, at least, that this was a very motherly move. 

“I’m good, thanks,” John said, smiling semi-self-consciously under Eliza’s critical once-over. “How can I help?”

“Got your gloves?” 

John pulled them out of his back pocket. 

“Good man.” Eliza beamed at him and wiped the sheen of sweat off her forehead with a forearm. “We’re just weeding today. Come on down, the dirt’s fine.” 

John sank to his knees in the soft soil beside her, savoring the feeling of cold damp through his jeans. He’d missed this. “How was your summer?” he asked, yanking out his first weed with vigor and adding it to Eliza’s already impressive pile.

“Too short, as always,” she said, wistful. “Working in the Writing Center is so easy over the summer. Hardly anyone comes in. So I played a lot of Bananagrams with the librarians and did some pleasure reading, some pleasure writing.” 

Eliza exhaled sharply to blow a stray wisp of hair off her forehead.  “Peggy stayed on campus, too,” she continued, “working as a counselor for some high school STEM camps that ran throughout June and July. It was so nice to have the company.”

Even though he’d been friends with all the Schuyler sisters for the better part of three years, it still bemused John greatly to think that anyone could enjoy the company of their siblings as much as they did.

As if on cue, Eliza asked, “How was your summer at home?”

John’s hand slipped on the plant he was trying to uproot. He tightened his grip. “Work was okay,” he said, knowing full well this was not the question Eliza had been asking. “I got assigned a few stories to fill in for out-of-town staffers, but mostly I did a lot of coffee-grabbing, file-cabinet-reorgnizing, and other assorted grunt work. At least I got paid, though.”

“And you made professional connections,” Eliza pointed out, waving a weed at him. 

John decided not to say that he wasn’t sure how much any of those professional connections from his small Kentucky town would matter out here on the east coast, because this was just Eliza’s way: eyes forever fixed on the bright side. John could have told her he’d been working down in a coal mine all summer and she’d probably say, What a great adventure! What great exercise! What amazing camaraderie you must have forged with your fellow miners! What excellent creative nonfiction fodder! 

“Sure,” is what John said instead. “Glad to be back at school, though.” 

Eliza’s expression shifted toward sympathy, now, because she’d read enough of John’s angsty nonfiction pieces and poems in their creative writing classes over the years to know that John’s relationship with his father was, well, fraught. Effectively nonexistent at best, confrontational at worst, and usually hovering in some weird middle ground full of awkward dinner table silences and pointed car ride questions about John’s class schedule and post-grad plans. 

“It is nice to have everyone back,” Eliza said smoothly, apparently guessing that John had nothing else to say on the subject of summer that she didn’t already know. “Although I’ve hardly seen Angelica at all since classes started.”

This was saying something, John thought, given that Angelica was rooming with Eliza in her two-bedroom RA suite, this year. 

“Most evidence of her presence, some days, is the trail of empty coffee mugs she leaves around,” Eliza said. 

“Lots of late nights in the newsroom already?” John said. 

“Yup.” Eliza rolled her eyes in the same fond way Angelica had, when she’d lamented Eliza’s ceaseless patience with Alexander Hamilton. “That girl works too hard.” 

John could hardly argue with that. Angelica, though a year older than John and Eliza, would graduate with them this spring, because she’d taken two gap semesters after sophomore year to work journalism internships in Manhattan. Every summer, she’d helped teach journalism workshops for high schoolers at a university back in her California hometown. And since their junior year, she’d served as editor in chief of the student magazine and campus life section editor of the student paper. For as long as he’d known her, Angelica Schuyler had exhibited the professional development momentum of a freight train. 

Angelica and Alexander Hamilton would probably get on like a house on fire, John thought. 

“That reminds me,” he said, giving a particularly resistant weed a ruthless tug, “I hear I have you to thank for my current Alexander Hamilton assignment.” 

Eliza looked over at him with a concerned pinch in her brow. “Oh, yes,” she said. “Angelica told me she’d commissioned you to cover Alexander. Is he behaving himself? He can be a handful, can’t he?” Like a hand-wringing mother at a parent-teach conference. 

“I’ve only met him once,” John said. “Had to corner him in the lab because he wouldn’t answer any of my emails. He was…prickly.” 

“Oh, yes,” Eliza said again, nodding knowingly. “He tends to do that, too.” 

Whether she meant Hamilton going off the grid or being a prick, John wasn’t sure. Maybe both. 

“Don’t worry. He’ll warm up to you,” Eliza said, with all the confidence of someone saying the sun would rise the next morning. “Hamilton is prickly, but—but like a hedgehog is prickly. Soft underneath.”

John threw her a dubious side-eye. 

“He is,” she insisted. “For instance, last spring I bought a bouquet of lilies for the Writing Center’s front desk to spruce the place up a bit, and when Alexander’s paper was accepted for publication, he sent me a bouquet of lilies as a thank-you for all my help.” 

“Eliza,” John said, trying not to overstep, but being familiar enough with Eliza’s careless, easy sort of beauty to know that she often didn’t know how much other people tried to flirt with her, “are you sure it wasn’t just because he, you know. Liked you?” 

Eliza actually threw her head back to laugh at that. “No,” she said decisively, tugging off her glove to wipe the corner of one eye with her knuckle. “No, definitely not. I mean, it was Alexander. The thank-you note was formatted like the  business letters they teach you how to write in elementary school—complete with the library’s street address under my name, and the Washington lab’s address under his. Printed out and signed with his full name.

“Also, I haven’t seen him since. I hope he’s not working himself too hard,” Eliza added, almost as an afterthought. 

From John’s fifteen-minute interaction with Hamilton, he could pretty much guarantee that was not the case, but he couldn’t bring himself to dash Eliza’s hopes. “Seems like he can be a bit of a workaholic,” he said. 

“Maybe even more than Angelica,” Eliza said gravely. “Whenever I would ask what he was doing over a weekend, or something, he’d just say he was working in the lab.” Eliza stood up and maneuvered her way through the shrubbery to find a yet unweeded patch of earth. “I just felt so bad for him, sometimes, because I don’t think the people in his lab are very nice to him.” 

“Maybe he’s not very nice to the other people in his lab,” John said, keeping his tone carefully neutral, as it was clear Eliza had entered full mother hen mode, now—though it still remained unclear to John why she’d taken Hamilton, of all people, under her wing. 

“Maybe not,” Eliza agreed, somewhat testily, “but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Alexander defending himself when he’s being bullied by grad students.” 

That gave John pause. He hadn’t given much thought to the possibility that although Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison were all clearly throwing punches, Hamilton may be punching up, and the others down. 

“He tries so hard,” Eliza went on, shaking her head. “He’s probably the most prolific person I’ve ever met. He’d come into our writing center sessions with dozens of versions of whatever section of the paper we were working on that night. It’s amazing how much he gets done, even when he’s having such a tough time of it.” 

John was on the brink of asking what exactly that meant, but the seriousness of Eliza’s tone implied it was not a problem professional enough to be pertinent to his profile. John could picture both Angelica and his investigative journalism professor with hands on their hips, telling John that as a journalist it was his job to pry. But there was a difference, John thought, between demanding official statements from school administrators and nosing unnecessarily into another student’s personal life.