She saw some of the professor's stuff on tv, sometimes. Late night, a smoke, a bottle of something, and Dr. Burroughs' compositions unwinding their way through her head. Music like this always turns to numbers in her head. She can see how he stitched it all together easier than he probably can, notes and chords and inexplicable alien cries haunting their way from ears to eyes. She learns to speak music. Sometimes to test herself she stumbles back to her room half-blind with the physics of decadence and turns on the tivo and writes out what she hears, draws equations, converts them to poetry, then scrawls them back into sheet music and finds someone on campus to play it back for her.

She's always gotten it, and that terrifies her.

She has no limits.

Four years like this, that second Earth and more and more wildly theoretical physics by day, more and more wildly theoretical drugs by night. She doesn't break, she doesn't fail. Dr. Glaser gets her an internship with the privately funded group making the fastest strides with the two Earths. She buys an apartment.

It's all vodka and pills and work for a year, and she can't shake the feeling of being secondhand, faint, grasping at a self pulling away from her, out of orbit and into the core of that other Earth.

Then Dr. Burroughs knocks on her door. He's all wrong, but the music is right, and he tells her things about herself that are so terrifying they must be true.

Then Rhoda. Rhoda with her sharp bones, her thinness from manual labor, not toxins. Her hair eyes hands full of pain, different pain, the right pain. This Rhoda destroys others, not herself. This Rhoda is herself. They will hurt each other, Rhoda thinks. They will be alright.

[[omg i'm sorry there's not Brit Marling making out with herself. It's implied right??]]