Not in Love

“I was born without a sense of humor.”

In this flat, unadorned statement, Rue reveals her poor opinion of her own social skills to Eli when they first meet, and her unapologetic admission indicates that she refuses to mask who she is for the sake of building a new social connection. Ironically, however, he is instantly attracted to her serious demeanor and blunt communication style. Her conviction that she lacks a sense of humor also proves ironic when she delivers jokes in a dry, sarcastic fashion. However, it is also clear that she does not show this side of herself unless she trusts someone.

“‘Two seven one eight two eight.’

‘Your password is Euler’s number?’

They exchanged a surprised, plane-tilting look. Like they were only just now meeting.

‘Are you a scientist?’ she asked, suddenly curious, and it was the first time he could perceive this kind of interest in him on her part.”

On the night that Rue and Eli meet, he gives her the password to his phone and lets her send information about him to Tisha, and Rue is surprised to realize that Eli’s understanding of scientific and mathematical constants just might mirror her own. Eli’s password is Euler’s number, a very specific mathematical constant, similar to pi. This is Rue’s first indication that Eli has a science background, and it is clear that his intellectual capabilities add to his romantic appeal in her eyes.

“When my sister was born, my parents kept saying how perfect she was, and I was so resentful, I refused to even look at her for weeks.”

After Vincent accosts Rue in the parking lot of the hotel where she and Eli first met, Rue admits that she sometimes thinks her life would be easier if her brother would just disappear. Because she seems ashamed of this admission, Eli reciprocates by telling her something that he feels guilty about. This is the first time Rue and Eli exchange stories that they view as shameful, and this confessional dynamic becomes a ritual that enhances their intimacy as the novel progresses.

“Her key chains jangled in her palm. A sparkly ice skate shoe, one of those flashlight and pen combinations, a supermarket loyalty card with H-E-B printed on the back. He had the very same one.”

When Eli walks Rue to her apartment, he still doesn’t know her name, so he examines her keychain to get more clues about her. However, Hazelwood also uses the scene to insert a key detail: the ice skate. This is the first indication that Rue is an ice skater like Eli, but the detail is soon lost in the more immediate aspects of the scene, and the mutual connection of the ice rink will not appear until much later in the narrative.

“So she’d rented lab space at a nearby facility. She’d done her own work. She’d filed her own patent, and founded her own company.”

Rue describes her perception of Florence to explain why she is so protective of her mentor. From Rue’s perspective, Florence is a strong and independent woman who has been forced to fight to protect her patent and her autonomy as a scientist. Rue is proud of Florence and wants to emulate her, but the undiluted admiration that she holds for her mentor also indicates that she has put Florence on a pedestal and has failed to realize that she has a range of serious flaws and is less than ethical in her business dealings.

“I still remembered the day in middle school when the realization dawned on me: If people perceived me as aloof and detached, then they would want to keep their distance. And if they kept their distance, then they wouldn’t notice how nervous and blundering and inadequate I was.”

Rue has internalized the idea that she is socially inadequate and awkward, and in her adult life, she uses this awkwardness as a shield to protect herself from potential pain and unnecessary interactions. Her cold and detached demeanor is therefore carefully calculated to reject opportunities for human connection. These maladaptive coping strategies indicate that Rue infrequently allows herself to be vulnerable with anyone.

“‘Did he say anything about me?’ Florence asked, alarmed.

‘Who?’ I cocked my head. ‘Vince?’

‘No, Eli. Did he say anything about Kline?’

‘No. He…I don’t think he knew I worked here.’ Or did he?”

The urgency of Florence’s tone in this passage is a subtle manifestation of foreshadowing indicating that all is not well in her world, for she takes an intense interest in questioning Rue in this scene. Although the author has not yet fully revealed Florence’s true past with Eli, Hark, and Minami, her behavior during this conversation is an early indication that she is less than sanguine about Harkness’s presence at Kline. The conversation also indicates that she has a reason to be concerned about what Eli might reveal.

“My first impression of him was probably highly similar to others’ first impressions of me–with the caveat that serious, unsmiling men tended to be considered consummate professionals, while serious, unsmiling women were often written off as haughty shrews.”

When Rue first meets Sul, she notices that he is serious and quiet, just like her, but she also realizes that he probably does not receive the criticism that she does for her demeanor. This passage reflects the Challenges for Women in STEM Careers, for Hazelwood illustrates one example of the double standard that exists for men and women’s behavior in social and professional contexts. Rue resents the fact that her personality would not make others as uncomfortable if she were a man.

“He smiled. That knockout, nice-guy, grown-up-surrounded-by-love-and-confidence-and-the-certainty-of-his-worth smile.”

In this passage, Rue’s contemplations reveal her issues with Overcoming Childhood Trauma, for she makes unfounded assumptions about the nature of Eli’s childhood and assumes that his was far more stable and loving than her own. At this point, Hazelwood has already revealed aspects of Rue’s difficult childhood experiences, but Eli’s background is still unrevealed.

“But I wasn’t normal, not when it came to food: eating quickly, eating standing up, eating on the go, it all triggered some of my most cavernous anxieties. And I would have taken the hunger over those any day.

To eat I needed time and quiet. I needed to stare at my meal and know, feel, that more food would be waiting for me after the bite I’d just swallowed was gone. My issues were deep-rooted, multilayered, and impossible to explain to someone who hadn’t grown up hiding expired Twinkies in secret spots, who hadn’t discovered fresh produce only well into her teens, who hadn’t fought with a sibling over the last stale cracker.”

This first-person description adds a deeper level of emotional anguish to Rue’s ongoing issues with food scarcity and disordered eating. The barrage of vivid details also creates a more immediate sense of the environment she endured as a child, and in this light, her difficulties as an adult take on a new level of significance. Because Rue is narrating her chapters in first person, Hazelwood provides this detail to her readers before Eli finds out about it.

“Florence was a fantastic leader. Maybe it was perverse of me, but I wanted Eli to know how much Kline had accomplished. Whatever Harkness was trying to achieve may have been legal, but it wasn’t moral, and I wanted him to feel like a villain for it.

But he didn’t seem upset, only happy to listen and ask questions. Above all, he seemed fully in his element. Like a lab was where he belonged.”

In this passage, Rue’s tone of hero-worship emphasizes her unswerving loyalty to Florence and explains her compulsion to frame Eli as the villain in the Harkness-Kline conflict. Given the inherent bias of her perspective, she is taken aback when his behavior reflects his genuine authenticity and competence, for he enjoys learning about Rue’s research and is content in the setting of the lab.

“‘It’s not a good idea.’

‘Is it not?’

‘You’re with Harkness. I’m with Kline.’”

Rue still resists Eli’s suggestion that they continue to see each other in a romantic capacity even though Harkness has acquired Kline’s loan. When Rue tells him that they shouldn’t, Hazelwood uses the scene to establish the romance trope of “forbidden love.” The characters’ problematic positions on opposite sides of a work conflict create many problems that inhibit their mutual desire to be together, and this becomes a primary conflict in the novel that replaces the formerly antagonistic vibe between the two.

“I simply think that anyone who feels free to take what’s others’ without consent in one context might just be willing to do the same in another.”

Florence makes this observation to Rue and warns her to be careful around Eli. Her words frame Eli as someone willing to take another person’s work without consent, but as subsequent chapters of the novel will reveal, Florence’s statement carries a heavy irony because she is essentially describing herself.

“Then again, I was always a little too protective when it came to my friends, maybe because I had so few of them.”

This sentence exhibits Rue’s propensity to remain fiercely loyal to the people she considers to be her friends. Because she could never rely on her parents and does not make friends easily, the few friends she has are extremely important to her. Eli says later that he deeply values her loyalty and integrity, even if she is sometimes loyal to the wrong people.

“‘When I was eleven, I stole thirty-four dollars and fifty cents from a drawer in my best friend’s house.’ I forced myself to hold Eli’s gaze through the shame of it, just like he’d held mine. ‘They never locked anything when I was around, because they trusted me. They treated me as their own. And I stole from them.’

He nodded, and I nodded, a tacit agreement that we were both terrible people. Telling terrible stories. We’d let our masks slip enough times that they now lay shattered on the floor, but it was okay.

We were okay.”

When Eli and Rue are alone on the balcony at Eric Sommers’s retirement party, Rue tells this story to Eli and watches him closely for signs of judgment. However, when she realizes that he does not condemn her for the actions of her past, she understands that he will not abandon her. This show of trust encourages her to agree to meet him at the hotel again. Thus, The Importance of Loyalty in Friendship becomes a central aspect of their growing connection.

“He huffed out a silent laugh. ‘Has this happened to you before?’

I shook my head in a first, instinctive reply, then forced myself to slow down and think about it. I’d been attracted to men before, but attraction had seemed like a conscious choice on my part, a feeling to chase and feed. Generic. The product of focus and cultivation, more than this current that seemed to rejoice in sweeping me under. ‘Not like this. You?’

‘Me, neither.’ […] ‘You know what’s funny? A while ago I almost got married.’”

At the retirement party, Eli and Rue admit to each other that they have never felt this kind of attraction with anyone else; Eli never even felt it with the woman to whom he was engaged. They both realize that their relationship is unique, and the freedom and encouragement that they gain from this understanding galvanizes their growing relationship.

“Listen, Rue, it might not be my place, but I think fair warnings are everybody’s right, and—”

This statement marks the beginning of Minami’s attempt to talk about her research. However, Rue declines, telling Minami that she is close to Florence and does not want to betray her. In this quote, Minami is about to warn Rue about something, but she is interrupted and doesn’t get a chance. Later, when the author reveals more about Florence’s past wrongs, it becomes clear that Minami is trying to warn Rue against trusting Florence with her own intellectual property.

“He wondered what Florence had been telling her employees. Whether Tisha would have still been so sure of Florence’s victory if she knew why Eli was here and what he’d been doing for the past few hours.”

Eli encounters a drunk Rue after normal business hours at the Kline offices. While Rue is using the bathroom, Tisha defends Florence to Eli and tells him that Florence will win the battle between Harkness and Kline. In this moment, Eli realizes that Florence must be lying to her employees about her own past in order to inspire such devoted loyalty.

“‘When I was a teenager, he’d bring food to the rink, just for me. Sandwiches, veggies, and hummus. Healthy snacks with protein.’ She stopped unloading the cart, eyes unfocused in the middle distance. ‘I never even said I was hungry.’

He observed her, recalling the slight frame of teenage Rue. Wasn’t her project on the shelf life extension of produce?

‘And were you hungry?’”

When Rue and Eli encounter each other at the ice rink for the first time, they admit how important skating and Dave and Alec’s care and guidance were to them both during their respective childhoods. Rue shares this confession and gives Eli a glimpse into her past and her struggles with Overcoming Childhood Trauma, but she doesn’t answer his final question; he is therefore meant to infer that she was hungry as a child and that this traumatic experience inspires her current work.

“He made it sound simple. But skating could be so…intimate. […] And if Eli were to go beyond sex, then my betrayal of Florence would run too deep for comfort. There had to be some limits. I had to set some limits.”

Eli suggests that he and Rue skate together, but Rue is reluctant because she is not ready to show vulnerability beyond the realm of their physical attraction to one another. For her, sex is one of the few social activities that she feels confident performing, but skating and other interpersonal interactions feel too intimate and difficult for her to manage. Additionally, skating with Eli would feel like a date, and if she does anything other than have sex with him, she will feel even guiltier about betraying Florence.

“In fact, the entire room was lush, every surface covered in green. Cacti, flowers, a few ornamental pots. But Rue’s favorite cultivation method was clearly hydroponics. There were towers, and shelves, and a couple of kits she may have built on her own. Most of what she grew was produce: Eli spotted basil, tomatoes, mini cucumbers, peppers, lettuce, and that was just at first glance. Her house was a beautiful, honest-to-god garden.”

The first time that Eli enters Rue’s apartment, he is amazed by all of her plants. Because her plant collection produces a variety of edible foods, the lush tableau of her apartment serves as yet another indication that she has a fraught relationship with food and is very conscious of different ways to stave off food scarcity.

“I’d learned that food was more than just calories and nutrition. Food was what brought the Fuli family together every night, what the parents of figure skaters made for their kids after a hard practice, what people talked about when they came back from weekends spent in quaint coastal bed-and-breakfasts. Food was collagen, the connective tissue of our society, and if I hadn’t grown up with enough of it, well. Clearly, it had to mean that I wasn’t tethered enough to anyone, and never could be.”

This quote demonstrates the fact that Rue views food as a symbol beyond mere nutrition. It is an important aspect of cultural and familial tradition, neither of which she had as a child. Not only does she feel that she missed the benefit of having reliable and healthy food, but she also feels the lack of the social and emotional connection that home-cooked meals offer. This issue contributes to her feelings of unworthiness and to her conviction that her past experiences will doom her to future loneliness.

“Being able to keep Vince fed, that had been happiness. And when I couldn’t, that’s when I’d begun to resent him, and the unfairness of what was being asked of me.”

Rue explains to Eli how deep the feelings of resentment for her brother run because of how they grew up. When Vince acts out in anger, she doesn't call the police or get a restraining order against him because she feels guilty for failing him and not being able to take care of him.