Love on the Brain

Levi Ward is Bee’s love interest in the story. He is an engineer who studied with Bee at grad school and was in the fifth year of his PhD while she was in her first. It was widely assumed that Levi despised Bee and found her unattractive although this is later revealed to be an untruth propagated by Tim, Bee’s ex-fiancé. Levi is the co-lead on BLINK alongside Bee. Like her, he also anonymously runs a popular account on Academic Twitter, @Schmacademics, through which he and Bee (as “Marie”) regularly interact; however, they remain unaware of each other’s true identities until the very end.

A successful and well-respected engineer, Levi is still essentially a somewhat shy, sensitive man. He feels things intensely but is not always able to communicate these feelings adequately. Levi attributes this to his upbringing, having grown up in a hostile family environment that was neglectful of his feelings and did not allow him space to express himself. A glimpse of this is seen at the family dinner Bee and Levi attend together, which is an awkward and stilted affair. Levi further explains his family’s coldness towards him as a result of his being the “family disappointment”—in a family of hunters who all have military careers, Levi is the only civilian, and a vegan, to boot. It is Levi’s uncommunicativeness, stemming from these experiences, that substantially contributes to Bee and everyone else’s misperception that he dislikes Bee.

Despite this, Levi shows the maturity and strength of character to evolve beyond his background. The fact that he goes to therapy displays a healthy self-awareness of the issues he needs to resolve, and the result is that he is far better at handling himself and his feelings, even in difficult situations. Throughout the family dinner, for instance, despite the constant disrespect shown to him, Levi never loses his cool or behaves defensively with them. In moments of conflict with Bee, such as when she is angry with him at having held a disciplinary meeting with his team despite her explicit request not to, he owns up to his mistake and apologizes sincerely. He also displays a fair amount of insight regarding what may be holding Bee back from investing in the relationship, divining the roots of her insecurity as stemming from the early loss of her parents and compounded by her sister’s absence. Levi is willing to give Bee the time and space to figure out what she needs even as he remains committed to her. Although Bee does not see all of these aspects of Levi’s personality at first, she responds to these traits in her interactions with Schmac throughout the novel, as Schmac has always been “Marie’s” ally and trusted confidant. Eventually, Levi is able to convince Bee of his commitment to her. After she discovers that he is Schmac and remembers the confessions of love Schmac had made about “the girl,” the couple gets their happy ending.

Rocío Cortoreal is Bee’s 22-year-old Italian research assistant, who accompanies her to Houston. Kaylee Jackson is the project manager at BLINK, the only other woman on the team besides Bee and Rocío. While Rocío professes to hate everything about Kaylee at first, the two eventually end up in a romantic relationship.

Rocío and Kaylee’s relationship mirrors Bee and Levi’s, and developments in their relationship serve to alert readers to the possible trajectory of Bee and Levi as a couple. Rocío and Kaylee have an “enemies-to-lovers” arc and a “stuck-together” scenario, in which the two women work together when Bee passes on tutoring Rocío for the GRE. Additionally, Rocío’s initial reaction to Kaylee becoming an intense attraction rather than misconstrued hatred is a clue as to how Levi’s initial response to Bee could have been misinterpreted. Rocío and Kaylee also collaborate creatively and intellectually in a similar manner as Bee and Levi do—the women join hands to work towards the #FairGraduateAdmissions cause on Twitter. The end of the book sees the women attending Johns Hopkins together for their respective PhD programs, still in a happy relationship, which parallels Levi and Bee staying on at NASA together and ending up happily married.