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“No, wait. Let me guess.” She puts her fingers to her temples. “Maria, you’ve sent out fifty résumés. You have three contingency plans and a spreadsheet. Gabe…” She shakes her head at him. “Ha.”
Gabe mock-frowns as he adds Parmesan from a shaker to his pasta. “That’s not fair. I’m not disorganized. The academic job market just sucks.”
Nana ignores this. “That birth order stuff skipped you two.”
“Hey!” My brother points a finger at her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m the perfect older child. I have a PhD in physics from Harvard. And—”
“Did you buy your plane tickets to Portland yet?” I ask sweetly.
Gabe blows out a breath. “Whatever.”
I turn to my grandmother. “He has an interview there in a month.”
“They just called me a week ago! I have plenty of time to get tickets.”
“Did you turn in your reimbursements from North Dakota yet? Because you told me—”
Gabe picks up his glass of wine and moves his chair six inches away from me. “I don’t know why I even come, when the two of you just make fun of me.”
“Free spaghetti,” I deadpan.
“Oh. Right.” Our eyes meet; there’s a glint of humor in his.
Gabe and I argue. Especially when we are around family. I don’t know why we do it; there’s just something about being around each other that makes us both revert to childhood. The first time Jutta, his fiancée, observed it, she nearly died of embarrassment. We had to stop mid-argument and explain to her that we weren’t serious, and the goal was to make the other person laugh.
“So what are your three options, Maria?”
“It’s not really three. The company I interned at last summer wants to hire me full-time.”
They were offering something that would look like a decent salary if they weren’t based in San Francisco. On the other hand, they had decent healthcare benefits. The job is, to put it bluntly, incredibly boring. But…health insurance.
“That’s really the only one I’ve put on my spreadsheet so far. I’ve applied to a handful of consulting firms—”
My brother guffaws. “Actuarial consultants? Who needs an actuarial consultant? That’s not a real thing.”
I fold my arms and glare at him. “Okay, dude who worked at the literal Hadron collider on a project designed to figure out if the universe is covered by an indetectable field. You would be the expert on things that are not real.”
“It’s not indetectable, it’s—”
“Oh, excuse me. You might be able to prove it exists if you can find your God particle. I stand corrected.”
“Don’t call it that.” But he snorts, on the verge of cracking up.
I shrug. “Have it your way. Actuarial consultants don’t exist. I mean, they just have webpages and business cards.”
Nana shakes her head in mock dismay. “Children, children. Behave yourselves.”
Gabe points at me. “She started it!”
“Did not!”
Nana glares at us. “Children who argue about Higgs bosons over dinner don’t get dessert.”
“Who says?” Gabe turns to her.
“Sorry, kids. It’s the law. San Francisco municipal code section 415.1. If I saw the restaurant violating it, I’d have to shut them down, and it’s my favorite restaurant.”
Gabe and I meet each others’ eyes across the table, and we both crack up.
She raises her arms in victory. “I win!”
“Fine,” I grumble. “Be that way.”
“And Maria was telling us about her possibilities,” Nana says. “What’s number three?”
“Number three…” Number three is not even an offer. It’s a non-possibility.
But it arrived in my email—MCL’s email, that is—two days ago. It was from a microchip company that sourced supplies globally. They’d read my post about the collapse of western civilization after the great helium shortage of 2028. I had, apparently, correctly predicted some of their supply chain vulnerabilities and freaked out their upper management. Why their upper management was not freaked before, I do not know. All of the information I used was public domain.
Still, they wanted to hire me to do a risk assessment at an hourly rate that staggered me. Two weeks of work would have paid off my student loans.
But I’ve seen the arguments about who I am online. There are several people who are convinced I’m a professor at some university. They think I have credentials. I can’t imagine how they’d react to me in person.
Hi. I’m still an undergrad.
Yeah. That would go over really well.
I’d declined; they had written back and told me the offer was open indefinitely.
I can daydream as much as the next person. A part of me loves the idea of doing worldwide risk consultations and getting paid for it.
It’s just a part of me. I learned long ago to avoid the mountaintops of life. Sure, it’s fun to get to the top. But storms come and lightning strikes, and it’s no fun being exposed on top of the world in those moments. Daydreams are great, but an established salary and health benefits have to come first, thank you.
So I just smile. “Number three is nonexistent. The job market sucks everywhere. And Gabe? I’m sorry I made fun of your God particle. I’m sure you won’t destroy the universe.”
“Thanks.”
“Yet,” I add, and he glares at me.
* * *
“We die,” Tina says, “we live to fight another day.”
We’re sitting at the granite island in the kitchen, sharing barbecue pork buns and talking shit about... Well, technically, we are talking shit about her parents.
“It won’t be that bad.” I promise her. “I mean, I know your mom is indiscreet, but...”
She shakes her head. “Oh my god, Maria. She’s terrible. It’s not that she’s indiscreet. She’s seriously collecting articles on Cyclone’s business in China and highlighting portions. She has the scrapbook of shit-talking that she is saving for Adam Reynolds. She prints things off the internet. ‘Just in case I forget.’”
“It’ll work out,” I promise. I don’t know that this is true, but Blake is pretty easygoing, and even though his dad is an asshole, it’s worked so far.
My phone dings. I look down at the notification.
In conclusion, A. has written, I am a horrible fraud, so give me more grant money.
It’s been a few
weeks since I argued him out of his office. We’ve fallen back into our friendship after he snapped at me, but it feels like there’s an edge to it. Still, I find myself smiling in spite of myself. I tap out a quick response: Yay, you finished!
I set the phone down and look up at Tina, who is watching me with one raised eyebrow.
“Sorry,” I say. “But look—as long as your parents don’t meet, you’re going to be dreading worst-case scenarios, and from experience, that’s—”
My phone dings again, and I look down.
I have a bad case of impostor syndrome, A. writes. Grant writing makes it worse. It’s always YES, MY RESEARCH WILL CURE CANCER. In reality, ha.
I look up. Tina is eyeing me. She points at my phone. “Do you need to get that?”
“No,” I say guiltily. “No. I’m listening. I swear.” I try to remember what I was saying. Something something something her parents? Dang it.
“You’re smiling,” she says.
I cross my legs primly on the barstool. “Listening and smiling are not incompatible.”
“Who are you texting?”
“I’m not texting anyone.” I look her in the eye and manage to keep the silly smile off my face. “I’m using a chat application that simulates texting so I don’t have to give out my number.”
“Oh, well.” She matches my tone. “That’s completely different.”
We look at each other, twin expressions of innocence on our faces. I break first, laughing, and she follows suit.
“Seriously, who are you texting?”
“Some physicist,” I toss off.
“Ooh, a physicist. Is he hot?”
I don’t look at her. “I wouldn’t know. We just talk science.”
“Does this physicist have a name?”
“I’m sure he does,” I say. “He just hasn’t told me yet. He comments on my blog sometimes.”
“So it’s no big deal.” Tina looks at me suspiciously.
“I met him through my blog. We mostly talk about plagues and nuclear explosions.”
I’m not lying, not really. I’m just not telling her the complete truth.
She indicates my phone. “Are you going to answer?”
