This Is My Brain on Blank

JOCELYN

The first time I step onto the University of Utica grounds, I’m pleasantly underwhelmed. It’s an urban campus, so it doesn’t have a lush, manicured college green. It’s basically a bunch of loosely affiliated parking lots and high rises. It looks almost unassuming, I think.

My dad drops me off and I find my way into one of the taller buildings. My borrowed shoes are the right size, but slightly too wide, so I have to scrunch my toes a little to keep them from slipping when I walk. A receptionist gives me a name tag with a UU lanyard and points me to some couches in the atrium, where two pasty-white guys and one slightly darker-skinned girl sit.

The other three are ignoring one another, which is fine by me. I open the leather folio that Will lent me and skim through the key talking points Grace had me write down.

“Once they start asking questions, remember to make like a politician on Fox News, and be ready to pivot, pivot, pivot!” Grace told me.

“Won’t they be mad if I don’t actually stay on topic, though?”

“Nah, they don’t really have an agenda other than wanting to know more about you. So it’s okay for you to be proactive and dictate what they discover.”

She gave me a bunch of pivot phrases, like: “That reminds me of _____” or “My personal experience of _____ led me to _____” or “It’s important for me to always remember _____.”

I whisper the words under my breath and try not to feel like a tool.

Eventually the other girl tries to start a conversation with me. “Excuse me,” she asks, “are you here to interview for the JBP, too?”

She’s wearing an adorable navy skirt suit that makes me feel like a classless ogre, even in Grace’s jacket, and her dark brown hair is up in a high ponytail that’s so perky I can’t help but be irked by it.

“Yeah,” I say cautiously, not able to figure out if she’s being genuinely friendly or just sizing up the competition.

“Oh, cool, me too. I’m Laura. This is such an amazing program. My older sister did it a few years ago. She’s at Syracuse now, and this summer she got an internship at Bain. Can you believe it?”

I smile as appreciatively as I can, as if I could tell Bain from Adam. “That’s great. She must be a rock star.”

“What school are you from? Are you going to be a junior or a senior?” she asks, her eyes flicking over my ensemble. Sizing me up, then.

“I’m from Perry High, just about to start junior year. How about you?” I ask.

“St. Agnes. And I’m going to be a junior, too!”

Will’s school, I realize with a jolt. They must know each other—I remember Will saying once that St. Agnes is small, only about one hundred kids in each grade, so it’s like a family. “A really incestuous family,” he said once. “I think the coeditor of our paper has dated literally every girl in the school at some point. Some of them twice.” When I asked Will how many he had dated, he’d gotten squirrely and said that he’d mostly had crushes. Now, of course, I can’t help but wonder if Laura was one of them.

She’s got that look of someone crushable, wearing just enough eyeliner to make her hazel eyes pop while still looking professional and expertly applied lip gloss that make me just want to stare at her mouth when she talks. And she’s likable, too?

Thankfully, before I can obsess for too long, a middle-aged woman with a clipboard walks over and leads us to a conference room. The two guys, Brad and Jonathan, jump up first. Laura follows, and I trail behind as the caboose. It suits me just fine to hang back. That way I can see the subtle wave Jonathan throws to one of the two white guys sitting at the head of the table when we enter, and catch the way Brad chooses a seat directly across from Laura and stares a little too long at where her name tag hangs at chest level.

Each of our seats has a glossy JBP brochure, a UU water bottle, and a UU pen laid out like a table setting. The older of the two men introduces himself as Dr. Harris and goes through a PowerPoint about the program.

It is, I realize, a recruitment pitch for the three of us who don’t get the scholarship, to entice us to enroll in the program anyway. Dr. Harris uses the phrase “tremendous opportunity” at least four times in his presentation, clearly going for the hard sell. At the end of his PowerPoint is a scrolling list of previous JBP students along with their colleges and current jobs; when I glance over at the others, they’re transfixed. Jonathan is slack jawed and actively mouth breathing, and Brad is leaning forward, lips moving as he silently mouths out the names of Ivy League schools like he’s reading a holy text. Even Laura is smiling and nodding.

Me? I’ve turned to the last page of the brochure, to the “tuition and fees” section, where it shows that I, too, can have the privilege of this “tremendous opportunity” for the low, low fee of $7,500. There are testaments from former graduates talking about “recognizing growth potential” and from parents gushing about how it was a “priceless experience.”

“Priceless” is one of those words that I’ve just never understood. It took me years to figure out that some people use it as a passive-aggressive faux-pliment (“Oh, yes, he’s just priceless”). But even when people use it as the Oxford English Dictionary intended, it doesn’t make any sense—at least it doesn’t to me, because in my world, growing up, everything had a price. Usually one that my family couldn’t pay.

So that’s the shitty position I’m in: I have to gear up enough enthusiasm for JBP to rock my interview and convince them that I am the person who deserves the scholarship the most, but also be ready to walk away if I don’t get funding.

They wrap up the presentation and pass out our itineraries—we’re each going to interview with both Dr. Harris and his colleague Professor Wisneski. As we gather our things I feel a little hollow tickle in the back of my throat and swallow. Silently I curse Will for bringing me an omelet for breakfast. He said that his sister told him I should eat a full breakfast, so I don’t get a sugar low during the interview, but I’m not used to having such a heavy meal first thing in the morning. My stomach feels like it’s trying to digest a baby hippopotamus.

I’ve already broken into a light sweat by the time I walk into Professor Wisneski’s office, which throws me into a panic, because one of the components of the perfect handshake is that your hand isn’t too clammy. I don’t have a purse, so nope, no tissues. I have to frantically rub my right hand along my pant leg and hope that the professor doesn’t notice.

“I’m so honored to be here, Professor Wisneski,” I say as I sit down. That’s one of the openings that Grace suggested, because even though it’s kind of obsequious (I mean, seriously, an honor?) it reminds the interviewer that they’ve selected you for a reason and, well, suggests that you deserved it.

I can tell from his slight smile that the professor eats it up. “No, thank you for coming, Ms. Wu. I must say, your personal statement really stood out among the others’—not many of our applicants have lived and breathed the business world like you.”

“Um, thank you for saying that,” I say, heart pounding, because this isn’t how it was supposed to go. I was supposed to come in, fists raised, full of passion, ready to explain to them how my life experience makes me the most qualified person ever for the JBP. To have him spit out my party line is both validating and completely deflating. It’s like I walked into a confrontation wearing full body armor only to realize that it was actually a water balloon fight, and what I really needed was a poncho.

There’s an awkward pause where I probably look like a complete Looney Tune as I rack my brains for a new game plan. The exact moment Professor Wisneski opens his mouth to say something, I blurt out, “I always try to remember that business is really all about relations.”

It takes about two seconds of dead silence for me to realize that that didn’t come out right.

The twitch of Professor Wisneski’s lips clues me in, too.

My face is on fire as I stutter out a correction. “Relationships, I mean. I meant relationships, not nepotism, or that type of relations—like Bill Clinton.” I manage, barely, to stop myself from saying “the sexual kind” during the most important interview of my life, but the damage is done. I’m such a disaster I couldn’t draw a tic-tac-toe board, let alone a game plan.

Fuck my life.

Professor Wisneski puts his hands over his mouth to cover a cough that I’m 99 percent sure is just a disguised chuckle. I’m so flustered that I can’t even look at him, so I open my folio with numb hands to furiously study my page of notes in a desperate attempt to avoid death by mortification.

Must. Get. Shit. Together.

Except, before I can think of some line of conversation to save the interview, Professor Wisneski pretends to leaf through my file and goes on as if nothing happened.

“Ms. Wu, you say in your personal statement that your family restaurant recently made moves to expand. Would you care to talk about that?”

It’s the interviewing equivalent of an underhand slow-pitch, and his kindness feels like a failure. “Sure,” I say, in a voice that sounds defeated even to myself. I shift around in my seat in an attempt to redistribute blood that’s decided to spend an extended vacation in my hands, feet, and rear end (basically every organ in my body besides my brain).

It’s a good thing I practiced. The gears in my head creak a bit, but eventually they get turning. “Well, to give you a bit of background, the restaurant my family owns was originally built in the eighties, and we inherited an infrastructure that was a bit dated.…”

I limp through the rest of the interview. The professor must take pity on me—he asks me two more questions, one about my “management style” and one about what I hope to get from the program. I dutifully rattle off my talking points.

There’s a point where it seems like the professor is looking at the grandfather clock on his wall every fifteen seconds. Finally, he closes his right hand into a fist and knocks twice on his desk. “Well, it looks like our time is up. It was truly a pleasure speaking with you today, Ms. Wu.”

“Thanks, Professor.” I reach out to shake his outstretched hand and try to approximate a smile. It’s only polite, since it’s probably the last time I’ll see him.

When I walk out of the interview room, clipboard lady shepherds me back to the boardroom, where she trades me for Laura, telling me that Dr. Harris should be ready for me in half an hour. I excuse myself to the bathroom, lock myself in a stall, and proceed to sit on a toilet seat, head in my hands. I breathe and let myself be hollow.

There’s something strangely comforting about losing hope. Or maybe comfort isn’t the right word—it’s more like relief. Because the hope that I’ve been holding on to for the past two weeks was just plain stressful. Hope comes with aspirations and the need to expend energy. Hope comes with expectations that weigh down your every thought and action. Hope comes with the never-ending fear of disappointment.

Well.

I don’t know how long I’ve been here when the door opens and someone comes in. I peer under the stall and see sensible shoes and ankles like dumpling dough. Not Laura, then. I check my cell phone and am surprised to find that it’s only been twenty minutes.

For a brief moment I run through possible excuses to bail on the second interview: Cramps? A migraine? Could I pull off a convincing faint? There’s nothing sharp enough in the bathroom for me to produce enough blood to require an ambulance.

I realize after a minute that I don’t have the energy or presence of mind to come up with an escape plan. So, I do what I’ve been doing my entire life. I pull on my big girl panties and soldier on. If nothing else, I know how to follow a script.

Dr. Harris’s interview passes in a blur. I think I’m polite. I think I avoid any more major gaffes. I think I manage to trot out one or two ungraceful pivots so I can parrot out some of the stock answers Grace and I came up with.

After I pick up my stuff and check out with clipboard woman, I go out to meet my dad, who’s waiting at the curb. I shrug when he asks me how it went. Then, once we get home, I claim a headache, go to my room, and lie down in my bed, where I don’t have to think at all.