“They said they had to advertise all the positions online this year, so they’re using some big recruiter to screen all the candidates. Theyknowme, but they want me to go through the portal and upload a resume and send a cover letter and...”
She put her head back down. She’d rather climb a sheer cliff face carrying fifty pounds of gear.
“I think that’s what most big employers do now, yeah,” Teagan said.
“Well, it fucking sucks,” Darcy growled. “I parked snowmobiles all last winter. There’s no reason to assume that there’s some other person out there who they’d rather hire this year because they parked snowmobiles at Yale or some shit.”
Teagan didn’t deserve that dig, but Darcy had a wild creature’s instinctive fear of showing vulnerability, and the idea of Teagan watching her land flat on her ass had her lashing out.
“If I had a snowmobile that needed parking, I’d definitely hire you over someone like me,” Teagan replied, and Darcy curled her lip in anger that he wouldn’t even get into a proper fight with her about it, when she longed to fight withsomeoneabout this.
Darcy didn’t know how long to count to stop being angry that she couldn’t get her last job back. If she had to sculpt flowers out of root vegetables this winter in Bozeman with Kristin because she didn’t have a car and she couldn’t even manage to apply for a hospitality gig in Yellowstone, she wasn’t sure she’d manage to stop being angry until spring.
She started counting anyway, and she’d gotten to forty-six before Teagan cleared his throat and began to read aloud, “Park Ranger. GS 7 scale. Yellowstone. Develops and presents a variety of natural history programs including geyser walks, ecology walks, lectures, campfire programs—”
Darcy turned her head over to look at him. He was reading off her phone. “Are you on the National Park Service page?” she asked.
“Yeah. This position opened last week. Is this the one you wanted?”
“No. I was applying with a contractor. Those Park Service jobs all want a four-year degree.”
Teagan blinked as though it had never occurred to him that she might not have finished college or potentially not gone to college at all.
“You don’t have one?”
“Nope. Hence the lawn mowing. And the generator repair. And the schlepping and hauling and—”
“But why don’t you have one?”
Darcy huffed in pained annoyance. “Maybe I’m just not that smart.” That’s what she worried sometimes, because there was no good reason why she couldn’t pass Ecological Genetics or navigate a hiring portal or figure out when job boards opened, except that she just couldn’t, no matter how hard she tried.
Teagan shook his head in embarrassment. “That’s obviously not it. I thought the Navy paid for college, I meant.”
“It does. But I’ve been enrolled at Oregon State since I was eighteen. I still need twenty-eight more credits to graduate.”
Teagan looked back down at the phone in consternation, scrolling more. “Well, there are some jobs here that say you can substitute experience—”
Darcy interrupted him. “The Park Service won’t hire me to do anything good, whatever the listing says. I tried two years ago.”
The jut of Teagan’s jaw said he didn’t believe her. He kept scrolling. She leaned across the table and tugged at a lock ofgolden hair that had fallen over his forehead to get his attention and change the subject from her recurring life failures. He’d looked stressed.
“Hey. Who were you talking to on the phone? Better not have been your horse tranquilizer guy.”
Teagan’s eyebrows quirked ironically. “IT. And they can’t even get me access to my email, much less fun drugs. Rose, my CIO, got all my messages forwarded to her account, and she told IT not to give them back to me.”
“Wow, someone’s leading a coup against you?” Darcy asked, startled at the idea, even though she was vaguely aware that people outside of her own industry could suck too.
“Maybe. Rose is the only one who knows where I am. The board chair left me a bunch of voice messages asking what the hell I’m doing out of the office this long. I guess the official word is that I’m out sick.”
“You are out sick,” Darcy said, taking the last of his fries. If he had sick leave stored up, he ought to use it for this.
Teagan once again refused to argue his contrary opinion, looking down at the phone screen instead and changing the subject back to Darcy’s persistent failures.
“I bet I can find a job you’re qualified for. Do you want me to edit your resume? I can rewrite it so it looks like you’re the perfect candidate. I’ll find the buzzwords in the post and copy them into the skills field. That’s all the screening software checks for.”
“It’s not a person who looks at it?”
“No, not on the first screening, usually,” he said, face nonjudgmental.
