“Hmm. Good move,” he said. “Much better opportunities up here, I’m sure.”
“Yes,” Caroline said, back stiffening, even if that was true.
“What was your major?”
“General management.”
“That’s what I did,” the fund manager replied, meeting her eyes for the first time. “Not as much emphasis on the analytics, but you can pick up the numbers if you’re bright. Do you know what you’re doing yet for this summer?”
Was she supposed to know? Did everyone else already know? What was the point of this event, if not to find out? Was this her last chance to figure it out? Her head spun.
“No, I... thought I’d like to work for a company that makes something though,” she said stiffly.
Conway smiled like she’d made a joke.
“We have an internship program during the school year,” he said. “You should send me your résumé.”
The dean had been standing there listening to the conversation, and he leaned in, hand lightly resting on Caroline’s shoulder.
“If she has time,” he said. “I’m sure Caroline’s still got an extensive tennis schedule. Her team won Division Two her junior year.”
“Oh, you were a student athlete?” Conway asked, and it was as though Caroline could observe his attention shift away as he assigned her to a new category of athletic meatheads. His eyes dipped again to her oversize sweatshirt, and he smirked as he mentally connected dots that weren’t supposed to go together at Boston College.
“I mean, I’m not anymore,” Caroline said, jaw clenching. She shot a dirty look at the dean, who failed to notice.
Pretty good tennis playercould have been her career. She hadn’t been quite good (or rich) enough to go pro instead of going to college, but she’d been pretty good. Now that she had the money, she could have hired the best coaches in the world and hit the vanity tournaments to build up her ranking. Nobody would have been angry or disappointed with her if she’d done that, not even her dad, probably.
Would that have been a better choice than this? She felt like she’d been training for weeks, and she was still sucking wind.
“Excuse me,” she said, because Conway was already trying to make eye contact with one of the guys in sports jackets. She swiped a few brochures and business cards at random from a nearby table and left. She wasn’t going to make any headway dressed like she was still trying to win an NCAA tournament, not get a real job.
She stalked out into the quad, slumping on an empty park bench despite the chill of the day. Everything was glazed in a half-frozen slick of precipitation. Her heart was hammering.
She instinctively pulled her phone out and looked at it, wishing it was a day she could call Adrian. Any of her family members would seize the opportunity to tell her they’d told her so and she ought to come running back home to Templeton.
Her mind looped on the awfulness of being unprepared and outplayed. She was tempted to go have a little bit of a cry about it in the gym bathroom, which was never occupied in the middle of the day, but lifelong coping systems immediately rejected that plan. If she wasn’t moving, she was losing. She tilted her head and blinked rapidly, sniffling back the gunk in her nose. She had to do something. She wasn’t allowed to just sit and feel sorry for herself.
Well, she’d solve some small problems first.Dress pantswas small enough to fix that day. She could at least buy a lot more black clothes for various occasions while she figured everything else out.
She called Tom—she had his number from the night she joined the tech crew. Theoretically joined the tech crew, anyway. He answered immediately.
“Caroline! To what do I owe the pleasure?” he warbled at her. She had to clench her hands at the thought that he was the first person who’d seemed happy to hear from her in ages.
“Hey, do you want to go shopping? For clothes?” Caroline asked, swallowing past the lump in her throat.Get it together, Caroline. Wrap it up and get back on the court.
“Mmm, love to go shopping,” Tom said thoughtfully.There was activity in the background of the call, but she couldn’t tell where he was. “When do you want to go?”
“Right now?” she asked.
Tom laughed. “I can’t. I’m working today. Why don’t you ask Adrian?”
“Oh, he’s busy today,” she said, trying to sound unbothered about it. She already knew they were going back to the movies the next night to see some documentary about a dead poet, so she couldn’t call him about making plans. And he’d been pretty quiet and uncommunicative with her that week. All points to raise on the quarterly review.
“Is he?” Tom said skeptically. “Is he really? Is heever?”
“Yeah, he’s getting all his gallery applications in and finishing that battle painting,” Caroline said defensively.
Tom’s palm covered and uncovered the speaker on his phone as he spoke to someone else.
