‘We should get the old crew down here, anyone who’s able to come on short notice: Rafa, Zach, Sonya. And you guys can get in touch with her college friends, maybe? Her roommates?’
Harper nodded. ‘Sure.’
‘Should we have it here?’ Noah asked. ‘Or back in DC?’
‘My idea was to do it at Susan’s house. I have a list of projects that need to get done. I don’t want Briar to have to do all of them in the fall, when she’ll have so many other things to catch up on. So we could fix it up as a surprise.’
‘Iampretty handy,’ Noah said.
Alice nodded. ‘We can enlist Freddie, Sierra and Cook too. The kids are so much better behaved than the first session, we can do with less coverage. I think they could smell our fear.’
‘Like sharks,’ Noah agreed.
Harper looked up at him. ‘That’s blood, not fear, babe.’
‘Thanks for taking my plan in stride.’
‘Oh, there was a choice?’ Harper deadpanned. Noah nudged her with his elbow. ‘Kidding!’
‘If this is about apologizing,’ Noah said, gesturing toward where Briar was trying not to be obvious about observing them, ‘I don’t think you need to anymore. I feel confident that you’re forgiven.’
‘It’s time!’ Briar said cheerily, intercepting Alice as she was making her way back to their cabin after a clandestine party planning meeting with Noah, Harper and Cook.
‘Huh?’ Alice said, feeling caught out. ‘I was just… walking!’
‘Yes, I can see that,’ Briar said. ‘Are you ready to prep?’
‘Oh. The interview.’ Briar had been insisting they make time for it for the past week, but Alice had been procrastinating. ‘Maybe tomorrow?’
Briar linked her arm with Alice’s, pulling her toward the mess hall. ‘First, fuel.’
Once they had raided the kitchen, Briar laid out a series of index cards on one of the mess hall tables. Alice stared at her in wonder.
‘I still do this when I prep for job interviews,’ Briar explained. ‘The Alice Hughes Method, patent pending.’ Alice felt her cheeks go pink. ‘Now, write out your responses to each question while I make popcorn.’
Briar disappeared and Alice got to work writing responses.
‘Ready?’ Briar asked, returning. She collected the cards, shuffling them and then sitting across from Alice. ‘Tell me about yourself.’
Alice cleared her throat. ‘I’m entering my final year of a DPhil in mycology at Oxford University. I’ve been Dr. Jeremy Beecham’s research assistant for the past three years. Prior to Oxford, I graduated with a degree in biology with first-class honors from St. Andrews.’ It was an easy recitation of her resume, something Alice had done thousands of times at networking events.
Briar cocked her head to the side. ‘Why mushrooms?’
Alice blinked. ‘That wasn’t on any of the cards.’
‘Gotta be able to think on your feet,’ Briar chided.
‘I spent a lot of time in the woods as a child,’ Alice said wryly, since explaining this to Briar felt like the most pointless exercise in the world. ‘I grew attached to the forest floor, playing in the dirt.’ Getting dirty had been a novel experience for Alice. So much of her life was pristine: the sterile house she shared with her mother, the platinum blonde hair she meticulously maintained and the grades she received. Having one sliver of mess in her life was her only rebellion. ‘I came across a beautiful mushroom one day, and I showed it to my camp counselor. She opened a new world to me, the world of decomposers. I was fascinated with the way that something could become nothing, all because of this small and seemingly innocuous thing.’
‘What’s camp?’ Briar joked.
‘Fair point,’ she said. ‘I’ll just say it was for school or something. Tell him I found a picture of a mushroom in a book and was taken by it and asked my teacher what it was.’
The thought of encountering a mushroom for the first time in a classroom felt wrong, a betrayal of the girl who had sat in the dirt studying them her whole childhood, but she pushed that aside.
Briar nodded, flipping to the next card. ‘Why do you want this job?’
Alice’s mind went completely blank, forgetting everything she’d written down. The only thing she could think of was how it would feel to tell her parents about it. Her mom would congratulate her on a job well done, and her dad would return her email with encouragement.
