“Yes.”
“Then yes. What do you think?”
“I think yes, even if they never touch the ground, because they’ll have salted the wind.”
Dustin gave her one of those looks that shot straight into her center. “Your wedding vows are going to be the most romantic things the world has ever heard,” he said.
“Probably.” Rae’s laugh got stuck in her chest as she was struck with an overwhelming ache that Dustin be the person beside her at the altar. She knew she wouldn’t be able to summon a single verse for someone else.
Dustin’s face clouded too. “We should get back,” he said, but led them farther away from the white tent, down one more grapevine aisle.
“What do you like to do in your free time?” Rae asked the college sophomore sitting across from her in the stark conference room. She’d forgotten how young nineteen looked.
Rae’s wedding bliss had worn off the moment she’d stepped foot in the office this morning. The least painful part of the day so far was this thirty-minute reprieve interviewing a candidate for a summer internship at the bank.
“I like to follow the stock market,” the boy answered. He tugged at his collar, like the tie was restricting him. Sweat stains splotched his gray suit.
“But outside of finance,” Rae said, scouring his impossibly perfect résumé for an “interests” section and finding nothing other thanYale Investment Club PresidentandIPO Organization Co-Founder. “What’re you passionate about?”
“Finance is my passion,” he said, giving a sharp nod to hammer home the point.
It was painfully obvious that he’d been coached by some upperclassman who’d landed a job at Morgan Stanley and was now milking the role of Wall Street wizard. But it was also obvious Rae wasn’t going to make any progress in understanding what actually made this boy tick. Rae was one of “them”—the hallowed, hated gatekeepers.
She remembered the feeling too well. It felt like just yesterday she’d been on the other side of the table, desperately trying to impress her interviewers by regurgitating words she didn’t understand.
“Okay,” she said, folding up the boy’s résumé in what she hoped he would interpret as a symbol of its unimportance. “Do you have any questions for me?”
“How much responsibility were you given as a junior member of the deal team?” he asked. “Did they let you present in client meetings and things like that?”
Rae disguised a snort as a sneeze. “I didn’t usually go to client meetings when I first started,” she said, as if she’d been invited to any before a couple months ago. Even now, when she did go, she usually stood against the wall because there were never enough chairs at the table. “But the early years helped set a solid foundation.”
The boy nodded vigorously. “That’s what I want. A solid foundation.”
She almost asked what he would build on that foundation, if he could do anything, but there was no need to project her own existential angst onto him, so she just stood up and shook the boy’s hand.
He shook too firmly, like Rae used to, overcompensating for his youth.
Rae thought about giving him some kind of warning about how he’d be nothing more than a sleep-deprived cog in a sleepless wheel, but she decided that working on Wall Street was just a mistake you had to make for yourself, like dating flashy frat bros before you could appreciate the depth of a bookworm.
She walked back to her desk and checked the COTWSM chat. TB and GQ had both interviewed the boy before Rae.
TB:What do you think of the fresh blood?
EE:He’s very eager
TB:He didn’t even know half the line items of a DCF. He’d never survive here.
GQ:He’s a straight white guy—that’s all the characteristics someone needs
TB:Fair point.
GQ:Never seen someone so excited to build a financial model before. There was literally drool coming out of his mouth
EE:Ah, the endearing innocence of infants
TB:We were like that as interns, too … remember??
GQ:And now look at us, three jaded associates
