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Chapter 1

Tea

When Tea was accepted into the Kellstadt Graduate School of Business, she didn’t foresee spending her graduation on the hardwood floor of her empty apartment in Chicago. She also didn’t expect there to be a global pandemic. No one did.

She cursed herself for not waiting one more day for that couch pickup. After she sold off the last of her furniture—“sold” being a loose term, seeing as she gave away her belongings for free on Facebook Marketplace to anyone brave enough to pick them up during a pandemic—she realized that she had nowhere to sleep, or even to sit, as she watched the dean give his commencement speech at a podium in an empty classroom, under flickering fluorescent lights on Zoom. A bed of her thickest blankets laid out in the middle of the floor was certainly not ideal, but none of her situation was ideal either. Like the rest of the world, she had to learn how to roll with it when the world went into lockdown in March.

But now, sitting on the oak floor, wearing her old cap and gown from her undergrad graduation two years earlier, Tea concluded that she was very much done rolling with it.

Times are tough, graduates. We know that the road ahead will not be an easy one. You are entering a market that is uncertain. Will we ever sit in an office again? Will we always have to wear our masks? Is this officially our new normal?

She sighed. “This is depressing.”

Mom leaned forward, her face filling Tea’s phone screen that was propped up by a plastic DePaul University cup next to her laptop, and blew on the plastic party blower that was dangling from her lips.

Tea sighed again.

Mom removed the party blower, pinching it between her fingers like it was a cigarette. “Cheer up, my cute little cup of Tea. You graduated business school! Not everyone can say that.”

“But what’s the point if I can’t even find a job?” she grumbled. “A fancy degree means literally nothing if you don’t have experience.”

“You have a lifetime ahead of you to get experience. Just because your internship was canceled this spring doesn’t mean there aren’t other opportunities down the road.”

It was the same pep talk she was used to, but in a different shade of blue. The two of them had engaged in similar versions of the same conversation for months now. When Tea received the email that the internship program at Bank of America would be put on hold for the foreseeable future, she hyperventilated and called her mom. She sat in her apartment, alone ever since her roommates left to “ride this thing out” in the suburbs with their parents and never returned, and ugly cried. Dribbles-of-snot-running-down-her-nose, using-her-forearm-because-she-was-too-distraught-to-grab-tissues kind of ugly crying. Her mom was patient and warm as she listened despite her clear exhaustion—she’d just finished a grueling nineteen-hour shift at the hospital. Thirty minutes after that phone call, Tea had been bulldozed by guilt. There she was, crying over a silly little internship, while her mother spent every possible minute she could muster at Saint Peter’s in New Brunswick, working as hard as she could to prevent people from dying.

But Mom liked to give her these pep talks, and Tea liked hearing her voice. Seven hundred and ninety miles felt too far, and that distance was only going to grow wider this summer.

Tea pulled at a loose string on her robe as she mumbled, “And a summer spent at Silver Falls is going to get me closer to those opportunities?” She tried to tone down the bitterness in her voice, but it was getting harder with each passing day. Especially since she hadn’t hugged her mom since Christmas.

“I don’t think anyone is going to question why you have a gap of undeclared time off on your résumé after graduation,” Mom replied. “I think a lot of résumés are going to look that way after all of this.”

Tea hugged her legs close to her chest, resting a cheek on her knees, her wavy red hair cascading down her legs. “Yeah. I just hate not knowing what comes next.”

“None of us do,” Mom answered quietly.

The two of them watched the rest of the ceremony in silence, listening as the dean of the business school rattled off all of the names of the MBA students. When he reached Theresa Richards, Mom blew hard on the party blower. Enough to make Tea smile.

When the ceremony ended, she closed her laptop, eyeing the apartment she’d called home for the past two years. “It feels weird to have my entire life packed up in one car,” she admitted. “None of this seems real.”

“I’m still impressed you were able to get rid of everything,” Mom quipped. “Think of it this way, you could go anywhere after this. Anywhere.”

“The only place I want to be is home with you.”

Mom let out a heavy sigh in response. “You know it wouldn’t be safe. I’m in and out of the hospital all the time—”

“I really wouldn’t mind,” Tea interrupted. “I’m willing to take the chance.”

“Your grandparents are really…really excited to see you.”

“And I’m excited to see them, but—”

“Go to Minnesota and have a normal summer. Maybe by this fall we’ll have a vaccine and everything will settle down. You can come back to New Jersey and find a job in the city like you wanted, and life will feel a little more normal again.”

Tea exhaled, a piece of her hair falling across her face. “Do you really think things could be over by then?”

Mom was silent for a beat too long. It made her stomach curl.

“I don’t know what to think,” she finally answered. “But we’ll figure it out, okay? We take this one day at a time.”