Hello Adventure

Chapter 2

"I told you that you didn't have a shot at the job, didn't I?" Ryder Scott told me over the phone, two days later. "You just don't have necessary years of experience, okay? You're fresh out of school and you've never even had a full-time job before."

I paced around my bedroom, unable to let it go. Even after the crushing in-person rejection (which I may or may not have cried about in the bathroom), I had followed up with a handwritten note on classy letterhead thanking Stasia for her time; then an unsolicited email proposing a brand launch plan for the new Bali hotel in the event she changed her mind; and now, a follow-up phone call to check if my proposal had been received. (It was actually my fourth call since Ryder had been screening me.)

Confirming that an email had been received was an admittedly ridiculous play, but I was out of ideas. I may not have been desperate before, but I sure as shit was now.

I directed the sound of my heavy breathing away from the phone, so Ryder wouldn't hear me freaking out. I was prepared for everything except the prospect of being turned away.

Frankly, I just couldn't see how that was even a possibility. There's this nice neat balance in academia: If you put in the work, you reap the reward. And I had put in the work...

It started when I got my first scholarship into that elite private high school. Back then, I thought I was in, that I made it, but that was just the beginning. Getting in the easy part: Once I was accepted, I had to maintain perfect marks to keep my scholarship, while also killing it with extra-curriculars—student newspaper, community service, the goddamn badminton team—to land a spot at that high-priced private college with only a partial scholarship this time, plus financial aid.

In my fours year at college, I attended nearly every single lecture; crammed in every page of the assigned readings; and pulled soul-deadening all-nighters (after my waitressing shift—because student loans!)—in order to graduate with the kind of GPA that was required to get noticed for a job at somewhere like Swish.

It goes without saying (and yet I'll say it anyway) that none of came easy to me. I missed out on a lot. I never made the cutesy college memories I was supposed to make in the late-night dining hall, eating salty curly fries out of greasy paper cones, or at campus football games with foamy beers and knitted scarves. I never made it to the packed keg parties or the epic spring breaks down in hell-hot Miami. I ate in the meal halls alone and I studied alone. I even stayed on campus during the holidays—staying up all night studying on Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve in deserted libraries that smelled of dusty paper and the lingering body odors of students long gone home to warm houses covered in twinkly lights.

I worked too hard to make any real friends, let alone to have an actual boyfriend. Oh, and you know all that fun, experimental sex you're supposed to be having in your early twenties? Well, I got in on precisely none of that. But I powered through and made these social-life sacrifices because I knew it would amount to something. I knew that it would all be worth it when I graduated and went on to live The Life I Always Wanted.

Or so I thought.

Now—after that heartbreaking interview—I was having a hard time swallowing down the almost-unthinkable suspicion that maybe real life wasn't as straight-foward and reciprocal as school had been. Maybe you can do the work, but still not get the reward. Is this what they meant when they said that life wasn't fair?

I rested my forehead against my small bedroom window feeling like I should have grasped this concept sooner. The glass of the window was still warm from the heat of the late September day, the summer adamant on clinging onto Boston, all prickly hot and soupy. Just then, there was a quick, sharp stab low and deep in my organs: If I didn't get this job, then would I have given up my life for absolutely nothing?