This Is My Brain in Love Read online

  When Javier (Most Likely to Insta His Own Kompromat) is announced as business manager, though, I can’t completely hide my disappointment. Everyone else is laughing, because it’s true: Javier’s Instagram is filled with compromising pictures that would probably torpedo any future attempts to run for public office, but the best I can manage is a barely convincing smile.

  “Congrats, Javi,” I say, slapping him on the back. “You’re going to be awesome.”

  As I wait for my own assignment, I focus on slowing down my breathing and on stopping my knee from jiggling so much it causes another furniture malfunction. Finally, after it seems like Mr. Evans has acknowledged every other sophomore on staff, his gaze turns to me.

  “To Will Domenici, I’m delighted to bestow the title of Most Likely to Respond to a Tech SOS Within Thirty Seconds.” A ripple of laughter goes through the classroom, and my face feels like it’s going to spontaneously combust. Does Mr. Evans realize that he’s implying that I have no life? Apparently not: “With his history of reliability, tech savvy, and eye for design, I think you guys will agree that the Spartan couldn’t have a better assistant online manager.”

  My classmates burst into applause, but for the second time in less than an hour, I have to force a grimace into a smile, and when I say “force” I’m describing a Herculean effort of acting and facial control that is probably Oscar-worthy, or at least deserving of a Daytime Emmy.

  Of all the positions at the Spartan, assistant online manager is the booby prize. You’re not a reporter. You’re not an editor. From what I’ve seen, you’re nothing more than a coding minion and social media gopher. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the fact that the web team is an integral part of the success of any paper, it’s just that I feel like I have more to contribute.

  I try to explain as much to Mr. Evans after class.

  “Just because you’re assistant online manager doesn’t mean that you won’t also be able to write,” he reassures me.

  “I know, but…” My voice cracks, and I study the worn linoleum floor by Mr. Evans’s desk. I take a deep breath and try not to sound pathetic. “Is my writing not good enough? Do you not trust my editorial judgment?”

  “Oh, Will.” Mr. Evans leans in toward me and looks straight into my eyes, like he knows I’m the type to be skeptical of any praise. “You’re an excellent writer. Your attention to word choice is phenomenal, and you are always clear and precise in your reasoning. Your fact-checking is top-notch.”

  I wait for the caveat for five excruciating seconds.

  Mr. Evans’s eyes flick away for a second, and when he speaks again his voice is gentler. “I’ve noticed, though, that you rely a lot on secondary sources and e-mail correspondence for your stories. Next year, I want you to focus on going behind the scenes to really dig deep. Make that extra call. Drill down and ask the hard questions that make sources squirm.”

  He makes it sound so easy. How can I tell him that he might as well be asking me to fly to the moon?

  As if to illustrate my failure, my smart watch buzzes. My parents got it for me a few years ago after my last panic attack, and it’s set to go off when my heart rate goes above one hundred beats per minute. It’s supposed to be a cue to do my mindful breathing and centering exercises.

  I open my mouth, but it feels like I’m drawing in air from one of those tiny plastic-straw stirrers you get at coffee shops.

  Five seconds in, five seconds out.

  The slow breaths do nothing to quiet the heckling questions that fill my head like an out-of-control press conference: Mr. Domenici, why are you so afraid of making cold calls? Don’t you think that you’re constitutionally incapable of asking the tough questions? Do you really think that someone who can’t even order pizza over the phone without breaking out into a sweat is going to be the next Bob Woodward?

  “Will, are you okay?” Mr. Evans’s round face is creased with concern. “I don’t want you to be discouraged. You’re only a sophomore, and you’ve already got the most important attributes of a good journalist. Integrity. Attention to detail. Work ethic. It’ll come.”

  “Sure,” I manage to get out. “Thanks, Mr. Evans.”

  “Did you end up applying to any of the summer programs on the list I sent out? That’s one way to start honing those investigative skills.”

  It’s a struggle to keep the self-loathing out of my voice when I answer. “No, it didn’t work out. I couldn’t find the right writing sample.” The truth is, I’d started the applications to three programs but chickened out when it came time to ask for letters of recommendation.

  Mr. Evans brightens. “Well, that’s something you can work on over the summer—some kind of long-form piece that’ll show them both your investigative skills and your analytic ability. Remember, there are lots of ways to learn leadership skills. I’d like to see you take on a bigger role on the staff next year, so look for a summer job where you can learn how to manage a team and start thinking of the newspaper as a business whose readership you can grow.”

  Furiously, I scribble down my assignment: Write a long-form piece. Make the calls and ask the hard questions. Learn how to manage a team. Grow a business. They’re only sound bites for now, and developing the story is going to be my big summer challenge, but all I can do is try.

  This Is My Brain on the Impossible

  JOCELYN

  Within the first day, I’m panicking.

  “He set me up, Priya. It’s basically the ‘Impossible Task’ trope.” It doesn’t take a Nobel Prize in economics to realize after looking at my dad’s books that A-Plus has been operating on razor-thin margins for months. “The worst thing is, there isn’t enough data to figure out how to do better. I have no idea what dishes really sell the best or what our foot traffic is.”

  It’s truly depressing. When it gets too exhausting to think about it, I do what I always do when I can’t deal with my life: I binge-watch a TV series.

  When we first moved to Utica six years ago, Netflix saved my life. I’m not exaggerating.

  I was ten years old when we moved, and to say that my family experienced culture shock moving from the “greatest city in the world” to a place where Red Lobster is high-class dining, well, that’s an understatement. Honestly, most of my classmates probably thought I was kind of a snob. There are only so many times you can start a sentence with “In the city, we used to…” before people stop talking to you. Which is why I spent most of middle school glued to a screen so I wouldn’t have to think about the fact that I had no real friends.

  When Priya Venkatram moved here from San Francisco in seventh grade, she latched on to me right away when she heard I had lived in NYC. After we bonded over our mutual love of Orange Is the New Black and Better Call Saul, we became BFFs. She’d come over to the restaurant, and we’d put on a show with descriptive audio so I could listen as I did cleanup. I trust her judgment on TV shows 100 percent, so when she tells me that I might want to check out Restaurant: Impossible and Kitchen Nightmares for ideas, I do.

  It only makes me feel more hopeless. “All the places on that show are sit-down,” I say. “Ninety percent of our business is take-out. Also, I can’t get a professional chef to come in with a full design team and do ten thousand dollars’ worth of renovations. You know this place is like a hamster wheel. There are only so many hours in a day, and we have to answer phones, make take-out bags, fold menus, prep food, do deliveries and inventory and purchasing.… How could I possibly have time to do community outreach on top of that?” I’m starting to hyperventilate just thinking about it.

  “Can you guys hire someone part-time?”

  I’ve thought about that, too. “My dad’s just going to yell that we can’t afford it,” I say.

  Sure enough, the next day, that’s exactly what my dad says.

  “Aren’t you always saying that our Yelp reviews complain about wait times?” I argue. “If we get more help our revenue goes up and they pay for themselves. Like with the sushi bar. If we g
et that cranking and sell four or five rolls a night, it’ll be worth it.” I still feel stupid calling a twelve-inch glass case that holds stuff to make California rolls a sushi bar, but whatever.

  “We can’t even afford to bring someone from China,” my dad says. By that he means an under-documented “business associate.” “No one want to come to Utica.”

  “We could hire a local student or something with the money in my savings account,” I suggest. I’ve squirreled away more than a thousand bucks from delivery tips. Because it isn’t like my dad actually pays me, of course.

  My dad turns a dark orange. “If you have extra money, should go to your college fund!”

  “If I have more time to study I’ll get into a better college,” I counter.

  As I watch my father wrestle with an Asian parent’s version of a no-win situation, I haul out my laptop. Within minutes I’ve got an ad up on Craigslist.

  Then I print up a HELP WANTED sign with little tabs you can tear off, and I hope to all the gods that it will be enough.

  This Is My Brain on Unemployment

  WILL

  When my eleventh-hour effort to see if the Observer-Dispatch has any job openings fails, my mother wangles me an interview for a data mining internship at the hospital. It’s the first summer where I’ve really felt pressure to get a summer job. My family is well-off enough that I’ve always gotten an allowance just for doing chores and homework. My sister and I have never wanted for anything, a fact that started making me feel vaguely guilty around freshman year, when Manny got a job to save up for a used car.

  This year, my mother is strongly encouraging me to “seek gainful employment.” I think she’s desperately afraid that I’m going to end up like my cousin Nick, who lazed around in the summers and is now going to what my mother deems a second-tier college, with my uncle Chris paying out his nose for him, too.

  “It will be good for college applications, William,” my mother tells me as she pecks me on the forehead before rushing out the door to perform a C-section. “Everyone judges a man by the work of his hands.”

  When my father drops me off for my interview, he hands me the container of hibiscus tea with honey that my mother made for me and reminds me to do some of Dr. Rifkin’s centering exercises if I get nervous before the interview.

  I started going to Dr. Rifkin in third grade. I had begun complaining of stomachaches; the pain happened at random, and my mother went wild trying to figure out if I was hungry, or lactose intolerant, or allergic to gluten. I was paraded in front of pediatric specialists and went for ultrasounds where they kneaded my belly like it was pizza dough.

  My father was the first one to notice that the stomachaches often coincided with exams at school, or with times I’d gotten into fights with my friends or my sister. He had seen my aunt Louisa struggle with anxiety when she was a teenager and suspected that was what I had. It took him a while to convince my mother that I should see someone.

  “Will has always been a nervous child. Let us start by giving him some guidance rather than pathologizing his issues,” she told my dad. She filed away the list of child psychologists he’d given her and arranged for me to have a sit-down with my youth group coordinator instead.

  Five months later and I had had guidance from pretty much everyone at the St. Agnes Lower School, up to and including Father Healdon (twice), and my stomachaches had progressed to bouts of nausea with the occasional vomiting episode thrown in for fun. When my nne nne visited from Chicago, she took one look at me and exclaimed, “Oga, na devil work,” before whisking me away to pray.

  Finally, my father had had enough and set me up for a Skype session with Dr. Rifkin. My mother conceded that it was the right thing to do when my really bad symptoms stopped after the first month of cognitive behavioral therapy. The anxiety has mostly been manageable since, except for a couple of panic attacks that I had at the beginning of middle school.

  After I check in at the front desk of the hospital for my interview, I’m directed to a waiting room. In a couple of minutes, the door to the administrative office opens, and a middle-aged guy with brown hair steps out. I kid you not, he’s wearing a cardigan in June.

  “Mr. Domenici?” he calls out, staring around the room until his eyes land on a rumpled-looking white man sitting two chairs down from me. I wonder how he can seriously think that man is an intern applicant. The guy looks like he was born in the first Bush administration.

  “Yes, hello. Mr. Johnson?” I stand up.

  Mr. Johnson’s welcoming smile freezes infinitesimally as he gives me a once-over. I rub my wrist and can feel the fluttering of my pulse beat faster. I’ve seen The Look—that little panicked surprise when people realize that William Domenici isn’t a white male like they’ve assumed—so many times in my life you would think that my body would have gotten used to it by now, but nope.

  My sister, golden child that she is, relishes getting The Look. It’s like her own little sociology experiment—her opportunity to catch people off-balance when they realize her skin tone is more Halle Berry than Drew Barrymore. “How people recover from that initial surprise says a lot about who they are and what kind of assumptions they hold,” she told me once.

  I still prefer not to get The Look at all, because invariably it leads to The Question, which can range from cloyingly polite (So, tell me about your parents, Will?) to offensively blunt (What are you?). Waiting for The Question always makes my anxiety level go up.

  Mr. Johnson leads me into a corner office overflowing with files and scraps of paper. I sit on a worn leather chair and clasp my hands on my lap to weigh down my jiggling legs.

  Five seconds in, five seconds out.

  Mr. Johnson leans back with a sigh into his mesh office chair and clicks on his computer screen. “So, William—do you go by that or by Will?” He plows on before I can even answer. “What makes you want to be an intern here at St. Luke’s?” He says it the way a checkout clerk asks you if you would like a receipt with your purchase: with minimal inflection—practically a negative inflection—giving you the impression that they have an equally negligible interest in your answer.

  I’m embarrassed to realize that I don’t have an answer. Of course I don’t really want to be a scanning drone in the basement of a hospital. I like the idea of having my own money, and I want my mother to think that I’m not a freeloader.

  When I hesitate, Mr. Johnson prompts, “Are you premed?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” I say. “My mother works here, so she told me there were some opportunities.”

  “Oh.” Mr. Johnson’s face breaks toward actual interest. “Is she a nurse?”

  It’s one of my mother’s biggest pet peeves to walk into a patient’s room, only to have someone assume that she’s a nurse or an orderly. Suffice to say, I learned the term “microaggression” before I went to kindergarten. “No, she’s a doctor. Dr. Ogonna. Ob-gyn.”

  He nods knowingly, as if to suggest that it finally makes sense why I’m applying. “Did you have questions about the job?”

  I bring out the folio my dad gave to me and run through the questions we prepared last night. I barely register Mr. Johnson’s answers, transcribing them to my reporter’s notebook like they’re algebra homework to be solved later. He asks me a few questions about what electives I’m taking, and we talk about my extracurriculars, but really it seems like the point of the interview is to make sure that I have a pulse.

  Before I leave, I think of one more question. “What is the stipend for the internship?”

  When Mr. Johnson laughs, he laughs with his whole body. “Oh boy. I’m sorry if your mother didn’t know, William, but St. Luke’s has a policy that teens aren’t eligible for our paid internships unless they have a high school diploma. If you want big bucks, you’ll have better luck with construction. I have a buddy who might be looking for an apprentice.”

  When my dad asks me how the interview went, I don’t know what to say.

  “It was okay,” I man
age. I stare at the reporter’s notebook I wrote my interview notes on and grimace at the “responsibilities” of my job at St. Luke’s: Scanning medical records. Data entry. Running utilization reports. Then I flip back to Mr. Evans’s sound bites from the day before.

  “You know what, Dad? I think I’m going to look around some more.”

  After my interview, I go to drown my sorrows at Amazing Stories, where Manny (aka Mansur Fathi: Most Likely to Succeed at Breaking Will Domenici Out of a Thought Spiral) is newly employed. The space used to be a nail salon, and sometimes if you breathe in really deeply you can still smell the carcinogens.

  Manny, Javier, and I have a standing gig taking a first look at that week’s trade-ins, including some pieces that the owner, Jordan, gets off eBay. It’s not a particularly good haul this week, mostly 1990s X-Men that’s already been digitized on Marvel Unlimited, so it doesn’t take too long. Still, my stomach is rumbling by the end. Or maybe it’s just leftover nerves. “Guys, can we go over to the deli? I need a BLT or something.”

  “Bring me something back,” Manny says, adding an unnecessary, “no piggie.” Manny isn’t a particularly observant Muslim, but he’s pretty firm about the no-pork thing. “I just don’t understand why you’d want to eat an animal that literally eats garbage,” he says whenever I have a ham sandwich.

  “We didn’t ask you how your interview at the hospital went,” Javier says as we walk to the deli down the street. He does that a lot—replays conversations in his head so he can follow threads and tease out social cues that he can act on later.

  “The interview went okay, but they can’t pay me, so it’s probably not worth it. I’m just afraid my mom’s going to make me do it ‘for the experience.’” I make air quotes.

  “You can always look for another job that pays,” Javier says.