Page 83 of My Favorite Bad Decision
“I like it,” I tell him. “I desperately wish I could avoid being a grown-up for another week.”
I leave him and return to my apartment. It’s an absolute wreck. My bags from Kili are open on the floor, their contents filthy. My suitcase from Starfish Cay sits waiting in a corner.
But the worst part is that it’s lonely. It’s too quiet. I pick up my phone and call Miller. “You want to come over tonight?” I ask.
It certainly doesn’t feel like I’m bringing this all to its necessary conclusion.
In the morning, I wake early and begin getting ready. A part of me still can’t quite believe I’m sitting here in a bra and underwear, applying lipliner while Miller watches from the bed, covered only by a sheet.
“You’re pulling out all the stops today. Are you nervous?” he asks.
I shrug. I don’t know if it’s nerves necessarily. “What I mostly feel is dread. Every time I enter a new part of the company, I know they’re thinking that they’re stuck with Henry Fischer’s idiot daughter, which means I have to work my ass off to prove I’m not the worst nepo hire in the history of time. I usually wing it until I figure things out, but I’m not sure I can do that in finance.”
“This entire enterprise weighs on you,” he says. “Every time you even looked at that book on publishing in our tent, you seemed to shrink. Please just tell your dad the truth over lunch today and quit.”
“What am I supposed to do with myself instead, though? It’s March. Even if Icanget back into med school, I can’t just twiddle my thumbs for the next six months.”
He pulls me down beside him. “We’ll go to Starfish Cay. I can work anywhere. We’ll lounge around naked and snorkel and brown ourselves until our skin turns to leather. You’ll learn to cook. I’ll throw out all the popsicles that aren’t cherry.”
My eyes fall closed. I can imagine nothing better, no way I could possibly be happier. I hate that I’ll never be able to agree.
* * *
Much as I expected,everyone in the finance department is polite but weary, as if already fatigued by the experience before I’ve even had a chance to fail. “So, what kind of accounting courses have you taken?” asks the section’s manager.
“I, uh, didn’t actually take any? I was pre-med.”
Her polite smile holds, but barely. “You can use QuickBooks, at least, right?”
I wince. “I’m sure I can figure it out?”
She leaves me going through expense reports because I’m not competent enough to do anything else, and I dutifully play along for an hour before I sit back and look around me.
I graduated summa cum laude from Brown. I got halfway through medical school. I will soon come into a trust worth many millions. Why the fuck am I here, in a windowless office under these fluorescent lights, going through expense reports like a high school intern? And how many times have I found myself in this position over the last three years?
I could be in Starfish Cay right now. Or I could be doing the shit that rich kids everywhere do: “exploring my art,” “developing my craft,” or turning a hobby into a business and letting everyone think it’s profitable when it’s not.
Hell, I could help with one fundraiser a year and fuck around the rest of the time and just claim that I’ve devoted myself to philanthropy.
I’ve been telling myself that my father’s philosophy made sense: that I should need to know what occurs in every department. I’ve been telling myself that it’ll be worth it when I’m in senior management, simply so that no one can say, “This idiot has no idea what we do here.”
Now I wonder if it was also a form of self-flagellation. If I continued to accept one unrewarding situation after another because I thought I deserved to be punished.
I get through three more hours. When I leave for lunch, I take all of my belongings because I won’t be coming back. They’ll remember me asKit Fischer, who couldn’t even stomach working at a real job for half a day, and they’re welcome to think it. I’ve been trying to prove myself to people who don’t matter, in fields I don’t care about, for years.
The person who matters is me. And I’m done.
* * *
I meetmy dad inside his building’s rooftop restaurant. “You’re looking particularlywell rested,” he says. If he’s trying to imply something about Miller, I’m not taking the bait. “How was Kilimanjaro?”
I frown at him. “Question—did you actually want me to write an article or was it all a ruse?”
He smiles as if I’m an especially clever child who’s just performed a new trick. “Of course it was a ruse. If you’d like to submit the article you can, but obviously the staff writers will be furious that you got to take an all-expenses paid trip instead of them.”
I sigh heavily and pour some of his wine into my glass. “As I recall, that’s exactly what I said when you first brought Kilimanjaro up. So…how much of this was about me risking my life on a climb I wasn’t ready for and how much of this was about you wanting to put me and Miller in the same place?”
He laughs. “How could I have known who he’d go up with and when?”
