“Don’t you have that essay due?”
A long bleep obscured a string of cursing from the real housewife on screen. Abby shrugged. “The class is pass-fail.”
“Okay. I’m in,” I said. “What else do we have to do tonight?”
But as we lugged cheap booze back from the liquor store, a nasty voice in my head, dormant for so long, started to resurface. What are you doing, Julia? What do you want? Why don’t you make up your mind? I had made absolutely no plans for the future, and that seemed okay, as long as I wasn’t alone. But as I looked around the party, I realized that I was the only person left. The only one without a job. Abby was going to be a teacher. Evan’s roommate Arthur was working for the Obama campaign. And Evan had secured one of the most competitive jobs in finance. Only then did I see it clearly: everyone was figuring it out. Everyone except me. I had no passion, no plan, nothing that made me stand out from the crowd. I had absolutely no idea what kind of job I was supposed to get.
Later that night, at the party, I overheard Evan talking to a friend of ours, Patrick, a tall guy from Connecticut who rowed crew. The guy Abby had slept with, freshman year, expressly to give me and Evan the room. Patrick still pined after Abby, but she had long ago moved on. She never kept a guy longer than a few weeks.
“You followed the news about Bear over spring break?” Patrick asked.
“Yeah,” Evan said.
I was standing several feet away, but they didn’t notice me.
“That was nuts. Feel bad for all those guys who got their offers rescinded.”
“I know. Jesus. What a mess.”
“Close call, too. My dad works at a hedge fund, and he was jumpy as hell. You know I was interviewing with Bear back in the fall? I’m so glad I didn’t go with them. Shit. Can you imagine?”
“Seriously. You’re going to Goldman, right?”
“Yup. By the way, congrats, man. You must be stoked about Spire.”
Evan’s eyes suddenly lit with anticipation. “So stoked.”
That expression on his face: a huge, satisfied grin. He didn’t know I could see it from where I stood. He had big plans for the future. He was going places. The system had deemed him exceptional. Why shouldn’t he feel a little cocky? When he told me about the offer earlier that week, he had insisted it was just a job like any other. “The main thing,” he said, “is that now I’ll be able to stay. Isn’t that great?” He didn’t want me to feel bad. And I didn’t. I didn’t really care. It hadn’t sunk in that there was something I had forgotten to do.
But when I saw that expression on his face, talking with Patrick about their jobs and the money and the city and the future, I realized that the way he was looking at me was different from the way I was looking at myself. Evan saw someone who wasn’t keeping up. Someone he had to tiptoe around. I felt a shift that night, when I overheard their conversation. It was also the first time I was aware that Evan had concealed something from me, that he had been anything less than totally honest.
A week later, he asked me to move in with him.
*
We didn’t bring much with us when we moved to New York: clothes, books, lamps, my futon and coffee table. It all fit into a handful of boxes and suitcases. We unpacked everything that first day. I even managed to hang our meager art—a few prints I’d gotten in Paris, my favorite Rothko poster from MoMA—strategically covering up the cracks and stains that showed through the landlord’s cheap paint job.
“Wow,” Evan said, grinning as he surveyed our tiny apartment, our new home. “This is awesome. I can’t believe we’re unpacked.”
He went into the bathroom to brush his teeth before bed, and a sob caught in my throat. The only thing that had kept me from losing it that day was the relentless distraction of unpacking. I caught a glimpse of myself in a window turned mirrorlike by the darkness. This was where I was: in a shitty fourth-floor walk-up in the shitty part of the Upper East Side. Tired, sweaty, dirty, and what was the point? Why was I even here? I didn’t have a job. I didn’t even have prospects. Evan and I would both wake up in the morning with nothing to do, with a day to spend however we wanted. Evan could enjoy it because it was sanctioned, an acceptable length of idle time before his job started. But this freedom, for me, came with a different weight. With the knowledge that every moment I wasted was another moment I wasn’t looking for a job. My breath grew fast and short. What was I doing?
Evan emerged from the bathroom, wiping away the remains of toothpaste. He saw me frozen in place. “Jules?” he said. “Jules, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said, but the tears had started spilling over. “I’m…”