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 manage. 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.