What happens when your baby is no longer yours? The tech maven and St. Catherine alum on her company’s IPO
1:00 P.M.–3:00 P.M.
Networking and Summer Internship Career Fair
Parents, guardians, and students come together for an opportunity to mix and mingle
The Life and Times of Alaine Beauparlant
I knew I was going to have a crappy day as soon as I took a look at the agenda for Career Day. Not only did they start it off with a shady, backhanded mention of Mom’s fiasco—“in light of recent updates”—they replaced her presentation with a chat about resolving disputes “the nonviolent way,” moderated by my nemesis Nina and her dad, Prescott. Seriously?
What’s worse is that each session was assigned seating and of course Tatiana and I were nowhere near each other in the auditorium we were stuck in for hours. Sister Gayle explained during the Welcome that our placements had been selected pre–Career Day to prevent us from talking with our friends and shaming her in front of the people who pay our tuition ensure that we got the most from the day’s activities. But what really solidified today as the day from hell was when the Voltaires wrapped up their presentation. Nina had insisted on having the largest projector screen possible temporarily installed in the auditorium, where her Mindfulness Moment would take place. Throughout the talk, we were forced to watch clips of various women losing their cool as they tried their hardest to one-up each other and win the affections of a young venture capitalist millionaire named Jake. Each lesson in conflict negotiation and anger management was interspersed with a horrible demonstration by Nina and her father on the “right” way to handle whatever squabble had presented itself on Will You Be Mine? It was super weird to watch from my dead-center seat in the front row. I would twist around to make eye contact with Tatiana from where she sat in the crowd behind me at each strange reenactment. Finally, we had suffered through the last scenario when Mr. Voltaire dismissed us for lunch.
Just as we started gathering up our things to leave, another scene popped up onto the projector. It was my mom on the set of Sunday Politicos, seated across from Senator Andres Venegas. My stomach tightened as my mom’s outburst played in front of the entire senior class of St. Catherine de’ Ricci Academy. The world slowed down as I felt the gaze of my peers fall on me and heard the buzzing of their whispers and cackles thunder like a shaken beehive. As if watching it once wasn’t traumatic enough, my mom slapped Venegas over and over again on a continuous loop. Nina must’ve enlisted the help of one of our more tech-savvy classmates, because Mom’s eyes grew larger with each smack, her face turning red as a tomato, steam pushing out of her ears like a too-hot teakettle.
“And this is how you don’t solve interpersonal conflict,” Nina shouted over the steam train engine sound that I could only guess was coming from my mom’s head. “Isn’t that right, Alaine?”
A hundred sets of eyes kept their focus on me while my own lasered in on Nina. My classmates’ laughter echoed throughout the auditorium, drowning out the locomotion noises. Just as I opened my mouth to reply, Mr. Voltaire stepped in.
“All right, all right. That’s quite enough,” he said, hardly trying to conceal the smirk on his face as he pressed some buttons on a small remote. “How do I turn this thing off, Nina?”
“You’ll miss the grand finale, Dad!” she replied, snatching the remote from his hand.
Suddenly, the steam engine noise grew so loud that even my classmates’ laughter couldn’t be heard. Mom’s face had turned an alarming shade of magenta, the smoke from her ears shifting from milky white to black. A countdown appeared on the screen—5...4...3...2...1—BOOM. My mom exploded into a cartoony burst of fireworks and perfectly pressed hair.
I imagine that Mr. Voltaire finally grabbed the remote back from Nina and turned off the projector. But I was already gone, pushing roughly past my classmates as I made my way to the bathroom. As I left, I could hear Tatiana shouting after me to wait, but I didn’t care. I was plotting. I didn’t usually stoop to high school level antics, but Nina Voltaire had chosen the wrong person to mess with.
Saturday, December 12
The Life and Times of Alaine Beauparlant
One of the perks of our expensive private school was “free” access to the local college library. Tatiana and I were supposed to be spending our Saturday finishing up our final safety school applications, but instead I had spent the last thirty minutes whisper-raging about the passive aggressive shade spectacle that was Career Day. It wasn’t until I looked up from my computer that I noticed Tatiana sleeping with her eyes open.
“Dude! Did you hear a word I just said?” I waved my hand in front of her face. She started suddenly.
“Sorry. What were you saying?”
“I said this is worse than when Nina had everyone calling you ‘Tatiana la Haitiana’ after your mom came to Mr. Berger’s class freshman year. It actually had a nice ring to it. But the fact that we know she was saying it in a derogatory way just made it so nasty. Anyway, sorry I didn’t turn around when you called after me when all of this went down. If I had stuck around, it would’ve definitely been Celeste Beauparlant Smackdown 2.0 and I couldn’t let that happen. Besides, I’ve already got an idea—”
Tatiana snored loudly and startled herself awake.
“Girl. What is going on?” I asked, annoyed. “Why can’t you keep your eyes open?”
“I fell asleep again? Ugh. I’m sorry. Church got out later than usual last night,” she yawned. “Cri de minuit, more like cri de four o’clock in the morning.”
“Jesus Christ—is God even awake to hear you then?” I loved hearing about Tatiana’s holy ghost stories.
She rolled her eyes. “We were in the homestretch. The pastor was winding down when some lady jumped up from her seat and began convulsing. Of course, he needed to exorcise her and the congregation started singing and my mom had taken my phone, so I couldn’t even record the thing.”
A college boy sitting behind a tall stack of GMAT prep books and a venti coffee looked up from his laptop and frowned over at where we sat in the corner of the library reserved for groups.
“And then! He started to preach again to round out the night with positive energy or whatever and went into this tirade about evil people who do vodou and split their souls into pieces and hide them in jelly bean jars so they can’t die.”
“You mean Horcruxes?”
“Puh-leez. We had all that before JKR wrote about it.”
“But is all vodou evil though?” I asked. “I feel like that particular instance would fall under the ‘bad’ branch of the spirit tree, but there are good uses too, right?”