“Now,” he says, gaze locked with mine, “we wait.”
It’s 10:45 on a Friday night. And for the third time in less than ten minutes, my world crashes to an end.
Chapter 2
Three weeks ago
There are worse things in the world.
There are, without a single doubt, giant heaps of worse things in the world. Wet socks. PMS. The Star Wars prequels. Oatmeal raisin cookies that masquerade as chocolate chip, slow Wi-Fi, climate change and income inequality, dandruff, traffic, the finale of Game of Thrones, tarantulas, food-scented soap, people who hate soccer, daylight saving time (when it moves one hour ahead, not behind), toxic masculinity, the unjustly short life span of guinea pigs—all of these, just to name a small handful, are truly terrible, dreadful, horrific things. Because such is the way of the universe: it’s full of bad, sad, upsetting, unfair, enraging circumstances, and I should know better than to pout like a ten-year-old who’s half an inch too short for the roller coaster when Faye tells me from behind the counter of her small coffee shop:
“Sorry, honey, we’re all out of croissants.”
To be clear: I don’t even want a croissant. Which I know sounds weird (everybody should always want a croissant; it’s a law of physics, like the Fermi paradox or Einstein’s field equation), but the truth is, I would gladly do without this specific croissant—if this were a regular Tuesday morning.
Unfortunately, today is pitch day. Which means that I’m meeting with potential future GreenFrame clients. I talk to them, tell them the hundreds of little things I can do to help them manage large-scale sustainable building projects, and hope they’ll decide to hire us. It’s what I’ve been doing for about eight months, ever since I finished my Ph.D.: I try to bring in new clients; I try to keep the ones we already have; I try to ease Gianna’s workload, since she just had her first baby—who, incidentally, is three babies. Apparently, triplets do happen. And they’re adorable, but they also wake one another up in the middle of the night in a never-ending spiral of sleeplessness and exhaustion. Who would have thought? But back to the clients: GreenFrame has been venturing dangerously close to not-quite-in-the-black territory, and today’s pitch meeting is critical to keep the red at bay.
Enter the croissants. And that other little problem I happen to have: I am a little superstitious. Just a tad. Just a little stitious. I have developed a complex system of rituals and apotropaic gestures that need to be performed to ensure that my pitch meetings will go as planned. I have more years of science education than anyone ever needed, and should probably know better than to believe that the color of my socks is in any way predictive of my professional success. But do I?
Nope.
Back in college, it was exactly three braids in my hair for every single soccer game (plus two coats of L’Oréal mascara if we were playing away) and I had to listen to “Dancing Queen” and “My Immortal” before each and every final—strictly in that order. Thank God I managed to graduate on time, because the emotional whiplash was starting to grind at me.
Not that this issue of mine is something I like to admit widely. Mostly just to Mara and Hannah, my supposed best friends. We met during the first year of our Ph.D.’s and have been lumbering together through the tribulations of STEM academia ever since. For the most part, having them in my life has been my one true joy, but there have been less-than-outstanding aspects of it. For instance, the fact that during the four years we lived together they oscillated between staging anti-superstition interventions and pranking me by inviting stray black cats into our apartment on every Friday the 13th. (We even ended up adopting one for a few months, JimBob, till we noticed that the kitty in the Missing flyers all over the neighborhood suspiciously resembled him; JimBob was, in fact, Mrs. Fluffpuff, and we returned her quietly, in the middle of the night. She’s been dearly missed ever since.) Anyway, yes: I have horrible, amazing, superstition-unsupportive BFFs. But we don’t live together anymore. We don’t even live in the same city: Mara is in D.C. at the EPA, and Hannah has been working for NASA and commuting between Texas and Norway. I can throw salt over my shoulder and frantically look around for wood to knock on to my heart’s content.
Why, why am I like this? I have no clue. Let’s just blame my aggressively Italian mother.
But back to this Tuesday morning: the crux of my problem, you see, is that back in the winter, before my most successful client pitch to date, I got a bit peckish. So I popped into Faye’s hole-in-the-wall coffee shop, and instead of just asking for the usual—punishingly black coffee: no sugar, no cream, just the bitter oblivion of darkness—I tacked a croissant on to my order. It was just as good as the coffee (i.e., simultaneously stale and undercooked; taste hovering between starch and salmonella) and, to my eternal dismay, was promptly followed by me bagging the most lucrative contract GreenFrame had seen in its young history.
Gianna was over the moon. And so was I, until my half-Italian brain started forming a million little connections between the croissant from hell and my big professional win. You know where this is going: yes, I now desperately feel that I must eat one of Faye’s croissants before every single pitch meeting, otherwise the unthinkable will happen. And no, I have no idea how to react to her kind but definitive, “Sorry, honey, we’re all out of croissants.”
Did I say that there are worse things in the world? I lied. This is a disaster. My career is over. Are those sirens in the distance?
“I see.” I bite into my lower lip, order it to un-pout itself, and force myself to smile. After all, it’s not Faye’s fault if my mom drilled into my baby neurons that walking under the stairs is a surefire way to a lifetime of despair. I go to therapy for that. Or I will. At some point. “Are you, um, making more?”
She looks at the display case. “I’ve got muffins left. Blueberry. Lemon glaze.”
Oh. That actually sounds good. But. “No croissants, though?”
“And I can make you a bagel. Cinnamon? Blueberry? Plain?”
“Is that a no on the croissants?”
Faye cocks her head with a pleased expression. “You really like my croissants, don’t you?”
Do I? “They’re so, um.” I clutch the strap of my fake-leather messenger bag. “Unique.”
“Well, unfortunately I just gave the last one to Erik over there.” Faye points to her left, toward the very end of the counter, but I barely glance at Erik-over-there—tall man, broad shoulders, wears suit, boring—too busy cursing my own timing. I should not have spent twenty minutes tickling the majestic beauty of Ozzy’s little guinea pig tush. I am now rightfully paying for my mistakes, and Faye is giving me an assessing stare. “I’ll toast you a bagel. You’re too skinny to skip breakfast. Eat more and you might grow a little taller, too.”
I doubt I’ll manage to finally push past five feet at the ripe old age of twenty-seven, but who’s to say. “Just to recap,” I say, in one last pleading, whiny attempt at salvaging my professional future, “you’re not making more croissants today?”