This Is My Brain in Love - I. W. Gregorio Page 0,5

says. By that he means an under-documented “business associate.” “No one want to come to Utica.”

“We could hire a local student or something with the money in my savings account,” I suggest. I’ve squirreled away more than a thousand bucks from delivery tips. Because it isn’t like my dad actually pays me, of course.

My dad turns a dark orange. “If you have extra money, should go to your college fund!”

“If I have more time to study I’ll get into a better college,” I counter.

As I watch my father wrestle with an Asian parent’s version of a no-win situation, I haul out my laptop. Within minutes I’ve got an ad up on Craigslist.

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