This Is My Brain in Love - I. W. Gregorio Page 0,6
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.
“You know what, Dad? I think I’m going to look around some more.”
After my interview, I go to drown my sorrows at Amazing Stories, where Manny (aka Mansur Fathi: Most Likely to Succeed at Breaking Will Domenici Out of a Thought Spiral) is newly employed. The space used to be a nail salon, and sometimes if you breathe in really deeply you can still smell the carcinogens.