“I am listening,” I scoffed.
The lie came out on instinct, brittle around the edges and thinner than I wanted it to be. Across from me, Micah didn’t buy it for even a second. She never did. Steam curled up from the fresh drink in front of her, carrying cinnamon and espresso and something sweet into the air.
Around us, the café moved in its own end-of-semester rhythm—chairs scraping, milk steaming, students laughing too loudly because they were running on caffeine and panic and not enough sleep. A group at the window argued over a group project. Someone behind us kept tapping a pen against the table in a maddening, arrhythmic beat. The espresso machine hissed again. My laptop screen glowed in front of me, the same unfinished paragraph mocking me.
“You’re not,” she countered, leaning back in her chair. “I bet you’ve been staring at the same paragraph for ten minutes.”
The cursor still blinked in the middle of my half-finished final paper, pulsing steadily like a reminder that time was moving whether I was ready for it or not. A citation sat incomplete halfway down the page. Three tabs were open across the top of my screen—one for a journal article on athlete scandal response, one for a case study involving a league office cover-up, and one for an email inbox that had become its own special kind of torture over the last three weeks. Every refresh was a quiet humiliation. Every empty response another small crack in the version of my future I’d been building since freshman year.
My grip tightened slightly around the cold mug. “I’m editing.”
“You’re spiraling.”
“I’m not spiraling.”
Her brows lifted. That one tiny look did more damage than if she’d laughed. It was so purely Micah—no cruelty, no judgment, just a silent,Are you hearing yourself?She knew me well enough to catch the difference between stress and actual collapse, and apparently I was toeing a line I hadn’t even realized I’d crossed.
I exhaled slowly, pressing my lips together before I spoke again. “I just need to finish this paper.”
Because papers had rules. They had rubrics. You researched, outlined, argued, cited, submitted. You got a grade. You moved on. Papers made sense in a way real life didn’t. Real life let you do everything right and still gave you failing grade.
“Bea.”
“I have a deadline.”
“Bea,” Micah’s tone shifted harshly. It wasn’t cruelty. It was precision. The verbal equivalent of a hand around my wrist before I walked straight into traffic.
I stopped. My eyes dropped to the table, to the edge of my laptop, to the notes scattered around me like if I arranged them correctly, they would solve everything.
Micah didn’t push immediately. She waited. That was her thing. She let silence do the work.
She had always been good at that. Better than most people, maybe because she didn’t need to fill every empty space to feel secure. She could sit inside a pause without panicking. Could let it stretch until the truth got uncomfortable enough that it came up on its own. I hated that trick. Itall pressed at the edges of my concentration until I felt thin with it.
“You haven’t heard back,” she finally whispered, a long sigh followed. Her hand landed on mine. Her fingers were warm. Entirely too grounding. I looked at where her hand covered mine and felt something sharp and tired move through me. We’d spent four years at this table in different forms—different cafés, different papers, different crises—and she still knew exactly when to stop joking and get underneath the performance.
“No.” The word barely made it out. My throat felt too tight around it. Admitting it aloud made it real in a way it hadn’t been when it lived only inside my own head. No interviews. No callbacks. No polite rejections, even. Just a vast, humiliating nothing.
“How many applications?”
I let out a breath that felt too thin. “All of them.”
I’d tracked every single one in a spreadsheet because of course I had. Organization, position, department, contact person, submission date, follow-up date, notes. Football operations. Communications departments. League offices. Agencies. Team PR staffs. Sports media support roles. Entry-level positions, coordinator positions, assistant roles I was overqualified for and internships I was technically too qualified to be applying to at all. I’d cast the net wide enough to exhaust myself and still every line I’d thrown out had come back empty.
Her eyes flicked over my face, reading everything I wasn’t saying. She was good at that. Too good.
“You applied everywhere,” she clarified.
“Yes.”
“And nothing.”
I shook my head once.
There was the shame of it. Not just disappointment. Shame. Because I wasn’t someone who coasted. I wasn’t someone who woke up senior year and realized I should maybe think about a career. I had done the internships. The networking. The late nights. The extra assignments. The practical coursework. I had built this path piece by piece so carefully that the silence now felt personal, like the world had looked at all of that effort and shrugged.
“I did everything right,” I murmured, more to myself than to her. “I have the grades. I have the recommendations. I have?—”
“You have the qualifications,” Micah cut in gently.