I had the campus PR work. The event staffing. The communications experience. The professors willing to vouch for me. The long nights translating, drafting, editing, helping clean up other people’s messes so quietly no one even noticed there had been messes in the first place. I had the polish. The discipline. The ability to keep my face composed when everyone else was falling apart. I had built myself into exactly the kind of person an organization should want. Hadn’t I?
“Then why is no one calling me?” The question came out sharper than I meant it to. A few people at nearby tables glanced over. I lowered my voice immediately, heat creeping up my neck. “Eu não entendo.”
Not understanding was the worst part. If I had failed because I’d been careless, I could have fixed carelessness. If I had bombed an interview, I could dissect it, improve, try again. But this? This was silence. An absence. Something shapeless enough that I couldn’t fight it directly. I hated problems I couldn’t name. Hated them even more when they might be naming me back—too young, too foreign, too ambitious, too polished, too much, not enough.
Micah leaned forward, resting her forearms on the table. “It’s competitive,” she offered.
“I know it’s competitive,” I groaned, sounding way too petulant than I wanted.
“You’re going after the MLS, Bea. That’s not entry-level friendly.”
There it was again—that reminder that I had chosen a narrow door and was now furious it wasn’t opening. But I couldn’t make myself want smaller just because smaller might have answered back faster. I had spent too long picturing myself inside a football organization, working comms, shaping messaging, managing fallout, building trust between players and the public. I wanted the pressure. Wanted the stakes. Wanted the room where everything mattered.
“I’m not asking for friendly,” I snapped, then immediately regretted it. “I’m asking for a chance.”
The edge in my voice scraped at both of us. I saw the instant I’d gone too sharp. Saw Micah register it and not take offense anyway. She knew the anger wasn’t for her. It was for every inbox that stayed quiet. Every application portal that still read under review. Every day ticking closer to graduation like a threat.
Her gaze softened. “I know.”
That made it worse somehow. Her understanding never let me hide in irritation for long. I looked back down at the screen, but the words there no longer looked like words. Just black marks. Meaningless shapes.
I pressed my fingers into my temple, trying to steady the pressure building behind my eyes. “I can’t not have something lined up,” I continued, my voice lower now, more controlled. “I can’t just… graduate and hope something works out.”
Because hope wasn’t a plan. Hope didn’t keep you in the country. Hope didn’t pay for rent. Hope didn’t fix paperwork.
Micah’s expression shifted again, something more serious settling in. “This is about your visa,” she muttered quietly.
Everything stilled for a second.
The café, the paper, the conversations around us—none of it disappeared, exactly. It just fell farther away. That was the word under everything. Not ambition. Not pride. Not even fear, really. Visa. Status. Permission. The fragile architecture of belonging. Those truths lived in my bones by now. They had shape and weight. My visa status sat behind every decision I made, invisible to everyone who didn’t have to think about it and inescapable to me.
“Yes.”
There it was.
The truth underneath everything else.
It always came back to that. No matter how polished I looked. No matter how put-together I sounded. Beneath every professional goal, every late-night study session, every carefully worded cover letter, there was that harder truth: I could not afford to drift.
“If I don’t secure employment,” I continued carefully, choosing each word like it mattered—because it did, “my status becomes… complicated.”
“That’s a very calm way of saying ‘terrifying.’”
“I’m not terrified.” The denial came a little too easily. Reflexively. Terror implied helplessness, and I had spent too many years learning how not to look helpless to wear the word comfortably now. Terrified people froze. Terrified people unraveled. I was still here, still functioning, still turning in papers and showing up to class and keeping myself in one piece. That had to count for something.
“You are.”
I met her eyes. “I don’t have the luxury of being terrified.”
Something in her face eased and tightened at the same time. Not disagreement. Recognition. She understood the distinction, even if she hated it. Fear was a privilege when your world gave you room to collapse. I didn’t have that kind of room.
She went quiet for a beat, studying me. Then—“Have you told Lo?”
My stomach dropped. “No.”
Of course she would go there. Of course she would name the one door I had been refusing even to look at. Lo existed in my mind as both comfort and danger when it came to problems like this. Comfort, because she loved me so completely it still stunned me sometimes. Danger, because that kind of love came with reach. Influence. The ability to make a phone call and change the temperature of a room.
“Bea—”