Super in the City by Daphne Uviller Read Free Book Online Page A

approving/understanding/smarmy gazes of grannies/NYU professors/current law students. Then I wrote pointedly meaningful essays. I began crashing parties with Tag and I briefly dated a fat film student named Jake.
    I got into seven of the eight schools I applied to. Didn’t that mean something? Didn’t that mean my value as a brainful human being was quantifiable? On my parents’ dime—they agreed to support and house me for that “transition” year—I flew to Palo Alto and got some quality time with Abigail. We had late- night, college- worthy conversations over steaming mugs of chai, all in the name of checking out Stanford Law. Ifelt directed and purposeful and industrious, but I still had time to go to Liquid Strength class with Tag, watch
Friends
reruns on Mercedes’s rent- controlled couch while she practiced Brahms’s Symphony No. 4 in E Minor in the other room, and catch the Hitchcock festival at the Quad Cinema with Lucy.
    No sooner had I sent in my deposit to the University of Pennsylvania—my passion for a good cheesesteak figuring heavily in my decision—than I began to regret my choice. It’s not that I wished I had said yes to Stanford or Columbia or Northwestern or any of the other places I’d gotten into. I just wished I could have said yes to all of them and gone to all of them while also training to become a member of the Olympic luge team and a vet.
    But still, I had the contented summer you can only enjoy when you have a solid plan lined up for the fall. One of the loveliest sentences a person can utter is, “I’m starting law school.” In late August, I enlisted my friends to help move furniture up from the basement and into a U-Haul. With a close eye on the packed truck, we sat on the stoop in shorts and tank tops, drenched in sweat, inhaling pizza. It felt like college again, except that this time I was the only one moving. I was going off to a place rife with future scholars and judges and activists who would actually be able to help those distended-bellied kids and could feasibly go to The Hague to prosecute the people responsible for the atrocities in Darfur.
    I attributed my shortness of breath to hoisting one too many boxes of CDs.
    An hour later, my dad slid into the driver’s seat and turned to me, beaming. I tried to return his smile, but my stomach began to roil and my mouth felt gummy.
    “Darling daught—?”
    I opened the door and threw up on the sidewalk, just missing the feet of a traffic cop ticketing her way up the block.
    *  *  *  
    S O I COULD SEE HOW MY PARENTS MIGHT BE ENTHUSIASTIC about the prospect of me fixing boilers, sweeping the sidewalk, and plunging toilets.
    I, on the other hand, felt my gizzards asphyxiating. Bella and Ollie Zuckerman were eyeing me with missionary zeal while I could only think of my five- year college reunion, which I was planning to attend in two months. As visions of me wielding industrial cleansers danced in my parents’ heads, I imagined the conversations I would have on campus.
    “… and after Teach for America, I founded a charter school in South Central. It’s been soooo crazy, but soooo great. So, Zephyr, what have you been up to?”
    “I’m the super of my parents’ building in Manhattan.”
    “I thought you were in med school?”
    “I dropped out.”
    Silence.
    “Well, no, that sounds really cool. You gotta do what’s right for you.”
    Or: “… I started out in the mail room and it totally sucked, I mean
totally
sucked, but one day, I just said, fuck it, and I slipped my script into Grazer’s mail and his assistant actually read it and they optioned it! But now I have this rewrite I got hired for and it’s a total mess and I’m completely freaked out. You were so smart to go to med school. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.”
    “Well, actually, um …”
    But more than a blow to my pride, my parents’ plan for me to earn my keep—not an unreasonable demand, even I could see that—meant learning