The Unknowns by Gabriel Roth Read Free Book Online Page B

Grady in the back-and-forth qualifies as a good sign.
    “No, I got hired right out of college as an assistant administrative assistant,” she says. “There’s a lot of turnover. Did you study, like, computer science?”
    “No, I, uh, I didn’t go to college,” I say. “I learned on my own, basically.” This information can be presented as a badge of shame or a badge of pride, depending on nuances of tone, expression, and gesture. Shame is never attractive, and pride raises the possibility that I don’t know anything about anything except computers, so I aim for neutrality, although this risks sounding defensive.
    “Did you not want to go, or you couldn’t afford it, or what?” she says. I have told maybe one hundred people that I didn’t go to college, and they were all wondering the same thing, but she’s the first to come out and ask.
    “I really wanted to go,” I say. “It’s a—well, it’s a medium-length story.”
    Maya gives me a go-ahead nod, and Rebecca Grady, demonstrating that there is more to life than failure and humiliation, slips over to the buffet table to refill her wine and dip a baby carrot in hummus. I almost thank her.
    “I was set to go to college,” I say. “I’d been accepted by Stanford. And then my dad lost all his money and there was no way my mom could pay the tuition. So I got a job doing computer stuff, and I was going to apply to the University of Colorado, and then my friend Bill asked me to come out here and do a startup with him.”
    “Damn,” she says. “That’s great.” I’m not sure what part of it is great; I suspect she means that it’s more interesting than she had anticipated.
    “So what about you?” I say. “Where did you go to college?”
    “No, we’re not switching back to me yet,” she says, and I feel like I’ve caught an eighty-yard pass on national television. “What does your startup do?”
    “We built a web service to track and synthesize people’s buying habits,” I say, “and then we sold it to a bigger company so they could run it into the ground.”
    “And what was your role?”
    “I designed the interface,” I say. “I built some of the back end, too. Are we switching back to you yet?”
    “Not yet. How did your father lose his money?”
    “He started a stupid business and put everything he had into it and burned through it in about two years.”
    “Were you worried about the same thing happening to you?”
    Terrified
. “I tried to learn from his mistakes. We did everything as cheaply as possible. No company cafeteria and no pinball machines and no advertising budget. And we spent other people’s money.”
    “Smart!”
    “Thank you. We are now officially done with me and moving on to you. Do you like being a reporter?”
    “Yeah, basically. I mean, day to day I hate it, it’s one heartbreak after another, but it’s the right thing for me to be doing. I like asking questions.”
    “I’d never have guessed.”
Look! I am teasing her affectionately
!
    “I like getting to the bottom of stuff. It’s just my nature.”
    Probably time to pull out before I mess up somehow; I’m almost in a position to ask for her email address, even without a pretext. And then I feel a dark shadow across my soul, and before I have consciously registered any specific sensory evidence I am aware that someone is approaching from behind me and that this person’s presence is a very, very bad thing. And then I’m turning fifteen degrees to the right, and my smile freezes into a terrified rictus, and there is Lauren.
    She’s still dressed as if for work, even though it’s Sunday. We all say polite things to one another, and Lauren and I ask each other how it’s going as though we had an interest in each other’s lives, but there’s no sign she’s any happier to see me than vice versa. I wish Cynthia and I had a special signal transmitter where I’d push a button and she’d hurry over and say
We really need to get out of here if