Chapter 8
IHUSTLED BACK TO THE SPRUCE STREET AIRBNB AS FAST AS MY LEGS could carry me. Much as I tried to think about anything but Desiree, my mind reeled to our first—and only—meeting, fifteen years earlier.
Desiree’s home office was in a thatched cottage improbably located in the middle of a suburban cul-de-sac. I’d shown up open to a session of self-discovery. I’d visited acupuncturists, herbalists, and psychics at Geeta and Leigh’s recommendation. I figured I might as well give this esteemed career counselor a shot too. Her reputation preceded her.
But I could tell something was off right away. First, Desiree buzzed me in, then made me wait for what felt like an eternity in what she referred to in an important tone of voice over the intercom as the “corridor.” It was an unseasonably cold, windowless space that was slightly below ground. I sat in the waiting area’s only chair, shivering and wondering what this woman had against sunlight. I was on the verge of hightailing it out of there when I heard a door creak open.
Desiree had finally come to fetch me, in her signature look—a snazzy pantsuit, not a copper hair out of place. We walked through the corridor and up a few stairs, which led directly into her living room. Her workplace was a monument to minimalism, all gleaming planes and uncluttered surfaces, nothing like the Coleman College career center, a wood-paneled office lined with binders filled with the contact information of various alumni.
She gestured for me to take a seat on a compact sofa. When she’d settled into the chair across from me and asked me why I’d booked an appointment with her, I’d told her the truth: I’d heard my friends talking about her and wanted to see what the fuss was all about. To be sure, Geeta kept saying I probably didn’t need Desiree’s services. Despite my so-so study habits, I maintained a high GPA. Geeta, on the other hand, had more Bs than As, and no idea what she wanted to do after college. Her parents, already devastated that she had abandoned her plans—their plans, to be precise—to pursue medicine, were calling her every night, asking if she had “any news.”
When Desiree asked me at that first meeting what I was most worried about, I’d told her my biggest concern for the future was that I wouldn’t be able to figure out a way to make a living doing what I loved. All the job opportunities I ever heard about involved sitting around in air-conditioned offices crunching numbers. Unrealistic as it may have been, I simply wanted to bake. I’d discovered my passion when I worked at a bakery the summer before my senior year of high school. I was supposed to oversee the cash register, but by August, I was hauling loaves of sundried tomato bread out of the industrial oven, as happy as I was sweat-slicked. From that point on, the smell of a bakery always felt like home to me.
During the course of our initial conversation, Desiree kept interrupting me. She acted like she already knew exactly what I wanted, which she told me was “to be high–net worth and high visibility.” Beyond being untrue, her read on me was presumptuous. “I don’t really care about that stuff. I just want to be successful enough to get by,” I said. “Pay the bills, hang out with my friends. I’m not seeking world domination.”
“You need to think bigger,” she said, rising from her seat to stand over me and placed her hands on the crown of my head. “Your potential is tremendous. I can feel it.” She started kneading my scalp, as if she were giving me a treatment at a salon shampoo station.
Desiree returned to her chair and proceeded to ask me a series of strange questions about whether there were people in my life who aroused excessive jealousy (no one) and which historical figures I would like to have brunch with (Julia Child?). She then recited an assortment of sounds, asking me whether hearing them made me “expand” or “contract.”
Finally, Desiree took a seat behind the desk in the corner of the room and typed her conclusions into a computer. After a few minutes, she printed out a banner-length graph. This, she told me, was a projection of my potential.
Her major prescription was that I drop out of school immediately.
“Now?” I asked. It was almost April. My last final exams were in a few weeks, and if I could maintain my past performance, it was likely that I’d graduate summa cum laude.
“Immediately,” she replied.
“You’re kidding, right? What kind of career counselor—”
“College is holding you back. It’s imperative.” Desiree began citing names of visionaries whose cachet at the start of their careers was that they weren’t college graduates: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey. “It’s a point of differentiation that will make your biography infinitely more interesting. Trust me.” She told me I should head to the Maldives, where my destiny awaited.
“Why the Maldives?” I asked.
“When you work with a member of Consortium Associates, you don’t need to ask questions. You follow your plan and you watch as the world falls at your feet,” she said.
But all I could do was spring to my feet and mutter my half-hearted thanks. I’d had enough. Before the allotted fifty minutes were up, I was running like hell to the nearest bus stop.
When I got home, I told my friends about the strange session with their anointed guru. “Can you believe this?” I asked them, still out of breath.
Leigh was stone-faced. She said she thought that what Desiree had said made a certain kind of sense. “What will it hurt? You’ve already learned most of what you will here, right?”
It was one thing for a random woo-woo career counselor to tell me to quit my studies and take a solo vacation on the other side of the world just weeks before graduation, but I expected more support from one of my closest friends. Then again, Leigh always had a competitive streak, and I wondered if she may have had ulterior motives. Everyone knew that Coleman only gave out fifty summas. Without me in the mix, she stood a stronger chance.
“I am not dropping out,” I said. “That’s insane.”
“Yeah, she’s not doing that,” Geeta chimed in, bless her. “Not happening.”
“I don’t understand how this woman can help you two,” I said earnestly.
“I’m not saying her advice is the only advice I listen to. But, you know, I’m keeping an open mind,” was Geeta’s reply.
“I’d be careful,” I said, looking at one friend and then the other. “That woman gives me a bad feeling.” It was one thing to keep an open mind. It was another to let your brain fall out of your head.
Over the following weeks, I ignored Desiree’s phone calls. Eventually, they stopped. Finally, I was done with her. But evidently, she wasn’t done with me.