"Only the first step into the rest of our lives." She doesn't really try for flippancy at all. She needs him to be serious about this, anyway. Get his head together. "If you're going to freak out we should stop and do it right here. Then you'll have it out of your system and you'll get this shit done."

“I’m not freaking out.”

He’s not.

“Do I seem like I’m freaking out, to you? That’s a little availability heuristic of you, Wicker, I thought we’d graduated past Psych 101. It’s just the one thing standing between me and grad school on the one hand, and me and abject poverty on the other.”

Both ways lies financial instability, obviously. A Bachelor’s in Comp Lit and a PhD in Philosophy won’t do him any favors on the job market. He probably shouldn’t say that during the interview.

"Oh, no. You seem very calm. The most amount of calm a person can be. And, please, you're as far away to living in the gutter as I am. It's not in my mom's interest to have me hanging around with the lower class. She'll keep shelling out money for as long as she's in the public eye. And then some."

“...thanks, Jules. I’m glad to know I can mooch of your mother’s boundless compassion for useless layabouts.”

Despite himself, he feels better. Jules always knows how to get him out of his head- half the time, because she can’t see why anyone would want to be in there. He’s long since given hope that they’ll be anything other than friends- or not, since he keeps thinking about it- but he’s glad they have this.

”They’ll probably take anyone halfway conscious for philosophy. I’m as good as in,” he asserts, trying to will it true. He doesn’t need another failure under his belt; he’s running out of notches.

She straightens his jacket and brushes the hair out of his eyes. "That's the spirit. You'll run circles around them. You've been preparing for this since you could string a sentence together."

He closes his eyes. The wind is biting, his shirt itches, but he is going to ace this interview.

He takes a sip of his coffee, and knocks on the door to his future.

After a respectful pause, the future does not answer. He knocks again, more tentatively.

"It's Quentin Coldwater, for the grad school interview?"

Calling out through a closed door doesn't much help. Maybe he went out to do something more fun than interview two nerds. Maybe he's having an orgy and can't come to the door. Maybe he's died of a sudden and rare condition-

The door opens.

"Sorry to keep you waiting," says the woman, in a crisp British accent. "Come in, have a seat."