Fiction: A Good Day

By Jack Whaler

It’s Sunday evening and I’m getting ready for bed and this is going to be a Good Day. A no-tears day. A certainly-no-crying-in-the-parking-lot-behind-fraternity-row-on-a-Saturday-night kind of day. And even though tomorrow is also my interview day, that’s exactly the sort of day it’ll be. A Good Day. 

I’m already in my sleep sweats, and I’m just doing the last preparations for tomorrow: I’ve got notebooks, my jacket in case the ol’ Oregon rain kicks in, and two Advil in a little plastic bag that makes them look downright illicit. And what more could I need? It’ll be a simple one: classes in the morning, a little break to shower and eat and prepare, and then my interview. One Good Day, coming up.

—

My alarm rings and I paw around for my phone on my desk, bumping pens and charging cables and the flimsy thin paper that the campus newspaper is printed on, until I feel the cracks on my phone screen, and I pull it up close to see without my contacts in. I half-open an eye and then both my eyes slam open at once because it’s 7:49 and I must have snoozed it once while half asleep and Topology starts in eleven minutes and I’m going to be late.

I’m pulling my arm through the sleeve of a flannel and dashing into the hall bathroom to splash water on my face and put just the teensiest bit of moisturizer on, and one of the sinks is clogged with vomit and that is just so gross and I need contacts too but there’s not enough time and it’ll have to be glasses for now, and oh God it’s 8:02 when I’m even out the door, running with my feet not totally in my sneakers but more like on top of my shoes and pressing down the heels so that they’re effectively just slippers and I’m going as fast as I can without them flying right off.

Fuck fuck fuck every single step I know I’m late and at 8:06 I’m in the building and Jesus shit two flights of stairs and the classroom door is shut, and I can’t breathe but I push my shoulder into it and I sorta stumble into the room.

Dr. Chambers is talking, saying something borderline incomprehensible about functions and pseudo compactness, and then he stops mid-sentence. I lower my head and walk toward an empty seat at the back, but the professor is still silent and no one’s making any noise and I wince and my classmates are staring and not in a friendly look-and-smile kind of way but more like a get-to-your-fucking-seat kind of thing, and once I’m in the chair the zipper to my backpack is so preposterously loud and everyone looks at me, and Dr. Chambers only resumes once I have a notebook and pen out. For the rest of the class I’m not really following whatever proof is going on. All I can think about is the little pause in the class’ momentum that I caused, and I think about it over and over and over again and oh God there's this little jiggle of energy in my stomach and the air in my throat is feeling like really weirdly wet but my mouth is very dry and why’d I even come today? Like I could’ve just reviewed the professor’s notes after class which I’ll probably need to do anyway and then people wouldn’t think of me as an interrupter or all sweaty and flustered.

And God, God, this is not the right headspace at all for my interview, the only PhD interview I even got. If I fuck this up I guess I’m moving back home with my parents like a fucking loser and waiting to apply again next year. God knows I’ve prepped for this thing though, and not just in the last three years of late night econ problem sets or watching my classmates live and have fun on Insta while I worked and worked and worked, but I’ve prepped for this actual conversation itself. I practiced hypothetical questions and answers until I had them memorized and then I practiced in the mirror until I got my facial expressions and tone and cadence and whole way of speaking down in a way that seems lucid and unrehearsed. I even looked up the exact pronunciation of my interviewers’ names online and I practiced them over and over again: Professor Basse and Professor Goyal. And I’m going to wow their socks off with my stellar communication skills, and afterward they’ll convene and one of them will go, ‘Wow, that guy seems like he could give a very engaging lecture,’ and they’ll both nod and tell their colleagues and then there’ll be a room of professors all nodding in unison and next thing I know I’ll be checking my email and oh what’s that? An acceptance email? Full funding for five years? And then I’ll make a big public Facebook post about it and everyone will like it and all sorts of people will see it and be like, ‘Wow, this guy is going places, I should get to know him,’ and all these cute girls from my classes will send me messages and I’ll come up with witty responses and they’ll be like, ‘Oh wow, I can’t believe we overlooked him for so long,’ and then I’ll sleep with a bunch of them and there’ll be drama about who gets me and maybe a few will have their hearts permanently broken and they’ll keep thinking about me long into the future and shed occasional tears and be like, ‘If only I had seen him sooner.’

That’s exactly what’s going to happen. And that starts today. Forget Topology and pseudo compactness. Forget anything to do with fraternities. None of that matters. It’s just me and the interview.

Probability Theory starts in eight minutes, but I don’t think stumbling through moment-generating functions is going to help right now. I’ll send the professor a note that I’m not feeling great and that I want to keep from spreading whatever I have. How courteous! Then I’ll go to the gym instead and cardio the edge off. 

—

At the gym, I see Angela with an open elliptical beside her. She’s wearing a fuchsia workout top that I’ve seen her wear before and I wish I had let her know the first time that it isn’t flattering, like in a friendly acquaintance way, because I know she’d care. It’s a little snug on her, gently put, not to mention the whole color issue. But this is the second time I’ve seen her wear it, so I definitely can’t tell her now, and as if I’d ever be that blunt anyway, so I just wave and take out my earbuds and ask her how her weekend was.

“Midterms are killing me!” she says. “Went to Sig Nu on Saturday but otherwise I just studied for Astro. How about you?”

I want to wince at the mention of greek letters but I hold it. “Good, good,” the words are already out of my mouth but I don’t know what I’m going to say next and I pause to try to think of something that might allude to a perfectly fun-happy-normal one, and I can tell I’m thinking too long and so I continue, “but nowhere near as good as this elliptical action is gonna be!” 

“Truly the only thing I look forward to.” She rolls her eyes and play-laughs. Her real laugh is throatier and kind of gaspy, but she’s being nice and so I smile back and that’s a genuine one from me. She’s still looking at me, and she starts to open her mouth and it hangs half-open before she closes it. Her eyes are way too round and God I’m sure she heard about the scene on Saturday night or maybe even saw it herself and it looks like she wants to ask if I’m okay or something and that is so not what I’ve signed up for today. 

So I put my earbuds in, hop onto the machine next to her, and start to pedal. For the next 45 minutes, I push my legs forward and back, forward and back, way faster than I usually would. The little groove of my spine starts to fill up with sweat. From time to time, Angela glances in my direction, but I don’t turn. I watch the gym in front of me. The unoccupied medicine balls, the fitness bros grunting as they squat, the dumbbells scattered across the floor and the spots in the racks where they should be. My legs move and move and move and move, but the view never changes.

—

After, I book it to my room for a quick shower and some last minute prep. Blistering water pours over my body, but I’m still thinking about that look that Angela had. She must have known. She must have.

See, on Saturday, there was a bit of a situation. I went to a fraternity party. I hadn’t been to one since freshman year when my whole floor went to ‘The Great Fratsby’ and I’m pretty sure the frat only let me in because there were a bunch of girls with us, and then I mostly just stood around and watched these senior guys wearing suits and backward baseball caps try to hook up with them. Eventually I went home and decided I never wanted to do that again.

But this year, with graduation on the horizon, I got thinking about all these things I told myself would happen in college. There was the academic stuff, of course. I’d get into a grad school and go become a professor and make buckets of money and wear lots of tweed jackets and have lots of answers. But there were more immediate social dreams too. I’d have a girlfriend and so many friends and people to keep in touch with after graduation. I had just been waiting and waiting, and then all of a sudden I was a second-semester senior and I had already used up seven-eighths of college and when exactly was that going to happen? The stress sorta collapsed on me then. I just felt this weight, like a rock lodged somewhere in my chest cavity or something, and I knew this was my last shot. A few months to make it all happen. I needed to shake it up.

So over the weekend I went to a fucking toga party at the Sigma Nu house. Ample red cups. Beer smells everywhere. Sweat smells everywhere. Music blasting with the bass turned up so high that the glass in the windows vibrated, and how do people even like that? There were all these gym bros with bedsheet togas, and some of them had to have been on steroids or at the very least flexing their muscles for a majority of the night. They were laughing and playing beer pong, and there were all these girls around in togas that were cropped way way short into like mini dresses, and there’s no way that was historically accurate.

I was thinking about that, the whole lack of historical accuracy, when I saw Jenna from my hall freshman year standing by herself and just like watching a game of beer pong, and she looked great in her toga and also very bored. So this was my moment, right? I pulled open my phone and Googled ‘famous ancient greek women’ and scrolled and scrolled until I found a name I thought I could pronounce. I walked up to her, gestured toward her outfit, and I was like, “I hear that’s how Agnodice of Athens wore her togas too.”

She turned toward me, made eye contact for a second, and then turned right back to the beer pong. So I was like, “Oh you don’t know Agnodice?” and then she still didn’t respond and I just stood there waiting for her to do something and I just felt this compulsion to shout out ‘Fuck!’ but I didn’t. Instead, my internal monologue was more like, ‘Please respond and don’t make me look so dumb, please,’ but she just kept watching the beer pong and ignoring me and I was just standing there looking at her and I started to feel weird and I’m sure other people were looking at me, and I guess I felt a little humiliated, so I pretended to check something on my phone and walked away.

Downstairs, there were a couple of people from class. I waved and they gave me the head nod back, and I was like phew and I walked over and this guy Sundeep was like, “This party’s a fucking rager man.”

And I was like “Oh yeah, a rager for sure.” The group wasn’t really talking, just sorta casually sipping drinks and swaying, and they were smiling and laughing or whatever and I didn’t really get it. Like what part of this was fun?

But maybe I was missing something! I scanned the room. There was a guy that was full-on shirtless. His toga’s shoulder strap dangled from his waist and how was it staying on? Did he have it belted? Another guy had an unboxed thing of boxed wine and he was screaming, “Slap the bag! Slap the bag!” And all these little frat bros with their big muscles lined up and put their mouths on the nozzle and slapped the bag and everyone was yelling and laughing and Sundeep looked like he was in awe and ha-ha what a fun time isn’t it so fun to watch these people we don’t know get drunk?

This guy wearing sunglasses inside pushed past us, like he bumped into Sundeep and physically shoved me, and I stumbled a bit, and he was like, “Watch it,” and why couldn’t he have just asked or said excuse me like any reasonable person would? I shot him a look and everyone else was like, “What?” and I was like, “That guy just pushed me,” and they were like, “I mean you were kind of in the way.”

And I just looked around the group and no one was getting it and I wasn’t having fun and I’m sure I was being anti-fun for them too, so I was like, “Hey I’m gonna go grab some air outside,” and they were like, “Oh, see you.”

It was cold outside, but I felt heavy all of a sudden and I sat down on the curb of the parking lot and I started to think. I was trying to figure out what I could have said or done differently in there to change the outcome, and I guess I started to cry a bit. Just a few tears. Nothing big. Nothing ugly. And no one was around so I just let ‘em out and kept sitting there. Maybe I made a noise or two, who knows. And then all of a sudden I heard this snickering behind me and I turned and there was this set of toga guys back there and one pointed at me and raised his fists to his eyes and called out, “Wahhh!”

And I was like, “What’s so funny guys?” and it came out way louder than it should’ve and it probably caught them off guard, and they stopped for a second and glanced at each other and then one of them started laughing again and then they all did and it was way louder now, and what was I gonna do? Go over there to talk to them and convince them they were being mean and get them to apologize? And the laughter was making the whole situation much more public and people were starting to come outside to look and I finally just turned away and walked back to my dorm and went to bed.

—

And hoo, okay okay no need to relive that one any more, of course people saw and logged that in their impressions of me. But that doesn’t matter right now. Not today. I can relive that shitty moment tomorrow or any other day, but today is Interview Day and headspace counts!

I wrap my towel around my waist, and head back into my dorm room. I re-moisturize and put on my slacks and my blazer and I know I don’t look too fancy but I know it looks like I’m taking this seriously, and I dash downstairs to get a chicken breast from the cafeteria downstairs which sounds like peak performance food if I’ve ever heard of it. The interview isn’t for a couple of hours, but honestly what more can I even do at this point? I scan over my notes. I pronounce Basse and Goyal a few more times. Then I pull out my phone, and open up Insta and scroll. There are pictures of some beach trip that a classmate went on and they’ve all got their hands on each other's shoulders and they’re all smiling and smiling, and I think that’s enough Insta for today.

—

The interview is a Zoom thing, and so as soon as I got invited, I booked one of the video conference rooms at the back of the library with good lighting. There’s this beautiful wood and like bound volumes of some old academic journal in the background, and if anything establishes context cues for grad school admissions it’s polished wood and old-ass books, right?

So I head to the library. I pull the door to my dorm room shut and walk out and shortcut across the grass on the quad. These guys throw a frisbee back and forth and they keep yelling, “Lay out! Lay out!” before one of them dives and then they yelp and laugh and surely it must be some sort of act. My stomach throbs. I swipe into the library and walk past groups of students at study tables doing anything but studying and I work my way to the room at the very back of the library.

I set up my laptop camera at eye level. I’ve heard that’ll make me look more confident on the video call. I’ve got an external keyboard so I can type with my shoulders back and not hunched up on the laptop keyboard and I’m hoping that exudes just the right level of confidence, even if I’m tabbing through my notes on the computer as I chat with them.

And then I sit there. I should probably be doing something, but the interview is only in a couple of minutes now, and really, what can I do? I click on the link early. My computer has that message that says, “Please wait, the meeting host will let you in soon,” and I just sit there and stare.

And all at once, the screen flashes and there’s a conference room with these two professors staring at me, and even though they’re zoomed out and tiny, I know their faces.

“Hi,” I say, and I smile in a crooked sort of way that I’ve practiced before that makes me look more genuine than I do with my real smile.

“Welcome,” Professor Goyal says. Her voice is lower than I expected. “We’re excited to have you join us today. Why don’t we do a quick round of introductions, and then we can jump into the interview itself.”

I nod. “Sounds great.” 

We do the rounds. Sonal Goyal, Professor of Economics. Amadou Basse, Joint appointment, Math and Econ. Me, college senior, eager applicant. No new information conveyed, but I smile and nod and tell them it’s nice to meet them anyway.

“Great,” Professor Goyal says, “So let’s get into it. Don’t think of this as some big formal interview. We’ve read your application, and obviously we’re interested. So we want to get to know you a little better.” She smiles. I nod, and smile back. “So let’s start off big. Why study economics?”

And this is a question I know. This one I have more than memorized.

“The truth is, I don’t know exactly what questions I want to answer,” I say and Dr. Basse squints, but on the inside I am absolutely grinning. “But I know that a PhD in Economics offers incredible training in an approach that can be used to answer almost any thorny social question in the world.

“Let me back up,” I say, “When I first came to college, I was overwhelmed by everything. I’d have these moments where I’d just be hit with how little I knew about the world. I still don’t, for what it’s worth, but it was more shocking then. One time, I was coming back from a math class where everything had seemed so clear and definite, and someone was watching TV in my dorm’s lounge. There was this guy on the screen in a bowtie. He was talking, very confidently, about fluctuations in stock prices. He kept using the word ‘punished,’ like, ‘Apple is getting punished this quarter from declining iTunes sales.’ It sounded plausible, but I found myself wondering how he knew that, or if he even knew that. So I wrote a little note for myself on my phone, ‘What causes stock prices to change? How do we know?’ And I kept jotting things down as I wondered about them. I overheard two people discussing some public policy on the way to class. Someone called it ‘effective.’ Well what makes it effective? And how could they know? Onto the list it went. Sometimes the questions were tiny. Our dining hall has this sustainability initiative called ‘Trayless Tuesdays,’ where they try to restrict food waste by reducing how much students can even carry. Students hated it at first. There was even a boycott at one point. Did the program work? Was there less food waste? And if there was, was it because students were eating less food on Tuesdays, or was it just that less students showed up? I wrote it down.

My list kept growing. Every once in a while I’d stumble across an answer and cross a question off, but the ratio of questions asked to answered was far from in equilibrium. 

Then, junior year, I took my first course in Econometrics and Causal Inference, and I was floored. There weren’t answers to any of my specific questions of course, but for the first time, I felt like I was actually learning a framework for figuring them out. I learned about differences-in-differences and propensity score matching and RCTs, and I started to go back through my list and really think about how I might go about answering them. What data would I need? What approaches could I take? As I did that, I realized I wasn’t nearly as interested in the questions as I was in the methodological approaches for how one might answer them.

“So I took every Econometrics class offered here, and then I found books and papers online. I took anything tangentially related—Statistics, Math, an odd class in the Psych department on survey design. It was never enough. 

“And that’s why I’m here. I want more. I know I’m interested in econometrics and causal inference. I want to learn new approaches, and even develop some. And I don’t know exactly what econ questions I want to answer yet, but I want to explore that in the course of a PhD.”

There’s a pause in the room for a second. Dr. Basse glances at Professor Goyal. “Now that,” he says, “is a very good answer.”

And I smile and even though it feels like my stomach is scrunching up like a drying sponge, I know I’m crushing it. 

Dr. Basse looks down at a sheet in front of him. It’s probably my CV or my application. “So it says here that you did an applied microeconomics research internship. Can you tell us about that? And, uh, given your interest in methodology, tell us about the approach you used, the identifying assumptions, and what you see as the method’s limitations for these particular questions?”

And I’ve prepped this one too. Even though I spent most of the internship just manually entering numbers into spreadsheets, I’ve got a spin on this like he wouldn’t believe. About automated data collection and sample sizes and statistical power first, but also about clever alternate approaches that we could’ve used. I smile, but not too big. Friendly, warm. I can see myself doing it in the little camera preview window and it looks just right.

—

When the Zoom ends and the window closes out, I exhale. I shut the lid of my laptop just in case my camera’s still on, and then I do a little fist pump. I jump around a bit, just a few hops around the room, and I know this is not very cool, but I just need to do it and I do it and I don’t care. And then I shout, “That’s what I’m fucking talking about!” and even though the room is supposed to be pretty muffled, people in the library turn toward me.

And I open the door and I’m like, “Sorry, sorry, I just crushed my PhD interview, that’s all!”

“Congrats bro,” someone says, and there’s a bit of laughter. People are still staring, and I take a little bow. There’s another snicker or two. They turn back toward their own things, their books, their conversations, whatever. And then there’s nothing.

I put my laptop and my keyboard in my bag. Nothing feels different. I thought it would feel big, or I’d feel triumphant or something. But my skin just feels a little buzzy, and my blazer feels tight. And that’s it.

I walk out of the study room. Then back through the library. Past the alleged studiers, and the table that the “Congrats bro” came from. They’re flicking little bits of paper at one another and laughing and taking cover behind the desk and chairs. One girl holds a notebook up over her face as a shield, and they’re all cracking up and I stutter step for a second. Part of me wants to stop them, to interrupt them and tell them how impressed they should be and how big of a deal this is and how they might not get it now but someday they will. But I don’t. I know that’s not even close to appropriate. My stomach twinges and I speed up toward the door of the library.

Back along on the quad, the guys are still playing frisbee. They’re damp with sweat, pit stains visible even from a distance and they look even happier than before, breathless grins all around. I wince. I speed up again and I’m almost jogging now, or as much as I can in these slacks. They’re stiff and my legs pull against them in the crotch and if I go any faster I think they might rip and I do not need that today. My shoes clomp and my backpack bumps on my lower back.

Back in my dorm room, I drop my things by the door. I hang up the blazer and slacks. I pull my sleep sweats back on. I sit on the corner of my bed. No phone, no textbooks, no laptop, no notes. No place to be next. No anything. I’m still. 

And all of a sudden there’s this weight in my stomach, and I don’t know how but my body is just crumpling into the bed, like some straight up tractor beam shit and my face is in the pillow and oh God I don’t even know what it is or why now, but I just need it all to be easier and I don’t know what I’m not doing that everyone else is. I just don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. 

I take gaspy breath after gaspy breath into the pillow, and the pillow is fully damp and how can air even come through all the feathers or synthetic down and fabric and water or whatever? It clearly can because I’m still breathing, but still.

And eventually, I’m not crying any more. I’m just smushed into the pillow and my nose is bent against the fabric. I sit up. I wipe my face. I probably need to re-moisturize but I’m not quite ready to brave the hall bathroom just yet.

Time passes. Minutes, hours, I don’t know. I rock back and forth a little on my mattress. The springs creak. I don’t even know what I could’ve done differently to make this day better, and even if I did, there probably isn’t even enough time left in college to make a difference now. So that’s that. That’s college. That was college. 

And then I have an idea, and I start all at once. I pull out my phone and pull up Insta, and as soon as my feed loads there are classmates smiling and taking shots at bars and looking very very pretty and happy and I feel a little dot of moisture by my eye, but I’m not here to aimlessly scroll. I go to Angela’s profile. She’s posted a series of hiking pics recently and her outfits are still like maximally unflattering but that’s so not why I’m here. I start a DM. “Hey cardio buddy, wanna grab food sometime post-elliptical??” My finger hovers over the send button, and I jam it down and wince.

I wait. I sit. I check to see if she’s read my message and she hasn’t and I flip my phone back over. A minute later, I checked again. 

And it’s Monday evening now, and this was not a Good Day. Tomorrow might not be so great either. And I don’t know how long it’ll be until I can make a day Good, but still, I’m going to try.

Jack Whaler is a new writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work has previously appeared in Berkeley Fiction Review.