Young Jane Young(73)

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access to health care. They are based out of Philadelphia. They do a lot of work in Mexico and they LOVE that you speak Spanish.

You arrange to have a phone interview, and if that goes well, you will fly to Philadelphia to speak with the team.

You are imagining your new life in Philadelphia. You browse winter coats online. The stores in Florida rarely stock them. How nice it will be to be somewhere with winter. How nice it will be to be somewhere where no one knows your name or the stupid mistake (series of mistakes, if you’re being completely honest) you made when you were twenty.

It is June. You make your mom leave the house, and you sit in your bedroom, and you wait for the phone to ring at 9:30 a.m. It is summer, and your mom’s school is on break, and she is hovering around you like flies around raw meat.

The phone does not ring.

At 9:34, you begin to worry that you missed the call, or that you screwed up the time. You check your e-mail again to confirm the details. Yes, 9:30.

If you wait for the phone to ring, turn to page 124.

If you call (even though the interviewer said she would call you – who cares if you look “too eager”?), turn to page 126.





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The interviewer picks up on the first ring.

“Oh Aviva,” she says, “I meant to call you.”

You can tell she is not referring to the interview.

“We’ve decided to go in another direction,” she says.

Normally, you wouldn’t ask for details. But you’ve had enough of being ignored, so you say, “Can you level with me? What happened? I really felt good about this one.”

The interviewer pauses. “Well, Aviva, we did an Internet search on your name, and the stuff about you and the congressman came up. It didn’t really bother me, but my boss felt that since we’re a not-for-profit, we need people of impeccable character. His words, not mine. But the truth is, we live and die on donations, and some of those people can be super conservative and weird about sex stuff. I argued for you. I truly did. You’re great, and I’m sure you’ll find something great.”

“Thanks for being honest,” you say. You hang up the phone.

This is why no one is calling you.

Because even if no one has heard of the Aviva Grossman scandal in Philly, in Detroit, in San Diego, they only have to search your name, and they can find every last ugly detail. You should know. Internet searches were your specialty.

Want to know about the shady past of the Kissimmee River? Want to know which city councilmen are homophobes? Want to know about that dumb girl from Florida who had anal sex with a married congressman because he wouldn’t put it in her vagina?

The discovery of your shame is one click away. Everyone’s is, not that that makes it any better. In high school, you read The





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Scarlet Letter, and it occurs to you that this is what the Internet is like. There’s that scene at the beginning where Hester Prynne is forced to stand in the town square for the afternoon. Maybe three or four hours. Whatever the time, it’s unbearable to her.

You will be standing in that square forever.

You will wear that “A” until you’re dead.

You consider your options.

You have no options.

Turn to the next page.





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You are depressed.

You read every Harry Potter that has been written.

You swim in your parents’ pool.

You read all the books on your childhood bookshelf.

You read a series of books called Choose Your Own Adventure that you liked when you were young. Even though you’re not the intended age for them anymore, you feel obsessed with them that summer. The way these books work is you get to the end of a section, and you make a choice, and then you turn to the corresponding page for that choice. You think how much these books are like life.

Except in Choose Your Own Adventure, you can move backward, and you can choose something else if you don’t like how the story turned out, or if you just want to know the other possible outcomes. You would like to do that, but you can’t. Life moves relentlessly forward. You turn to the next page, or you stop reading. If you stop reading, the story is over.

Even when you were a kid, you were aware of the fact that the Choose Your Own Adventure stories were pretty bald morality tales. For instance, one of your favorite ones, Track Star!, involves a runner deciding whether or not to take performance-enhancing drugs. If you take the drugs, you’ll win for a while, but then something horrible will happen to you. You’ll be a victim of your poor choices.

You think that if your life were a Choose Your Own Adventure story – let’s call it Intern! – this would be the point where it would say THE END. You would have made enough poor choices for the story to have had a bad ending. The only





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redemption would be in going back to the beginning and starting again. This isn’t an option for you, because you are a person and not a character in a Choose Your Own Adventure.

The rub of the Choose Your Own Adventure stories is that if you don’t make a few bad choices, the story will be terribly boring. If you do everything right and you’re always good, the story will be very short.

You wonder if the congressman ever read Choose Your Own Adventure stories. He’s probably too old, but you think he would get a kick out of them and what a good metaphor they are for life.