I cringed, holding my cell away before I could utter something I would regret. I’d been on the phone with my mother for less than a minute and already she was asking the question I’d been dreading. “Working on it,” I told her, staring at the open webpages in front of me: remnants of my hopeless search. I had just graduated from NYU with the most useless degree imaginable—a Bachelor of Fine Arts in sketching and drawing—and was facing the reality of my decision. I had to move out of my apartment in student residence by the end of the week, and I hadn’t found a new place to live, let alone a job to pay for it. “New York is expensive,” Mom continued. “I hope you have a plan.” My fingers closed tightly around my phone. Her meaning wasn’t lost on me; the plan had always been for me to enter law school after completing my BFA, and now that I wasn’t, my parents were cutting me off. They were hoping I’d crash and burn and come running back to them saying how right they were and pleading with them to send me.
