Entitlement

by Rumaan Alam

She’d become the person she was destined to be, and that person would never have to go to an office.

Filmed with adolescent sebum, swollen with preteen braggadocio.

Weird sentence.

Matthew said, often, that most jobs were just sending email.

She wished him to know that she was comfortable sitting alone in a restaurant, but also someone who did not have to.

parenthood but the polishing of another into something like a mirror?

That life sometimes organized itself around these motifs (not one car crash but two!) and you felt some responsibility to figure out what they meant.

The men beside them were onto a new subject, Obama, Cuomo, someone. Why did their chat sound so familiar? Comic timing, a roll of an eye, an exaggeration with the pronunciation of certain words. This was how people talked now, as though the pleasure in their conversation was in their performance, their interpretation of a script provided for them.

She liked a bite at La Goulue, a movie at the Paris, a Vesper at Bemelmans, but she loved tromping through the underbrush, tossing a stick into a pond and watching the setters lose their minds.

Google.

money for the Throop School. I respect that.” Brooke didn’t care to defend the fact that she felt more loyalty to an old white man than to a Black woman her age.

Maggie wanted her daughter to understand, but comprehension was indifferent to how badly it was desired.

Those children were a ghost of a Brooke he’d never meet. We wish that, of the people we truly love, to see them as they were before we knew them.

people could only be judged by the numbers. Brooke, despite everything, was only her numbers. The grade point average, the permanent record, the credit report: it was never a secret, the extent to which data determined your life. The right person could extrapolate your life span from your zip code and body mass index. Could Andrea at Chase Bank look into the monitor of her PC and divine when Brooke would die?

In the old days you could slam down a heavy plastic receiver and feel something. She pressed the button to end the call, and it was anticlimactic.