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have a degree in journalism. I wrote for the school newspaper.” Hamid looked up at her, trying to encourage her. Samantha nodded, her lips pressed together like she too was anxious about what Rachel would say. “I volunteered for a nonprofit that raises money for kids who need tutoring, medical care. I volunteer for the annual art auction.” Okay, that was better. “We raised 120 thousand dollars this year, 20 thousand more than last year.”  

    “Hmm,” Samantha said. “How many tickets did you sell?”

    “Four hundred?”

    “Rachel, you wrote on your resume that ticket sales went up almost twenty percent. How did you   manage that?”  

    “We-” her voice cracked and she cleared her throat. “We built on what we’d done the year before and expanded our mailing list. We, the executive director, did an interview on public radio.” She noticed she was wringing her hands and stopped. “Word of mouth helped too. People really like the art and the collection grows every year. So people come for that.”

    “What about hobbies? Languages?”  

    The room was quiet. Out the window she saw a family walk past, a man and woman, two kids, carrying towels and goggles and an inflatable elephant. They were headed to the pool. Unaware that on the other side of the reflective window was a girl with the rapt attention of her new coworkers, unable to name a single thing she’d accomplished in her twenty-three years.  

    “I run, sometimes. For exercise,” she said.  

    When she was thirteen she took first runner up in the Miss Kroeger pageant. Her local grocery store held a spring festival to celebrate twentieth year in her neighborhood. She had gone at the urging of her parents and at their insistence entered the pageant. Her prize was a coupon for a free turkey, her picture in the newspaper, shaking hands with the produce manager, a copy of which still hung at Kroeger, in the hallway near the bathrooms. The girl who beat her sang “God Bless America” a cappella and hit most of the notes. Most. Rachel, watched her realizing she had no talent and decided to do the robot dance to Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal.”  

    The small crowd that had gathered in the parking lot to watch her, mistook her performance for a comedy routine.  

    “And I played on a soccer team,” she added.  

    “In university?” Samantha asked, perking up.  

    “High school,” Rachel said. She looked around the room again and then, like someone else had taken charge of her mouth, blurted out. “I speak German.”

    German? She’d taken two German courses in college and could barely conjugate the verb to be.  

    “Well, that’s very good,” Samantha said. “German, quite a hard language, that. Quite guttural compared to French. Perhaps you could say something in German, just so we can hear it.”

    “I mean,” she said, looking at Kritika and Suki. “I can speak some German. Very, very basic German.”  

    “Just say something,” Samantha said.  

    Rachel cleared her throat. “Am Morgan” she said. “Gehen wir nach dem Biblioteque.” Yes! That was German! Something about going to the library. It must’ve come from one of those dialogues she’d been forced to memorize. It does come back to you.

    Samantha looked not pleased, but not disappointed either.   “Very good. And what did you just say?”  

    “I said -,” Rachel swallowed. Her throat was tight but she could still breath okay. She looked directly at Samantha now, wanting so badly to keep her non disapproval. “It’s very nice to meet you. I look forward. I look forward to working here. And...that’s it.”

    Before Samantha had a chance to ask her anything else, she sat down and looked down at her agenda.  

    ***

    After the meeting she headed straight for the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. What was wrong with her? German? Her face looked pale; her eyes, red. In another time zone she’d missed her bedtime. German? Where