Second string

“Where was I on the short list?”, I ask.
He smiles his polite, unaffected smile; the smile he gives when it is an uncomfortable question and he is trying to give nothing away while his mind races to find an appropriate answer.

We have just finished sticky toffee pudding after a work dinner someone else has paid for. It is his favourite dessert. It is also mine. He is tall and lean, skinny tie and fitted shirt, with close-cropped hair and the beginnings of a bald spot. He is my program director. I have been in the program long enough, and am close enough to the end, that I have no qualms about making him feel uncomfortable. Picking a fight when drunk. Saying what I think unfiltered.

The pause and hint of grimace behind that empty smile is enough.

“Wait, don’t answer that, I don’t actually want to know.”

There is a visible relaxing of the fake smile lines.
I was definitely not first choice.

I’m okay with that. In an applicant pool of overachievers, I do not rank high on the list. Too nerdy. Not enough real world experience. Socially awkward, maybe inappropriate. Like that one time I compared one of my best friends to a whale when she was in the late stages of pregnancy, wholly unaware of how horrible I was being. She was kind, forgiving and cognizant of my stupidity, and it did not bring our friendship to ruin. She then made me drink a vodka shot with a pickle chaser at her family cabin watching a sunset.
There were three available spots that year. I got in, probably by stroke of dumb luck, and probably because the top-ranked applicants didn’t choose this program as their first. It had the misfortune of being a great program in a really lame city. I would venture to say that all three of us in my year were second string. We share similar faults.

I think all this while sitting in a hot tub by myself in the dark after nine straight days of work. I’m going to ride my bike tomorrow and the day after, and hopefully it will rid my mind of all accumulated toxins. Hopefully it will take this heavy lump of anxiety in my chest away. Because there is a piece of me that is not-so-secretly hoping that I will win that essay competition I submitted to a while back (to what end? I don’t know), even though I know I am not of winning calibre and have preset my expectations so as not to be sorely disappointed, and all these second string remembrances are suddenly surfacing.