Ten Girls to Watch by Charity Shumway

me with energy. Instead of my earlier, tattered self, I felt buoyant, like a pumped-up tire, ready to ride smoothly over whatever rocky roads came my way.
    Yes, I was also a tiny little bit worried that I might be doomed because unlike Kathy Knowlton as a young woman, I couldn’t say exactly what I wanted to do with my whole life, other than something vague like “be a writer” or “give back somehow” or “make enough money so I don’t have to move home.” But that was niggling. After melting away that morning, my confidence wasn’t quite firm yet, but it was re-forming, like Jell-O poured back into the mold and setting again quite nicely.
    XADI hadn’t given me any instructions for how to keep track of my interviews, but after Kathy I decided on an approach. I added a few short notes to my Excel spreadsheet, “Kathy Knowlton, Epidemiology Professor, University of Minnesota (married, four kids),” plus all the address, phone number, and e-mail information. Then I wrote up a profile. Nothing fancy, just a page, but I spent more than a few minutes on it, making sure I had Kathy’s quotes right, coming up with the right words to describe her enthusiasm for her research and her family. Who knew what good these profiles would do—I suspected XADI only wanted the spreadsheet—but after everything Kathy had told me, taking a little time felt appropriate. Besides which, wasn’t writing what I wanted to do with my life? Surely if Kathy Knowlton had wanted to be a writer, she wouldn’t have waited for an assignment. She would have seized whatever material came her way. I imagined a tidy pile of profiles, growing taller and taller. For just a second I pictured handing them all over to Regina, who’d read them in awe and immediately offer me a staff job.
    If I’d wanted someone to talk me further into fantasies like that one, I’d have called Helen. If I wanted someone to talk me back to reality, I’d call my dad. I decided a little reality was in order.
    Walking to the subway that night, I weaved past the tourists slowing up midtown’s pedestrian traffic, and then, hoping not to slow foot traffic myself, I stepped to the side of the sidewalk at a quiet spot between a Rolland’s Pretzel cart and a fire hydrant and dialed my dad.
    “Hello?” he said, as if he didn’t have caller ID.
    “Hi, Dad, it’s Dawn.”
    “Oh! How nice to hear your voice.”
    He was only in his fifties, but he’d been playing the part of a sweet old man for years. He got away with a lot because of it. “It was your birthday? Well, I plum forgot.”
    “So I guess Sarah told you my news,” I said.
    “That’s right! I was so pleased to hear it. So, tell me about the job.”
    When I talked to my mom, she always got a thrill out of the New York details— “They have sushi in convenience stores? My gosh!” —as if even the dingiest aspects of my life (like eating questionably fresh bodega sushi) were dusted with glamour. Not so with my dad. New York had no appeal for him. A fishing cabin on a lake in upstate New York, maybe. But the city? Nope. Add to that the fact that he just wasn’t a phone talker and could handle maybe seven minutes of chitchat max, and you had conditions that led to the development of good summarizing skills on my part. I hit the high points: fiftieth anniversary of contest, calls to women, office in basement of warehouse archives.
    “How nice that you have your own office,” he said.
    “I know,” I said. I’d been pretty impressed by that too, even if it was in a basement. If I’d had to pick one detail out of everything I’d said, I probably would have picked that one too. Just another data point proving my dad and I shared more brain waves than I sometimes liked to admit.
    “Are you walking home right now?” he asked. The city’s geography wasn’t his strong suit. For all he knew, midtown and Brooklyn were just a few blocks apart.
    “Well, not quite walking home, but walking to the subway that