“You should talk to him”

“You should go talk to him. It looks to me like he doesn’t have enough girls interested in him at the moment,” you say, loud enough that Jack must have heard. He looks towards you, and then his gaze drifts over to the girl, where it lingers on her for just a second too long.

“You’re right about that, he could use another girl or two,” she says, “but he seems a little needy to me. Did you see him just now? He was seeking validation. Lord knows I don’t need that in my life.”

“I’ve known more than my fair share of womanisers who’re only in it because they never had a good female figure in their life. It’s self-destructive behavior, if you ask me,” you say sagely, even half-believing it to be true.

“Oh trust me, I know plenty enough about that. Back home in Chennai, there were these rich boys in the neighborhood who would boast that they could have any girl that they wanted, because they were rich and powerful, and papa would have their backs if anything so much as went wrong. We all knew they were right, but god I would have loved to stick it to them.”

“Well, you know what you have to do now, don’t you? You’ve just got to make enough until you have plenty of fuck-you money, return to Chennai, and turn down every one of those assholes - I bet you they’re still working in daddy’s company as a second tier executive at that point.”

“It seems like you know me and my plans a little too well,” she says, a hand coming up to hide a smile. “I’m Shruti. What was your name again?”

“Alex,” you say. “But tell me more - what is your grand plan to get back at those boys?”

“It’s not an especially complex one,” she says. “Get a graduate degree in engineering, spend some time working for a big firm here in the States, then transfer operations over to India. Spend a decade or so building up connections and my name brand, then enter into the local politics game. I think I’ll have gotten demonstrably further than all of those pissers combined by that point, much less before I set my sights on the national stage…”

“Well, that’s ambitious,” you say, taking a second to wonder about what you’re doing with your life. You haven’t even really figured out your major, much less your life plan for the next 30 years, but hey, whatever, right? “You sure you can pull it off?”

“Things are a little harder because I’m a girl - you have to do twice as much to get half the recognition as guys back home, but the underlying plan is solid,” she says. “You underestimate the degree to which a good foreign degree draws prestige and power back home. It’s like flies to honey. They can’t resist.”

“Interesting,” you say, and you ask her a little more about her plans - she has a remarkable amount worked out already, as you discover while you try your best to poke holes in those lofty goals of hers.

The two of you spend the next half an hour chatting companionably, until the doors are unlocked, and people begin pouring into this room to the sound of thumping music in the hallway beyond. It looks like the party’s officially gotten started while the mixer was going on.

Shruti +10