Senator Sloan loosens his tie and settles back in the armchair in the corner. He takes a long swig from his can of Diet Coke. I slouch in the chair behind my desk. We’re silent for a while. It’s comfortable. Just two guys, hanging out. My brain can’t quite wrap itself around the fact of who he is anymore. Every once in a while my mind kicks me, like, Dude, you’re chilling with Alabaster Sloan!!! And then it goes back to feeling normal.

Senator Sloan glances around the room. I fight the urge to bustle around and straighten things up. It’s only a tiny mental fight. I’m too exhausted.

“Your work with SCORE is volunteer?” Sloan says.

“Yes, sir. We have a couple of grants but nothing that would cover an actual staff position.”

“Who writes your grants?”

“I do.” I grin. “Most of the behind-the-scenes work is me.”

“Impressive,” the senator says. “I know how much work goes into something like this.”

That’s not fair. Don’t be that guy, I chide myself. There’s a temptation, for sure, to puff myself up in front of Senator Sloan. I add, “At least, it was all me in the beginning. Kimberly has really stepped up in the last few months. I wouldn’t be able to do nearly as much without her.”

“And when you graduate? Nonprofit sector, politics? What do you envision?”

When anyone else asks me this, it feels like a can of worms. Like there is something squirming inside me yearning to get out, and I can never put words to it. The question itself feels like a game I can’t win. But when Sloan asks, it’s not hard to answer honestly.

“I don’t know. I want to do a bunch of things. To make a difference. Is that corny?”

“What’s the point of anything, if not to make a difference?” he answers.

“Yeah.” I muse on that. “I’m not sure everyone sees it that way.”

“Then they’re wrong,” he says, in that definitive, resonant preacher voice. His certainty fills the small space.

I riffle the corners of a stack of paper on my desk. “I’m supposed to want something concrete. Something simple. To be a lawyer. An accountant. A teacher.”

“Do you want to teach?”

“Not per se.” I pause. “But leadership is teaching, isn’t it? From a slant, maybe.”

Senator Sloan swigs the Diet Coke. Studies me. “You have a vision,” he says. “You just don’t know how to realize it yet.”

“I do realize,” I say quietly. It’s strange, that it feels like a secret, something to place in a vault, or to be ashamed of.

“Mmm.” He shakes his head. “I mean realize, in the sense that you don’t know how to bring it into fruition yet. How to make it real.”

“Oh. Yeah. For sure.” I shrug, smile as brightly as I can in the face of the uncertainty that is my future. “All things in time, or something like that?”