Everything is going just as planned. Until it’s not…

I wake up before my alarm, like my body has been anticipating the moment all night long. Despite my nerves, I awake well-rested and full of adrenaline. I practically leap out of bed, pouring myself a cup of coffee I barely need. My energy is overflowing.

I shower and dress in the corporate-but-casual outfit that I’d picked out weeks ago with my roommate Elise: skinny black pants, a white silk button-up (untucked, because that says, “I’m professional, but cool”), and a gray tweed blazer. Plus a pair of black leather Rag and Bone booties on my feet that I’d scored on eBay for a song.

My laptop, tablet, and an old-fashioned datebook are tucked into a white leather tote with my initials monogrammed in tiny gold letters at the top, a graduation gift from my parents after I told them I’d won the internship.

The day is cold and gray, the streets wet from an evening drizzle. It’s only slightly unseasonable for May in Boston, but I don’t give a damn about the weather. I catch the red line at Porter Square, a ten-minute walk from the tiny two apartment I share with Elise in Cambridge, and join the rest of the morning commuters headed into downtown. After four surprisingly short years working my ass of at New England College, I’m finally one of them.

When I emerge from the T at South Station, I don’t even pause, turning across the bridge at Summer Street towards Scour’s headquarters, an old brick factory building that was converted to office space just a few years ago.

I’d practiced the trip at least ten times.

I’m not normally this neurotic (though, okay, Elise had certainly used that descriptor for me on more than one occasion — usually after she came home from a fraternity party to find me doing extra credit for one of my honors business classes). It’s just that this isn’t any summer internship. This is the Business Lab Program at Scour, the world’s largest search engine (some people go so far as to refer to the entire internet as Scour … these people are usually over the age of sixty-five and don’t know how to use Facebook).

Thousands of new graduates with an interest in the intersection of business and tech apply every year. They come from Harvard and Stanford and Princeton and MIT. They send their pristine transcripts and their impressive resumes and personal statements that they’d slaved over for months (although, if I’m honest, I started working on mine over winter break of sophomore year). Thousands of applications — some say as many as Harvard receives each year — and only four are chosen. Making the Business Lab Program infinitely more selective than those snooty snoots in Cambridge.

All those applicants, and I was chosen.

But the competition is just beginning.

Because the four interns aren’t just gaining valuable experience at one of the most influential tech companies in the world — they are also competing for a job. At the end of the summer, when projects are done and each has been evaluated, one of us will be hired on to lead a department at Scour. One of us will join the ranks of hot-shot Scour employees at a starting salary that would make most of my well-heeled classmates at NEC green with envy.

And from the moment I received the call telling me that I’d be one of the four, I’d been strategizing just how I can become the one. While my classmates started coasting towards graduation around the beginning of April, weeks left on their degrees, most with jobs secured (or safety nets firmly in place courtesy of mommy and daddy), I threw myself into studying Scour.

I read everything I could find about past interns and new hires. I read everything I could find about the company itself, which led me down quite a rabbit hole reading about its founder, Nixon Blake. And while there wasn’t that much to find, I committed it all to memory.

I feel only a little bit like a lunatic, knowing that I have Nixon Blake’s vital statistics running through my head like a Top 40 radio hit:

• Graduate, summa cum laude, from New England College (my alma mater, as of last week)
• Founded the company freshman year, when his roommate complained about not being able to find bootleg copies of his textbook online
• Was seed-funded by his sophomore year, and was a junior when Wollensky Venture Capital came a-calling and made him filthy, stinking rich
• Has since grown Scour into an international juggernaut, basically becoming synonymous with the internet and releasing a Scour laptop, tablet, and phone
• At over six feet tall, ripped, and chiseled, Nixon is a complete and total smoke show

It’s always when I get to that last fact that my brain stumbles, the Scour image search wallpapering the inside of my mind with shots of a guy with a jaw that could cut glass, a tasteful amount of stubble, and ice blue eyes that could cause your blood to freeze in your veins. And then there’s his dark, wavy hair that looks like it would be heaven to run your fingers through.

Jesus, Delaney. Down girl.

I pause, now standing at the wide glass doors of Scour world headquarters, letting the last bit of burning desire run out of my body. I can’t let myself be distracted by Nixon Blake, even if he is the sexiest human I’ve ever seen (in photos, and oh god, soon to be in real life). I might possibly end up working directly for him some day, so I need to turn that part of my brain off.

It’s usually not a problem for me, after all.

I take a deep breath. “You will be the top intern. This job is yours,” I whisper to myself before charging through the door, my boots clip-clopping on the polished floor and into my future.