Melting Point

Every substance has a melting point. At 32 degrees Fahrenheit, a popsicle has reached this point. Caleb squinted at the sun, halfway across the sky by now. Yeah, it’s long past 32 degrees, and he just paid $4.50 for the sticky mess in his hands.

He’s six years old, still no real concept of monetary value, and is not quite fast enough to finish his purple popsicle before it falls apart and drips down the length of his arm. His mother’s smile is brilliant and he looks up at her, giggling as she helps clean him up.

“Better eat faster next time,” she says. Caleb agrees, and from then on, every two dollar popsicle becomes a race between himself and the summer sun to see who can consume it first.

He’s thirteen years old, a middle schooler now with an interest in science. They just learned about melting points in class and he asks what color popsicle would melt the fastest. His friends laugh and his teacher doesn’t know, but a suggestion is made that he hold an experiment to find out. Caleb’s friends scoff at the idea, they tell him all popsicles would melt at the same speed. He laughs, too, but begs his dad to take him to the store and stocks up on all the colors of the rainbow. In his experiments, he thinks the purple ones melt the fastest. He collects the melted treats in bowls and freezes them for later. Caleb’s teacher is pleased with his initiative and tells him that he can be a real scientist some day.

When he’s twenty years old, Caleb visits an HMart with his friend and they stop to take a look inside the ice cream cooler. It’s February in New York City and the weather is a chilled 50 degrees.

“You want one?” His friend asks. Caleb nods, so they both grab a red bean popsicle. By the time they get back to their dorm, the ice is long gone.

“I always like ice cream when it’s cold out. Doesn’t melt as fast.”

His friend looks at him incredulously, then huffs and shakes his head. “You’re so weird, man.” Their parents would scold them for eating cold treats when it’s already so cold outside, but the old Chinese traditions also warned against eating ice cream on a too hot summer’s day for fear of stomachache, so Caleb thinks that they should be fine. “Only you would want ice cream when it’s still winter outside.”

He’s twenty-seven now, a working professional in the city that never sleeps, the greatest city in the world. Seven years ago, this was his idea of the perfect life, but seven years ago, he had no idea what “perfect” was. Financial stability was one thing. A girlfriend was another. A nice apartment uptown with a view of Central Park would be nice, too. But seven years ago, he never thought that he could have all of these things and still be unfulfilled and confused about where he was headed. 

The New York summer heat is sweltering, overbearing, for Caleb in his shirt and suit pants. He’s not quite sure why he came outside at all -- perhaps only to avoid the suffocating atmosphere of the private equity firm he’s been hiding away in since grad school. Two blocks from the office, around 52nd and 6th, he can see Radio City Music Hall right around the corner. Tourists with their children are walking up and down the Avenue of the Americas, and he wonders if they’re just as disappointed in this city as he is these days. Radio City looks a lot more impressive on TV than it does in real life.

An ice cream truck is parked on a corner and there’s a sizable line of kids and adults alike queuing around it. Caleb decides he might as well grab something there before heading back to all the meetings he can’t afford to miss. As he hands over his credit card to pay for a purple popsicle, it’s hard not to wonder how much more he could be doing with his life if things had been a little bit different.

The sun has climbed pretty high in the sky by now and he squints up at it, having forgotten sunglasses. His popsicle is quick to melt in his hand and he feels like a kid again, except without his mother watching out for him, ready with a handful of napkins and a bottle of hand sanitizer. Instead, he’s left to his own devices, grimacing as he tosses the half-eaten treat away and does what he can to wipe to the stick, purple residue from his hand before it touches his shirt sleeve. 

His days are monotonous, the same routines stretching out for as far as he can imagine. This job was supposed to be a stepping stone to his happiness, but every time Caleb thinks he’s got a hold on what he truly wants, it turns to sand and slips away between his fingers. He’s left grasping at air. 

“Caleb! How’ve you been? I haven’t seen you in so long!” In many ways, Jenn takes after their mother, but the most striking resemblance had always been her smile. Seeing his sister again, for the first time since their mother’s funeral, only makes him miss their childhood more. “How’s your girlfriend? Tell me everything.”

“She’s fine.” Caleb smiles, waving to the bartender to place an order for scotch. Neat. “Things have been kind of the same for me. Still at Blackstone. What about you, though? Haven’t heard much from you either.”

Jennifer eyes his choice in drink and Caleb just knows that she’s thinking of making some joke about him getting old. He’s genuinely surprised when she somehow restrains herself, taking a sip of her appletini. “I’ve been great! I’m starting my PhD program at Columbia in the fall, so we’ll get to hang out more often.”

“PhD? I didn’t know you applied.”

She laughs. “There’s a lot you don’t know, Caleb! Always stuck in your own world, I have no idea what goes on in that dense head of yours.” He rolls his eyes, but he does feel a little hurt that his little sister hadn’t even thought to text about applying for a PhD. He hides it by finishing his glass and asking for another. “You know, I always thought you’d be the type to go for a doctorate, too. Why haven’t you?”

His mouth opens reflexively to respond, but finds that there’s nothing to say. Why hasn’t he? Jenn waits for a minute before she carries onto a different topic of conversation, but for the rest of the night, Caleb’s mind is stuck on that singular question. Why haven’t I?

“Only you would want ice cream when it’s still winter outside.”

Caleb laughs, collecting a notebook and some scattered research papers from his desk and tossing them haphazardly into his backpack.

“Wait, where’re you going?”

“Library.”

“Right now? Dude, it’s a Saturday. Thought you were coming with me to the party tonight?”

“No, I need to finish up some research for the lab.”

His friend’s face scrunches up at the word ‘research’ and waves him off, saying something about how Caleb will miss out on all these college experiences if he stays glued to his books and papers. Caleb only smiles sheepishly and waves as he heads out. His friend doesn’t understand how close his professor is to making a breakthrough in the lab. If he gets lucky, Caleb might even get to participate in the publishing of these findings, might even get to present those findings at NYU’s Undergraduate Research Conference in the spring. He cannot let this opportunity slip between his fingers. 

The rest of the night goes by in a bit of a haze. Caleb drinks. A lot. And Jennifer talks and talks about all the fun things going on in her life. He sees how alive she is, how excited she is about the opportunities that are presenting themselves to her, and he finds that he’s more than a little bit jealous. So he drinks more. As a college student, even before that, Caleb always imagined himself as someone who would dedicate his life to academics, similar to what Jenn is doing now. He remembers spending all his days in the library or the lab or at his professor’s office hours, barely carving out time for sleep, let alone a social life. And he had been content with living that way. Until he wasn’t.

Jenn gets up to use the bathroom and Caleb nods, his mind is fuzzy. When he asks for another drink, the bartender studies his face and shakes her head. 

“I think you’ve had enough for tonight, sir.” Her voice is gentle, lilting, he smiles like an idiot and shrugs. She leaves.

His best friend from college, his freshman and sophomore year roommate, had always been the extroverted and outgoing type. A typical Sternie, a business major, always stressed about recruiting but still always flitting from one party to the next. The summer of their sophomore year, while Caleb was doing research with his biology professor, Kevin was interning at a trading firm. While Caleb earned minimum wage and scraped by with help from his parents, Kevin made thousands that summer and could pay his own rent. At the time, all Caleb could see was the money, the self-sufficiency. He didn’t see that, while neither of them really had much spare time that summer, Caleb was doing something he loved while Kevin worked only for the promise that one day he’d be high enough on the corporate ladder that he’d have the time to do something he could enjoy.

When Jenn came back, she finished the rest of her drink and suggested that they call it a night and head home. He agreed. He didn’t feel very well. 

Suddenly, he felt pressure on his neck. Then, as quickly as it made itself known, it was released. Looking down, he could see long, manicured fingers pulling on his purple tie, loosening it. Jenn patted his chest lightly, asking if he needed her to call him an Uber. Caleb shook his head, pulling out his phone. He could do it himself. The last thing he remembered from that night was a flash of red in the corner of his eye as his sister hopped off the barstool and walked away. 

He’s twenty-eight now, in a new city, a place he used to think of as the academic capital of the United States. As a kid, he’d always dreamed of studying in Cambridge, but neither of his dream universities had accepted him. Now, here he was. Not at Harvard or MIT, but close enough to feel that he had made some childhood dream come true.

In the wake of seeing his sister start her doctorate program at Columbia, Caleb had set about making preparations to start on a graduate degree soon after. The private equity he worked for was kind enough to offer to pay for an MBA, should he enroll in school part-time and continue working at the firm throughout the duration of his studies and for a while afterwards. It was a tempting offer, but Caleb declined it. If he was going to go to grad school, he would go for a degree that he actually wanted to have. And he would turn that degree into a doctorate, then into what he hoped would be a blossoming career in academia.

Early September in Boston was still warm and sunny from summer, the leaves were still green and the flowers still bloomed, but everything felt like it was slowing down in anticipation of cooler months ahead. There was a peacefulness to this city, the likes of which Caleb had never been able to experience in New York. He’d only been here for a few days, but already he could tell that this was a city that understood and cultivated his needs much better than the hustle and bustle of the Big Apple. 

At the edge of Boston Commons, along Tremont Street, there was a small ice cream cart. Caleb watched a group of teenagers chat away in front of it, laughing at each other’s jokes and indecision as they scoured the menu. As they walked off into the park, Caleb approached. It had been a while since he last treated himself to a popsicle.

“Good afternoon! What can I get for you?”

He looked at the bright colors popping out at him from the images laid over the side of the cart. “A purple popsicle, please.”

“Sure! That’ll be $2.50.”

He reached into his pocket, flipping open his wallet. The worker pulled a purple popsicle from the freezer and held it out with one hand, the other hand open to accept his five dollar bill. As Caleb placed the money in her hand, he hesitated. His eyes wandered towards an image of a cherry-red popsicle on the side of the cart, just in his line of sight. Shaking his head, he smiled apologetically and pointed to it.

“Actually, could I get a red one instead?”