A college student interviews for a babysitting job. She’s hired, and the job will pay twice as much as the job she currently has. She’s saving to buy a car that she will share with one of her roommates, a boy she has a crush on. She meets the child, who takes to her immediately. They act out a scene from The Little Mermaid together, over and over again. The girl plans to move to Arizona after graduation because that’s where the boy she has a crush on is moving. She plans on applying to law school because he suggested it. She gets to know the family she’s babysitting for. The mother is thoughtful, generous, and her husband is quirky and kind. The husband has a start-up Internet company that causes him to work a lot. The mother asks if the girl would babysit when she goes into labor with their second child. The girl agrees, and the mother pays her $500 upfront. The second child is born without any complications, and the babysitting job is easy. When the husband drops the girl back off at her house, he offers her a job at his start-up because she’s “a solid, reliable person.” She declines. The girl continues to babysit for the family and continues to get to know the boy she has a crush on. They watch The X-Files together, and he asks her which of the leads she would sleep with. She says Mulder. “[T]hat this was the correct answer seemed obvious—Mulder was male, and Scully was female.” She doesn’t think to ask him who he’d choose. The girl graduates from college. She says goodbye to the family she was babysitting for. She moves to Arizona with the boy, as friends, but soon after finds him having sex with one of his guy friends. She stays in Arizona for a while, first working as a cashier and then goes to graduate school, eventually becoming a professor and moving to Illinois. The man’s start-up company becomes wildly successful as the Internet becomes more popular. He becomes a billionaire. At first, the girl tells people she used to babysit for his family, but after she is teased for it, she stops mentioning it as much. Time passes. Eventually, she tells her ten-year-old son she used to know the man, after the boy gushed about how much he loves his company. When she mentions he tried to hire her, her husband says that even if she’d only worked there for a little while, her stock shares would be worth tens of millions of dollars now. She says if she’d worked there, they would’ve never met, and they wouldn’t have their son. He says, “Who cares? You’d be the richest babysitter in the world,” and now, instead, she’s insignificant. She wonders if the man, who has divorced his wife, ever reflects on how he got where he is. She wonders the same thing—“How the fuck did I arrive at this point?”—about her own life.