Chapter 19: Table Stakes

All good things come to an end. In this case, the good thing was my physics classwork, which is not something you’ll ever hear a teenager say out loud. There’s an unwritten rule that if you admit something is interesting, they’ll just give you more work. But trust me, any sane person would rather do a hundred pages of pre-calculus than get pulled from class for a meeting with Mrs. Randall. And that’s exactly where I was headed: summoned from the beautiful, predictable world of vectors and velocity to talk about my ‘employment status.’

And I’d been trying. I'd raked leaves for pocket change and a pretty fire. I picked trash out of the culvert with a stick. I have applied at every fast food chain and every supermarket, and the Asian market, and that would have been heaven on earth. Have you smelled an Asian market? But I’m not the only one graduating; everyone is competing for these jobs.

And I don’t have a car. I have a license, but not a car, you see. I can’t honestly say that when I’m emancipated—fancy word for getting kicked out—I will continue to be able to use the car, which means I am the one on the bike. And the other high school kids with the cars get the jobs, so I don’t get the job, so I don’t earn the money to get a car. It’s a catch-22, and worse, if I don’t get the job, I won’t be able to keep the phone turned on. I’ll be the teenager without the phone, without the car. That’s pretty bad.

Of course, Mrs. Randall had her own thoughts on the matter. When she was young, as it turns out, jobs grew on trees. Why can’t I do migrant farm work? Because I’m 100 pounds soaking wet, and we don’t have a migrant farm work industry in our city anymore, not since COVID. But Mrs. Randall is the sort of confident person who learned everything she was ever going to learn back when she was in high school, and nothing will ever change in the world ever again. So I tell her, you know, I have considered applying to an auto shop, see if they have a veteran career path. But she just kind of laughed. I don’t think she believes that either. She strikes me as the sort of woman who would be willing to disbelieve sexism existed.

And after all this, you’re not gonna believe me, but I think she means well. It’s the scary part. I think in her mind, she is giving realistic, actionable advice to a misguided teenager who just needs to get their act together before it’s too late. But from what I’ve heard from her, I’ve gotten closer to understanding her position, which is apparently what she was here for today. “I found you a position,” she said. “Okay, you’ll be working as a fry cook.” A little bit more information led me to discover that a non-franchise fast food fish place called The Burger Barn had been hiring, and through some creepy government back channel, she knew the owner, and he was willing to let me interview.

“It’s not the same,” she told me, as she had many times before, when I told her I’d landed the interview. “Not the same as having a job.” I’ve noticed. “Sheesh, I’m just saying,” she complained, “I don’t want you to get your hopes up.” As if that had ever been my problem. “No worries on that score,” I told her confidently. “What’s the job pay?”

That part was good news. $10 an hour. That was well above minimum. That was creeping into livable. An eternity later, I had completed her interview prep to her satisfaction. It’s not like I don’t know how to do interview prep, but I appreciated it, even if I was also kind of deeply worried that the last time she had interviewed might have been in the 70s. Something about the way that she described doing my makeup as being an essential part of the process threw me just a little bit. I dearly hoped it wouldn’t actually come down to any sort of appearance-based judgment. I’m not vain, but I knew better than to bet on myself as the top candidate in town. “Under that rubric, you’re going to be fine,” she told me. “With your interview.” That was a relief to finally hear.

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But now we had to move on to the real meat of my visit. “We need to talk about your drug test,” she told me. I thought we had just done that. “Excuse me?” I asked her. “As soon as you find a place in federal housing, in all likelihood, you’ll get a drug test. They do that to everyone in the first week.” Well, I wasn’t completely surprised. “Okay, that’s three weeks. I’ll be okay,” I said.

Unsurprisingly, this was antagonistic. “Don’t go telling me that,” she moaned. “We do not need you out on the street.” To hear her talk about it, that was a real risk. It went like this: if I couldn’t get a job and support myself, then I was dependent on the government. If I couldn’t pass a drug test, the government didn’t want me dependent on them. Bing, bang, boom, Bob’s your uncle. I’m out on the street. It’s not even that I didn’t believe her. Just walk a mile in my shoes, damn it.

“I’ll keep straight edge, all the way,” I told her, and something about the way I said it must have convinced her, because her expression brightened. “Of course you will, honey,” she told me. I hate when she does that. “You’re going to do so well. You’re gonna get a job, and I’m gonna help you move in, and you’re gonna be all set.”

I cannot even describe for you how frustrating it is to have someone genuinely wish you well when you genuinely wish they would go away. But soon enough, she did. I had missed a class, but I didn’t really care.

“You’re going to get a job,” Toby said at lunch. “That’s exciting.” He was genuinely happy for me. He’d known how hard I was looking—he’d even offered to put in a good word for me with his distributor, once. I know that’s something people do, but there was no effing way I was going to do crime for my day job without trying everything else first. A girl’s gotta eat, but you’ve got to have standards.

I could picture myself hanging on street corners, people thinking I was a highschooler in, like, twenty years. I’d get arrested not for peddling drugs or for hooking, but for truancy. No, if I had to get into a life of crime, cat burglary was probably my speed. Dogs love me, I have very light footfalls, and I think I look good in black.

My natural hair is a sort of cherry color—like brown, but with a little bit of red in it, just a hint. My skin is pale, my eyes are dark, but nature didn’t see fit to give me black hair, so I bleached it and fixed that deficiency. Otherwise, it would clash with my black and white striped outfit, which was my favorite. It has little puffy sleeves, but no pockets. You can’t have everything.

Toby bleached his smile. I didn’t know many people who did that. He told me that smoking can kill your teeth, and he didn’t want that, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him actually smoking or brushing his teeth. He just kind of exists in a state of permanent bliss with that same lazy grin. I think, personally, it’s probably to attract girls. Evidence would seem to indicate that it’s effective.

“If I get the job,” I promised, “I’ll flip a burger especially for you.”

Tired and sad. Sometimes I wonder if he knows what those words mean. He’d smiled like a puppy when I’d told him.

“I know where it is,” he told me confidently.

“Oh?” I said, with interest.

“Yeah, it’s right up in Midtown.”

My heart sank. That’s a twenty-minute bike ride.

“I’ll drive you there and drop you off.”

Yes please.

“You don’t have to do that.”

His grin was carefree.

“No,” he said, “but if I go to Midtown, I can get a slushy.”