Page 1 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

June

The box used to hold printer paper. Now it holds a plant, a phone charger, and a stapler I’m stealing on principle.

“That’s company property,” Bex says, watching me pack it.

“The company stopped existing forty minutes ago. It’s nobody’s stapler. I’m giving it a home.”

“God, I love you when you’re ruthless.”

At two o’clock this afternoon, the founders called all nineteen of us into the conference room and said the word “sunsetting” with straight faces. Both of them wore fleece vests. One of them cried, and it wasn’t the one you’d think. Harlow Creative is out of runway. Payroll might clear Friday. The doors lock at four. Nobody asked questions, because what would the questions even be? We filed out past the good espresso machine they leased two months ago. A girl from accounts was already on the phone in the stairwell, saying, “No, tonight, I can pick up shifts tonight.”

Eleven weeks — that’s how long my first real marketing job lasted. Eleven weeks, one order of business cards, and a holiday party I will now never have to attend. You can’t even learn where a building creaks in eleven weeks. I was still finding out which conference rooms got warm in the afternoon.

There’s a man stationed by the elevators in a polo shirt that still has fold marks in it, holding a clipboard with our names on it. They hired him this morning. The company can’t make payroll, but somebody looked at what was left in the account and spent it on a stranger to watch us carry our plants out.

Bex hoists her own box, which is mostly candy and a framed photo of her cat. “Drinks. Tonight. I’m buying, on the theory that my card still works.”

“Can’t. I have rent math to do.”

“Do it at the bar. Bars have napkins.”

“You’ve seen my rent math. It needs more than a napkin.”

She looks at me too long when I say that. Bex is the only person on this floor — the only person anywhere — who knows how I paid for the last two years. She has never once brought it up in a room with other people in it, and she doesn’t bring it up now. She bumps her box against mine like we’re toasting.

“What are you going to do?” she asks, quieter. “For money. Because if you’re about to say what I think you’re about to say—”

“I’m going to do rent math.”

“June.”

“Bex.” I fold the box flaps down. “Let me get through Tuesday before you make me promise things.”

She lets it go the way she lets anything go, which is temporarily. “Text me tonight. I mean it. Not a thumbs-up. Words.”

The man with the clipboard finds my name and draws a line through it. He holds the door with his foot. “Good luck out there,” he says, and the worst part is he means it.

Outside, it’s an ordinary Tuesday for everybody else. The bus takes forty minutes. I ride with the box on my lap and my dead badge still clipped to my shirt. It stopped working at two. I wear it anyway, all the way to my stop. Then I drop it in the trash can outside the vacuum repair shop, which is always closed.

My studio is two floors above the shop, in Greenwood, with a slanted ceiling and a kitchen the listing called “efficient.” Four hundred square feet, and I know every one of them. It’s the first address in my adult life that is only mine, and it costs $1,395 a month for the privilege.

I sit at the counter and do the math on the back of a Harlow envelope, which feels appropriate.

Checking: $1,612. Final paycheck, if payroll clears: $1,730. Rent lands on the first. After rent there’s the phone, the bus pass, groceries if I’m realistic about it. If the paycheck comes, I make September and most of October. If it doesn’t, rent clears on the first and leaves me two hundred dollars for everything else there is.

I run the numbers again, slower, in case they come out different the second time. They don’t.

The window fan died in July, and I’ve been pricing replacements for a month without buying one. That’s my twenties in one sentence: knowing exactly what everything costs, and waiting.

I know how this goes from here, is the problem. I know how long a bill can float before the phone calls start. Which billing departments will take forty dollars a month, and which ones sell you to a collections agency by Halloween. What it sounds like when a stranger who has your account number says your first name warmly. I learned all of it at twenty-four, the year my mother died and left me her medical debt. I finished paying off the last of it in April. Forty thousand dollars. Every cent of it mine. Every cent of it earned at night, in this apartment, with the door locked.

A real job search takes five weeks. I did one in the spring — five weeks, forty-one applications, one offer, and today the offer handed me a box.

September I can make. October I can’t promise. Nobody is calling back tonight. Nobody is calling back this week.

I know something that pays.

The ring light is in the closet, under the winter blankets, exactly where I put it four months ago.