I get up, grab my bag from under my pillow, where I keep it so people don’t steal my things, wash up in the communal bathroom, which, while fixed, was a horror show that I don’t really care to go into, and then head outside.
It’s about 4:30 a.m. I need to be there at 5:00, and it’ll take me less than fifteen minutes to walk there, so I’m feeling pretty good… until I start working my way down the street and realize that an enormous accident between an eighteen-wheeler and a highway support beam is blocking the entrance to Seventh. Fuck. Red River is also closed, along with the access road. I have to go south to Cesar Chavez, cross the highway there, and continue up several blocks, then back north to Seventh, and finally back down Seventh to the shop. I jog nearly the entire way but don’t walk in the door until 5:04.
“Don’t bother.” Nick is on one of the weight machines, his muscles beaded with sweat. He doesn’t even stop his set to look at me. Hot, sweaty asshole.
“Are you not aware that there is a dangerous materials spill about three blocks from here, and that everything in a mile radius around it is shut down?”
“People who aren’t serious about their duties find excuses. People who are serious find a way.” He still hasn’t stopped working his arms, and that bothers me more than anything else. What kind of asshole doesn’t even face the person he’s firing when he’s firing him?
Dammit, I really need this job. I mean, is it too much to ask for a little fucking hope?
“What’s going on here?” Roly asks, walking in with a bright smile on his face. “Elijah! Nice to see you this morning.”
“Not really. Four minutes late on the first day.”
Roly’s eyebrows pinch in a frustrated expression. “Elijah, I thought that you were really serious about this job.”
“I am. I live literally like four or five blocks away and would normally be here early, but there’s a huge hazardous spill and…”
“Oh my god, did you get caught in that? That was awful!”
“Yes, it was. The smell was really terrible. But I don’t have a car, so I was walking in, and I had to go, like, two miles out of the way.” I wipe the sweat off my forehead to emphasize the effort I’d put in. “I jogged and got here as quickly as possible, but I guess that’s not good enough for Some People.”
That got his attention. I really should watch my mouth around him.
Nick finally stops his incessant arm curls and looks up at me. His lips flatten into their all-too-familiar purse of disdain. “So, just because I want you to arrive at your job on time means, what, I’m an asshole?”
“No, expecting employees to generally arrive on time is a reasonable expectation. Expecting employees to somehow intuit a freak chemical spill, then magic a way around it without being late… now that might make you an asshole.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your word, hoss. Not mine.” I am doing myself zero favors right now and need to shut my mouth.
He rolls his eyes and turns away from me, starting an ever-so-important series on his lats. “Also, what the hell are you wearing?”
I know that my one pair of sweatpants are a little rough, but I didn’t have enough to buy new ones. I’m wearing the white T-shirt again, and thankfully it was still clean after yesterday. “This is the best I’ve got,” I say, embarrassed and frustrated and annoyed.
Roly looks me over and I wait, hoping that they at least let me get through the first day. “Nick, this is on us. We never discussed dress code, and I’m absolutely certain Elijah will make sure that he is here on time every day.” I nod in agreement, annoyed I have to do so enthusiastically just so that Keto Spice doesn’t think I’m not being serious. Dude, I need this job in the worst way. I have to do well.
Last night I’d written down my hourly wage, plus expected hours, plus what I guessed would be my taxes. Penny took me to my bank yesterday, and I was surprised to see that my account, which I hadn’t used in three months, was still active. I got a little lucky; my driver’s license, which I also hadn’t had needed in three months, is still good for another six months, so I was able to gather my account details, which had been hidden in a drawer by my old bedside table when my mom sold the house. I’d been doing a lot of cash-only work lately, and it was shocking to me how quickly the normal act of going to a bank seemed so foreign and almost impossible to me.
Hell, coming home had been a shock. I was stationed at Fort Irwin during my service, and by the time I’d come back to Austin, my crew of friends had more or less disbanded. Half moved elsewhere because Austin was so damned expensive, and the half that stayed had kids and jobs and lives in the suburbs. Instead of feeling like home, Austin felt like an echoey version of the city I used to explore with my aunt.
For the last six months of my deployment, I watched from a base in Afghanistan as my mother dismantled my entire life. I’d had a decent lawyer, decent enough to suck my savings dry, but I hadn’t lived with my aunt Katie for four years, and my mother made claims that she had a close relationship with her sister. So, when Katie died unexpectedly and without a will, I was helpless against my mother’s revenge.
By the way, in case you didn’t know, being gay is a vengeance-worthy offense, and my mom’s version of Christianity insisted on its pound of flesh.
Being gay meant that I hadn’t just lost my immediate family, but that I hadn’t even been informed of Katie’s death until after her funeral. She’d become a mother figure to me over the last nine years, and to have her ripped away like that was awful. Honestly, fuck the house and the savings and the plans for college… losing her and not being able to mourn her properly was the worst thing my actual mother had ever done to me. I like to imagine my mom’s twisted version of God is pleased as punch and is considering promoting her to Director of Punishments. I imagine that comes with a sweet benefits package.
I probably should have stayed in California when I returned, but my service was done and Austin was home, and coming here had made me feel closer to my aunt. Grief for her was a constant, dull ache in my chest, and I spent the first few weeks home sleeping on my friends Rob and Harvey’s couch, mostly drunk, mostly thinking that I just needed a minute to gather myself and then I’d go out and find a job like everyone else.
About three weeks in, I’d walked in on an argument between Rob and Harvey, and it was clear they’d been arguing about me. I was embarrassed that I’d overstayed my welcome, so I pulled myself together, bought a suit from Goodwill, and started going on interviews, figuring I’d get a job pretty quickly. It didn’t take me long to figure out that, while my skills transferred fairly easily to a corporate job, I did not. The jokes and snark that slid easily off my tongue among friends landed poorly in interviews, and my poker face, which had always been shit, told interviewers that the cube farms they’d walked me through gave me the heebie-jeebies. Maybe it was years of operations that involved going into some really scary places, always with eyes in the back of my head, but these cube farm folks were sitting ducks with their backs turned, typing away with headphones on for Christ’s sake. They had way more faith in mankind than I ever could.
So yeah, corporate life isn’t for me, which means I have to make this job work, or I’ll be back where I’d started. I just… can’t do anything without a paycheck. As I’m trying to figure out how to get the right clothes so that I don’t lose this job, Roly walks over the gift shop area and picks out four different Wrecked T-shirts and four of the nicer pairs of workout pants and hands them over to me with a kind smile. “Here, this’ll be a good start. Small, right?”