ONE
LENA
The call dropsat 4:47 PM. Thirteen minutes until I can clock out, the queue is backed up to sixty-two, and Karen has that look she gets when she’s about to ask someone to stay late.
Not again.
I can feel her moving through the open floor, the way you feel the weather coming in. The target is whoever still has their headset on when she makes her pass.
That’s me. It’s always me, because I’m the one who doesn’t pretend to be on a call to avoid her, because pretending makes me feel worse than just saying yes and grinding through it.
I pull up the queue, take a breath through my nose so it doesn’t come out in my voice, and tapAccept. “Thank you for calling Meridian Wireless. This is Lena. How can I help you today?” My voice comes out warm and bright and entirely manufactured, and the man on the other end doesn’t notice. Nobody ever does. I think they’re just glad to get a real person on the line instead of automation.
He wants to go through his bill line by line. Fine. I settle in. I can track a billing dispute with about forty percent of my brain while the other sixty percent runs a grocery list, quietly checks the time, and counts the minutes since Miranda last texted. I have learned, over three years of this, to exist in several places at once. It’s not the same as being present. But I don’t need to be present for this.
The truth is, I’m good at this job in the way that people are good at things they find spiritually deadening but technically manageable. I know the system. I know where the overrides are and which supervisors will approve them and which ones will make you justify the same waiver three times and then deny it. I can do it in my sleep, and sometimes, I damn near do.
There’s a woman three desks down, Priya, who’s been here eight months and still reads from the prompts, and sometimes I watch her doing it and feel some combination of pity and envy because at least she’s still reading.
I should not still be here. I know that. I should be in a different city, on a different trajectory. The version of Lena who went to community college and transferred and finished her degree and did something with the business classes she was actually good at.
But Opal’s dad left when I told him I was pregnant, and that version of me became impossible. So, I made the necessary adjustments, and the adjustments have a way of becoming permanent if you’re not careful.
I’ve beennotcareful for a while now.
My phone buzzes in my lap. I angle it just enough to read.
Miranda:“She feels real hot, Lena. More than yesterday.”
The grocery list in my mind dissolves. My stomach does the thing it’s been doing since Tuesday, when Opal woke up hoarse again. I keep my voice on the call perfectly steady. I redirect the man toward plan options, which is something I can actually fix, away from the data overage, which isn’t.
Meanwhile, under the desk, I type back to Miranda:“Keep giving her the Tylenol every four hours. Meet me at the free clinic at 6.”
He takes the plan option. I close the ticket and take the next call. Three more buzzes from Miranda come through in the next forty minutes. Each one is a gut punch.
“We’ll be there. She won’t eat.”
“She asked for you, poor little thing.”
“Lena, I’m a little worried.”
Miranda Castellano is not a woman who worries easily. She raised four kids in our building, two of them without their dad, watched the block cycle through three different economic eras, and has the disposition of someone who has been surprised enough times that she’s stopped letting things surprise her.
When she says she’s a little worried, it’s the way a smoke alarm says there’s a little smoke.
At 5:01, I’m logged off and moving. I don’t wait for Karen. I smile at nobody in particular and take the stairs. April cold hits me outside the revolving door, and I pull my coat the rest of the way on while I walk, already calculating.
The 14 bus. Twenty minutes if it’s running okay. Twenty-five is more likely.
I spend the whole ride doing the thing I try not to do, which is more math. What Opal’s care costs versus what I have. The prescription co-pay for whatever they prescribe tonight. Whether I can swing both it and the electric bill this cycle. When is the point where I need to call my mom and ask for a hundred dollars, which I hate doing because my mom doesn’t have a hundred dollars either, not really, and because calling her means explaining why, and explaining why means watching her worry, and I have enough worry in my immediate environment.
It’s a lot. I know it’s a lot. I tell myself that every time I do the math. But I also know it doesn’t matter that it’s a lot.
Opal iseverything.
The free clinic on Archer is a squat brick building lodged between a check-cashing place and a laundromat, in a block that hasn’t quite decided what it’s becoming. The waiting room smells like industrial cleaner and someone’s lunch and the particular staleness of recycled air, and the fluorescents hum at a frequency just slightly too present to ignore. Everything looks slightly sick under them. Maybe that’s efficient, actually.
If you look sick, you belong here.
