Standing in the center of the kitchen, hands on her hips, smug as a cat in cream, Patricia glances at the clock. It’s been half an hour. Surely Brooklyn is still fine, happily giving herself diabetes and ADD as she watches her show. If Ella were still where she should be, Patricia would feel so much better about being away from the house. She’ll have to teach Brooklyn how to use a phone, as she’s certain Chelsea has taught her daughter how to use such a device for literally any purpose other than making a phone call. She probably doesn’t even know what to do with a landline.
Sighing in annoyance, she hefts her bags and hurries back home. Fortunately, she doesn’t pass any more busybodies. Not a single car. No one on the street. She concocts a story about taking donations for the local food pantry to help others in this time of need, which would keep any of her neighbors from knowing she’s just committed a crime and which might possibly result in further donations that she can definitely find a use for. That story becomes her truth, and her posture straightens. Now she would welcome another visit from nosy Marion, although no opportunities present themselves. She sees the curtains twitch at the Robinsons’, but Sandra doesn’t immediately text her, so it was probably whatever elderly relative is currently convalescing in their front room.
Back home, finally, her heart calms down, and she wonders if she will notice one day the first symptoms of a heart attack, considering her chest feels tight every moment of her life. This past week has pushed her further than she would prefer.
“Brooklyn, darling, do you like clementines?” she calls as she enters the kitchen.
As usual, there is no answer. Those dratted headphones!
But when she goes to the couch, the headphones and tablet and a pile of black and green jelly beans are there without their mistress.
“Brooklyn?” she calls.
For the longest time, there is no answer, and her heart jacks right back up again like a good little soldier. But then there is a sound, one she wasn’t expecting.
The sound of glass, breaking, as something rams into it, over and over again.
30.
The interviews go on all day the next day, and Chelsea is put to work with the other new hires getting their training gym set up. At first, she’s pretty annoyed, because she didn’t sign on to carry dusty boxes and heavy mats. But then she sees everyone else just pitching in cheerfully and realizes…it’s a job. She hasn’t had a job in almost twenty years, and it’s not exactly a booming time for the hiring market, and she’d rather do manual labor and get paid than sit around thinking about Jeanie. Indigo turns on some thumping EDM and puts her phone on a chair, and it starts to feel like a college moving party.
They’re unloading a giant semi truck’s guts into the back part of the interview building, which is an agricultural-type hall. Just a huge, metal room with a concrete floor and big double doors at regular intervals. She can imagine it on fair day, pies and quilts and pigs waiting to be judged. But now it’s empty and echoing, and they’re putting together a wrestling ring and laying down tons of mats and what feels like hundreds of weights. She smirks when ladders and chairs and folding tables appear. They really are going full smackdown.
As the day progresses, more new people arrive until there are a total of twenty, ten men and ten women. By the time they’re done working and interviewing, everybody is more than ready for dinner. The people Chelsea met yesterday—Amy, Matt, Steve, TJ, and the tattooed girl, Joy—now feel like an in-group, and the new people look as lost as Chelsea felt when she first showed up. They’re as surprising as everyone else. An immense white man with a long beard and a tattooed bald head, an older Latinx woman who has to be a bodybuilder and fitness model, a gorgeous Pamela Anderson look-alike, a hot Black man with long locs, a stylish redhead with geek glasses in a Star Wars shirt, a lumbersexual, among others. Nobody starts a fight or acts weird. Once you’ve been in a dogpile with people, they just feel more like family.
They have another round of hot dogs and hamburgers for dinner, but the chip variety packs are running out, taking them down to just Cool Ranch Doritos, and the cooler full of liquor is noticeably less full. Sienna warns them not to drink too much. Training starts tomorrow.
“If you’re hungover or dehydrated, you’re going to feel it. And you’re going to puke your guts up, possibly on whoever you’re training with. Which won’t be fun for anyone,” Sienna says, hands on her hips. She and Indigo are vegetarian, and they have some tofu dogs that no one else seems to want.
At night, they sleep in bunks on the two tour buses Chelsea saw on her way in. Each of the two buses has twelve bunks on it, stacked three up from floor to ceiling, each with its own privacy curtain. It’s not the newest bus in the world—each bunk has its own phone, for example—but it’s clean and the sheets are fresh and she’s not worried about David, as she’s chosen a bunk all the way in the back and anyone who wanted to hurt her would have to go through a locked door and ten other people to get to her. Sienna and Indigo stay in their own RV, but Arlene bunks in the coach, almost like an innkeeper. Chelsea likes her. She’s fun most of the time and stern when she has to be.
Last night, Chelsea slept like a log. She noticed that, after her first bout with the Violence—the sleep afterward is deep, dreamless, and heavy. She normally wakes up every night at least once to pee, but last night, she was out the moment she got comfortable in her bunk and didn’t twitch until Arlene’s phone alarm went off at eight. Hard to believe that just yesterday she left her house with Jeanie driving her minivan, and then…
Well, now she’s here.
And she’s going to do her very best, go back to being the perfect student so that she can keep this job until she’s vaccinated and has enough money to bring her family back together.
Well, her family without David.
Her, Ella, and Brooklyn. That’s what she’s fighting for.
Tonight, she doesn’t sleep as well, but it’s not terrible. She’s never lived like this, surrounded by so many other women, shoved into a bunk the size of a coffin. If she sits up too fast, she’ll bonk her head. And if she forgets how high up she is and goes to pee, she’ll break her ankle. Everyone is trying to be quiet, but the space is not large. The hum of the air conditioner and the generator driving it helps, but no machine can disguise the squeak of a fart or the sharp bark of a cough, a sound that’s still startling even after everyone got the Covid vaccine and multiple boosters. Of everything she’s left behind or lost, right now, Chelsea just wishes for some earbuds so she could go to sleep watching something comforting, which she knows several of the others are doing. One asshole is actually watching some sort of documentary on full volume, and Chelsea is furious for a moment before just accepting that she finally has something to listen to.