“Ramona,” I said as I caught her eye. “I’m so sorry.”
She wiped her eyes on the back of her sleeve and gave me a weepy smile. “I haven’t told anyone here yet, but I’m pregnant.”
My mouth fell open. “Oh god.”
She nodded. “And Chris—” She got choked up again as she said her partner’s name. “He just quit his job so he could do culinary school full-time. We’re so screwed.”
My stomach flipped with that about-to-puke feeling at the thought of how they were going to afford everything they needed for a baby.
“It’s so messed up,” I said. “My student-loan bills are already a nightmare. I don’t know how I’m going to pay them down now.”
Conversations around us were muted and whispered, but the panic was tangible. Most of the office was under thirty, and almost half of us were now out of work, sent into the wilds of the New York City job market with whatever severance we’d been given. I’d spent four years plugging away at a job that maybe hadn’t always stimulated me creatively, but it had paid well, and my coworkers were fun and easy to be around for nine hours a day.
And now, like me, they were reduced to shoving what was left of their time at Spayce into a sixteen-inch cardboard box. A cube-shaped crystal award for Best Digital Design Start-Up. A small green turtle figurine my coworker Raphael had brought me back from Mexico. The framed photo of Keanu Reeves someone had left on my desk as an April Fool’s joke. The branded stainless-steel water bottle everyone at the company had gotten last Earth Day.
The last four years of my life, packed up in ten minutes, ready to be lugged home on the subway.
With my vintage bejeweled purse on one shoulder and my canvas Spayce tote bag still packed with my lunch of pasta leftovers on the other, I grabbed my box, mumbled some hushed goodbyes, and headed to the elevator, pressing the neon-blue call button with my knee.
We were in the middle of a heat wave in New York City, one of those bizarro stretches where it goes from sixty to ninety degrees in the middle of May. At seven thirty in the morning, just hours earlier, a billowy blue-green tank-sleeved silk dress （my best friend Cleo called it my “fancy sack”） paired with black high-top Chucks had seemed like a perfectly reasonable outfit choice.
But huffing the three blocks through Times Square while weighted down with all this crap turned me into a sweating tangle of bags and clothes, armpits damp and sweat beads clinging to my curls. And a blister was rubbing itself into existence on my right heel.
After what felt like an hour of digging around, I found my MetroCard and gave it a swipe through the large metal turnstile at the station. By the time I’d made it down a flight of stairs and maneuvered around the late-morning wall of humans still rushing to work, I was a seething, irritated mess. I walked toward the downtown 2/3 train, only to be greeted with a sign by the stairs that declared NO DOWNTOWN TRAINS AT THIS STATION DUE TO CONSTRUCTION.
Everything that could possibly go wrong today was happening. I shifted directions, grumbling curse words under my breath, and headed toward the Q train. This would at least get me to Brooklyn, and then I could loop back on the 2/3 from Atlantic, which would suck. God, I just wanted to get home.
As I tried to catch my breath, I inhaled the pungent stink of the subway that was set free the second warm air descended upon our fair but smelly city. “Oh my god,” I muttered, holding in a gag.
And then I heard it: the squeal of brakes, a sure sign that my train was arriving at the platform, which was down yet another flight of stairs in front of me. I dared to breathe through my nose—ugh, everything smelled like urine—and took off jogging, the tchotchkes in my box bouncing with every step. I hit the stairs and caught a glimpse of the silver glint of subway car. It was still in the station.
Ding ding, the subway doors announced. Any New Yorker knew what that sound meant. It was time to run.
“No, no, no!” I shouted, and sprinted onto the platform just as the doors were, mercifully, opening a second time. The train was a blur, but I could see through the scratched-up windows that it was packed—bodies next to bodies next to bodies. An entire barricade of humans stood just inside the doors.
“Excuse me,” I huffed, wedging myself next to an older woman with a wire grocery cart, who shuffled forward into the center of the car, and a giant of a man who was long and lean and all suit.
“Sorry. Thank you,” I said, angling myself sideways to squeeze on. There was no way to shrink myself with this stupid box in my arms. But still, I was inside, with inches to spare. And I was finally heading home to escape this god-awful shit show of a morning.