“You knew,” I said accusingly to Qanisha as I walked up to her. “You knew and you wished me luck anyway.”
“Sorry,” she said.
“Put up your fist.”
She did, confused. I punched it, lightly. “There,” I said. “I’m taking back that previous solidarity fist bump.”
“Fair.” She handed me my severance paperwork. “I was also told to tell you that a deliverator account has been opened in your name.” She said deliverator like it hurt her to say it. “You know, just in case.”
“I think I’d rather die.”
“Don’t be hasty, Jamie,” Qanisha warned. “That shutdown is coming. And our Duane Reade discount is now up to fifteen percent.”
* * *
“So that was my day,” I said to my roommate Brent. We were in the pathetically small fourth-floor walk-up on Henry Street that I shared with Brent, Brent’s boyfriend, Laertes, and a convenient stranger named Reba, who we almost never saw and, if she didn’t leave long strands of hair on the shower wall on the daily, might not believe actually existed.
“That’s rough,” Brent said.
“Firebomb the place,” Laertes said, from the room he and Brent shared, where he was playing a video game.
“No one’s firebombing anything,” Brent yelled back to Laertes.
“Yet,” Laertes replied.
“You can’t firebomb your way out of every problem,” Brent said.
“You can’t,” Laertes called back.
“Don’t firebomb the place,” Brent said to me, his voice lowered so Laertes wouldn’t hear.
“I’m not going to,” I promised. “But it’s tempting.”
“So you’re looking for something else now?”
“I am, but it’s not looking great,” I said. “All of New York is in a state of emergency. Everything’s closing up. No one’s hiring for anything, and what jobs there are won’t pay for this.” I motioned to our crappy fourth-floor walk-up. “I mean, the good news, if you want to call it that, is that my severance payment from füdmüd will pay my share of the rent here for a few months. I might starve, but I won’t be homeless at least until August.”
Brent looked uncomfortable at that. “What?” I said.
He reached over to the pile of mail on the kitchen table we were sitting at, and picked up a plain envelope. “I assume you didn’t see this, then.”
I took it and opened it. Inside were ten one-hundred-dollar bills, and a note which read, in its entirety, Fuck this plague town I am out—R.
I looked over to where Reba’s room was. “She’s gone?”
“To the extent she was ever here, yes.”
“She’s a ghost with an ATM card,” Laertes yelled, from the other room.
“Well, this is great,” I said. “At least she left her last month’s rent.” I dropped the envelope, the note, and the money on the table, and put my head in my hands. “This is what I get for not putting any of the rest of you on the lease. Don’t you two leave, okay?”
“So,” Brent said. “About that.”
I glanced at him through my fingers. “No.”
“Look, Jai—”
“No.”
Brent held up his hands. “Look, here’s the thing—”
“Noooooooo,” I whined, and dropped my head on the table, thunking it nice and hard as I did so.
“Drama won’t help,” Laertes said, from the bedroom.
“You want to firebomb everything,” I yelled back at him.
“That’s not drama, that’s revolution,” was his response.
I looked back over to Brent. “Please tell me you’re not abandoning me,” I said.
“We work in the theater,” Brent said. “And it’s like you said, everything’s shutting down. I don’t have any savings, and you know Laertes doesn’t either.”
“I am hilariously broke,” Laertes confirmed.
Brent winced at that, then continued. “If things get bad, and they’re going to get bad, we can’t afford to stay.”
“Where will you go?” I asked. As far as I knew, Brent had no family to speak of.
“We can stay with Laertes’s parents in Boulder.”
“My old room is just the way I left it,” Laertes said. “Until I firebomb it.”
“No firebombing,” Brent said, but his heart wasn’t in it. Laertes’s parents were the sort of outwardly very nice conservative people who wouldn’t miss an opportunity to call Laertes by his deadname, and that shit will wear you down over time.