For a summer I snatched cucumbers off a belt and into cardboard boxes. Sixteen per batch, send the box down the chute. A third of my co-workers wore orange jumpsuits. Another third didn’t speak English. The rest of us were college kids between semesters, earning tuition. We were all miserable. Clock watching compounded our misery by quantifying it. My hands were machinery, clawing for hothouse fruits. I felt anonymous as a cog. “This’ll motivate you to get your degree,” my father teased when I came home.
The degree didn’t help. I sent out dozens of job applications, like balloons released to the sky. Nobody responded. I attempted freelance editing, but didn’t know shit about self-promotion. Eventually, I stood behind a chrome counter, yanking french fries from sunflower oil, not really sure how I’d gotten there.
As a kid I spent years freeing helium balloons with my number taped to the string, waiting for someone to call. I had a lot of faith back then; I clung to Santa Claus and Uncle Sam, and God like a magical bouquet.
Somebody called: a hiker who’d found shredded gold latex in the Superstition Mountains. I was so thrilled, it may as well have been God on the other line. Somewhere in the Superstitions lay the Lost Dutchman’s gold, I should have asked where it was. Then I wouldn’t have to desk sit 40 hours a week.
My first college apartment had no kitchen; the oven and sink were shoved into the hallway. I got my friend to talk me up to his campus IT job until I scored part-time work, though I wouldn’t receive a check until a full month after starting. I had $20 in the bank.
I cried when I realized I’d have to break my self-made promise against eating Top Ramen. The twenty got me ramen and Quaker oats for three weeks. Any campus event promising food found me in attendance, hoping no one at the Transfer Students meet-and-greet would ask which school I’d transferred from. I thought if I was smart I could skate through school without taking out a loan, but smarts had shit to do with it.
They always hung the holiday over us like a threat, like Santa really weighed our good and bad and awarded kids based on their yearly performance, but I never knew a kid who unwrapped coal. Santa must have been easily swayed if even Austin across the street got when he wished for. Still, there was a certain relief when the boxes under the tree held candy and action figures, a feeling that I’d spent my year doing right, that I’d earned this bounty.
Of course, we grew up to learn the system was rigged.
My final year of college, my roommate and I started looking for work. “This is good,” I pointed to a job listing. “I can earn up to 50k.” I didn’t know; anytime I’d told people I wanted to be a writer they always threatened me with poverty. I wasn’t worried about getting rich, I just wanted healthcare.
That’s terrible,” he said. “I’m being offered 70k. Starting salary.” He was an electrical engineer. I was starting to believe I’d done something wrong.
On my twenty-ninth birthday my boyfriend and I got high and drove to Denny’s. We’d spent the day with his six-figure salary friends, and this threatened to break my months-long streak without a panic attack. Eight weeks after my Master’s degree came in the mail, I was still unemployed. I had a toothache, like a small, persistent animal had taken up residence in my molar, curling against the nerve. I didn’t have health care. How much was it worth to evict him?
Our waitress took years to serve us. A cluster of girls at one end of the restaurant sipped milkshakes and giggled. In the booth across from us a man in a suit bent toward his french fries. This was one o’clock in the morning.
My boyfriend was older than me, tenure track, established. I felt like a mooch every time he pulled out his billfold. I jumped through the necessary hoops to remove my Birthday meal from the check by downloading the Denny’s app before the check came. I was twenty-nine. I was balding. I was a grown ass adult; why couldn’t I make my own goddamn toast and soggy eggs?
The first time I was paid for something I wrote, I made $75. The first day I drove for DoorDash, I made $75. Before lunch.
I liked DoorDash, carrying bags of groceries up flights of stairs to be deposited outside someone’s apartment. I tried to be gone before the person reached the door, to drop the goods and run, unseen, like Santa.
I took a temp job on a sinking ship of a company. My department was all temps. In lieu of training we were given buckets and told to keep the place from foundering. The boss was a thousand miles away, in Florida. Our office looked onto a lake roughly the color and shape of a dead trout. We were professional scapegoats, spent workdays looking out the window, watching birds snag meals from the water, and waiting for Florida to materialize on Zoom and scream at us. Sometimes we found fish bits outside the office’s front double doors—tails, fins, heads with eyes that stared blindly up at us.
My first “real” job—full time, benefits—I worked accounts payable, sending money to contractors when they finished a job. My bosses threw around words like “family.” We had Bingo Fridays, MarioKart in the break room, the occasional catered lunch. I had to break it to a woman once that we weren’t paying out her contract because she filed the paperwork wrong. We’re talking thousands of dollars. “That’s my rent,” said the woman on the other line. “I’m begging you.” I denied her claim. I still think about that woman at least once a month.
We had a cornhole tournament once. I won second place.
Being an adult means getting fucked at least once by someone who should know better.
In eighth grade, my English teacher asked: “Who is the richest man in the world?” We dropped our answers into a box on his desk. I won a twelve-pack of Sprite for guessing the right one: Santa Claus. I sold each can for $1, and then regretted not having any for myself.
My eighth grade English teacher played Santa at the local tree lighting. He played around with his students too, until he got nailed for a years-long relationship with one of my friends, Britta.
Britta and I played cops and robbers across town on summer evenings. We army-crawled through strangers’ backyards, skittered across dark asphalt. Barbed wire snagged holes in my jeans like fish hooks piercing scaly jaws. We were kids then, running was a game. Every game ended the same way—the headlight would find us out, the ‘cops’ would drag us back into reality.
But not yet.
For now, Britta and I race from shadow to shadow. We will make it to Pioneer Park, where we will be declared ‘safe.’ We believe we will never grow up. As long as we keep moving, nothing at all can catch us.
***
Hal Wright is a queer writer whose work has been published in Ninth Letter, Pithead Chapel, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere.
Rejection Letters 