I nod, already factoring it into my timeline. “I have a car picking me up.”
“Fancy.” She doesn’t mean it sarcastically. “You always look like you’re about to do something important.”
I think of the mirror, the armor of my outfit, the way I’ve practiced my smile for nights like this. “It’s just work,” I say, and I want it to sound matter-of-fact. Instead, it lands somewhere between admission and defense.
She doesn’t press, which is why we get along. She lets the silence draw out, then says, “Bring back leftovers if there’s food. The fridge is empty.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
She grins and disappears back into the room. As I open the door, I’m hit with a wave of hallway air—metallic, slightly scorched, with a top note of someone’s burnt toast. It’s a relief to be out of the gravity well of the apartment, even if it’s into the gravity well of the city.
I take the stairs two at a time, conscious of the small tremors in the old building, the creak and hush of each landing telegraphing my movements to neighbors I’ve never met. Stepping into the vestibule, I draw in the sour, institutional scent of over-bleached tile—a sensory palate cleanser after the musky entropy of the apartment. The door sticks, as always, but I hip-check it and emerge onto the stoop, where the city’s evening is already in full, orchestral swing.
At this hour, the block could be a study in urban choreography, every element recurring with mathematical certainty but always colored by variance. I scan the grid: to my left, the bodega’s fluorescent halo is interrupted by the familiar sight of Mr. Patel, who is outside arguing with the delivery guy about the number of crates he’s signed for. He gesturesemphatically with hands that look too delicate for the violence of the conversation, but I know from the way he can break down and reassemble a coin-operated espresso machine that he’s not to be underestimated.
On the corner, a guy in a parka paces the length of the sidewalk, cell phone pressed so hard to his ear it’s probably leaving an imprint. He’s yelling at someone named “Mikey,” every phrase punctuated by the drag and snap of his cigarette. I spot the woman in the headscarf—she’s new to the block, or new to me at least. She balances three grocery bags on one forearm and her toddler on the other hip, her expression inscrutable but determined. I recognize the armored tension in her jaw: survival is a skill set, not a personality trait.
The light has shifted since I returned from school, everything more saturated, the brickwork glowing with that late-winter optimism that tricks you into thinking the temperature is warmer than it is. Kids have tagged the sidewalk in neon chalk, their misspelled graffiti a catalog of heartbreaks and threats and declarations of love, all rendered in the desperate capitals of the nearly literate. It’s possible I am the only person who reads these messages as if they’re meant for her.
The city’s soundtrack is a layering of sirens (distant, then close, then distant again), car horns rising in irritable harmony, the sub-bass rumble of the subway as it passes below, and always, always, the ambient chorus of voices—shouting, laughing, negotiating, calling out to lost dogs or lovers or wayward children. The air smells like gasoline, yesterday’s rain, and yeast from the bakery across the street.
I pause against the iron railing, adjust my coat, and allow myself one brief moment of stillness. It’s a ritual I started in undergrad: a way to mark the boundary between one compartment of my life and the next. The phone in my pocket buzzes—first the calendar alert, then a text from Sofie, bothreminders that I have exactly thirty-seven minutes to get to the arena. Efficiency is my native language, so I’m already moving before the alert can vibrate a second time.
At the curb, a black town car idles, taillights pulsing in the dusky gloom like the heartbeat of a patient on standby. The driver, a woman maybe twice my age and half my height, has shaved patterns into her hair and a playlist of classic hip-hop thumping just loud enough to rattle the windows. I catch my reflection in the rear door—coat still buttoned, bag squared on my shoulder, all systems nominal—then open it and slide into the backseat, careful not to touch anything I don’t have to.
“Fairfax PR?” she asks, her voice the no-nonsense timbre of someone who’s driven every mile of every borough.
“That’s me,” I say, and give her my name, even though it’s already displayed on the dash screen. She nods and pulls away from the curb so smoothly that the motion feels simulated. I watch the block receding through the back window. Someone is waving—Cassidy, leaning out of the second-floor window. For a second, I think she might have been watching me the whole time, but then she ducks back in without a wave.
We join the traffic on Atlantic, swept instantly into a migration of vehicles all bent on arriving somewhere marginally more important than where they are. I press my head against the window and let the vibration of the road rearrange my thoughts. There’s always a stretch of time between leaving and arriving, a pocket where the world feels malleable and consequences can be deferred. It’s my favorite part of any commute—the temporary suspension of expectation.
The driver glances at me in the rearview mirror, catches my eye, and asks if I care about the music. I shake my head. “It’s good,” I say, and it is. The beat fills the car like a promise.
At the next red light, I allow myself to look up, to read the city as it blurs by: laundromats and tire shops, halal carts, a tinystorefront church with a sign that reads, “MIRACLES EVERY SUNDAY.” The city is all surface tension, but underneath, everything is a set of converging lines, waiting to be mapped.
The driver takes a sharp left into the arena’s private lot, tires crunching over salt and residual winter gravel, and the boom of the city is replaced by excited murmurs of fans. For a full three seconds, I let myself imagine what it’s like to be the sort of person who belonged here without needing a credential. The kind of woman who didn’t have to rehearse her posture or catalog the possible weaknesses that might be exposed before the night was over.
But the car stops, and the driver smiles back. “Go Bears.”
I smile as I slip her a tip, “Go Bears.”
The parking lot is cordoned with barriers and security, but my name is on the clipboard, and my face is on the list. The guard at the VIP entrance doesn’t just recognize me, he actually smiles, which throws me enough that I almost return it. “Big night,” he says.
I shrug, and for once, the gesture feels real. “Sure is.”
Inside, the arena’s architecture is designed to compress you, then expand you. The lobby is a gauntlet of velvet ropes, glass, and glossier humans in black suits. Everyone is either here to be seen or to make sure the people who need to be seen get seen. I’m neither, which is its own kind of freedom.
I keep my head up as I move through the atrium, the coat a shield, the bag a ballast. There’s a lighting install tonight—red, of course, the team’s colors refracted through cut crystal—and the effect is to make every face look a little more expensive. The woman at the check-in desk has perfect cheekbones and a voice that doesn’t betray the fact that she’s been saying “Welcome to Costello Arena, can I see your credentials?” every two minutes for the past three hours. She clips the pass around my neck and says, “You know your way?”
I already know this, but I shake my head like I don’t. One of my rules: never act like you know more than the people paid to help you.
I thank her and head in the direction she gave me.
The escalator is a strange sort of pilgrimage, an uphill procession of men in ill-advised sport coats, women in knife-sharp boots, and a handful of actual children, all ascending toward the excitement. My reflection in the glass is more honest than the photo on my pass—hair slightly windblown, the beginnings of a headache behind my eyebrows, the set of my mouth just short of a smile. I like this face better than the one I practiced in the car.
In the PR suite, Sofie is already there, typing fast on her laptop and not looking up until I’m close enough to see the faint run of mascara beneath her left eye. She’s dressed in black, always, and her hair in perfect beach waves. On the table are three phones, a folder of printouts, and a half-eaten protein bar.
She glances up. “Last night for actual work.”
