Such a Fun Age(78)

Emira and Zara stood still in the bright white bathroom. Zara bit her lip and said, “Girl, you can’t work here.” Emira raised her shoulders and—knowing it had all been too good to be true—released them and said, “I know.”

“Okay, fuck it then,” Zara said. She began putting Emira’s makeup back into her travel bag. “Let’s just leave. You don’t owe her shit.” A pencil shaving dropped out from an eye pencil sharpener, which Zara quickly scooped into the trash. It was as if she were trying to conceal the fact that she and Emira were ever there.

“Wait. Zara, stop.” Emira gripped her friend’s forearm. Her pulse quickened as the consequences jelled in her mind. “I won’t have a job,” she said. “It’s not like I can put in my two weeks’ notice. I can’t not have a job.”

Zara sucked her top lip. “Can you live off your typing job?”

“If I could do that, do you think I’d have this one?”

Zara went quiet in thought. She reached up and tapped her thumb to her mouth. “Okay. Then let’s get you another job right quick.”

“What?”

“We gettin’ you a temp job,” Zara decided. “It don’t have to be perfect. It just needs to work right now. So who called you this weekend? You better not have told any of them no.”

“I didn’t,” Emira said. Suddenly she was back to where she started. The idea of scouring the Internet and checking Craigslist and seeing disgusting children on the street and thinking, Could I learn to love you? put a twist inside her chest that brought her shoulders forward. Emira took a deep breath. “Okay, umm . . . this family called and said they’d take me as a nanny.”

“Nuh-uh.” Zara wagged her pointer finger. “We ain’t doin’ this mammy shit no more. Next.”

“There were stupid offers for essays that I could never write,” Emira said. “And then my boss at the Green Party said she’d take me on for more hours.”

“Your typing boss?”

“Yeah, but it’d be as a receptionist.”

“Okay . . . ? Can you work there?”

Emira said, “Yes . . . ?” It would be boring but she could do it. And in that moment, what seemed like the biggest selling point was the fact that she wouldn’t have to buy new clothes because everyone who worked there always wore jeans. “I mean, yeah, they’re chill over there.”

“Okay, perfect, that’s all we need,” Zara said. “It doesn’t have to be forever. How much will they give you?”

“She didn’t say.”

Outside in the hallway, Laney called, “Five minutes to places, ladies!”

Zara said, “Get them on the phone.”

Emira bent down to her backpack and retrieved her phone. At this point it was a relief to have someone telling her what to do. She stayed seated on the toilet as she tapped Beverly’s office number, and the line began to ring as Zara continued to pack her makeup. “Don’t say yes yet. Just ask for details.” Zara zipped up Emira’s makeup bag and threw it down to her backpack. “Just be cool,” she told Emira. “We got this, don’t stress.”

On the fifth ring, she answered.

“Hi, Beverly? It’s Emira.” Emira tried to sound as natural as possible while whispering in the echoing space. “I got your message and I just wanted to talk about . . . your offer?”

Beverly explained that she just got into the office, and apologized if she sounded out of breath. She went on about how she had no idea what Emira had gone through, that it might be perfect timing, that the current front desk person would be going back to school and that they’d love to have her. Then Laney knocked on the door.

“Finishing touches in there?” she called.

Zara bolted for the doorknob. She stuck her face in the crack between the door and the wall and grinned, “Yep! Just one more minute!” before she closed it once again.

“Can you hang for two seconds?” Emira asked. She clicked her phone on mute. “They’ll give me sixteen dollars an hour for thirty-five hours a week.”

“Ooohh, nuh-uh nuh-uh.” Zara shook her head and pulled out her own phone. “They fina do that so they don’t have to give you benefits.”

“Are you sure?”

“Go’n and ask her.”

Emira’s breath quickened within her rib cage as she clicked back into the call. “Sorry, Beverly?” she said. “Does that mean I wouldn’t have health insurance?” Emira listened to Beverly confirm that it wouldn’t. She looked back at Zara and mouthed, Shit.

“Okay, we gon’ negotiate right now,” Zara whispered. She knelt down in front of Emira and began to type furiously into her phone’s calculator. “Tell her . . .” Zara held a hand up in the air as she formed her words. “Tell her that you’re very interested in the position, and that you’d like to talk about including health coverage.”

Emira slowly spoke these exact words into her cell’s receiver.

“And,” Zara whispered as she typed, “that you’re willing to go down in rate.”

Emira wanted to ask her friend, Am I? Am I willing to go down in rate? She currently made sixteen dollars an hour. And Briar wouldn’t be there, so honestly, what was the point? Emira realized then that she never would have actually worked at Body World Fitness as a childcare manager, even if they had offered the position to her. She would have stayed with Briar for as long as the Chamberlains would have her. But Mrs. Chamberlain had finally gone too far and it was no longer a private matter. Emira heard Mrs. Chamberlain in the hallway say, “Are they almost done?” Emira repeated Zara’s words verbatim. “I’m also willing to go down in rate.”