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Chapter One In the handful of minutes before our store opened, the sales day was pregnant with potential cash. Soon my boss Richard would open our front door, that plastic membrane that separated us from the rest of the mall. I’d worked myself into a nervousness that felt exciting, as if every single goose bump on my arms was the drop on a roller-coaster ride.

“Five minutes!” Richard yelled.

Audrey, Lanae, and I rushed around the store. We folded shirts. We straightened pants. We arranged sunglasses on those little racks with the bumps in them that look nothing like noses. I picked up a dust ball and put it in my pocket so I could throw it away later. At the beginning of the day, our floors had to look clean enough to lick. We went to our assigned places. Richard roamed the store. Audrey worked the cash register. Lanae took up residence in the middle. I stationed myself at the front, as the greeter. After the incident that had cost me my career, I was happy to still be allowed to be around clothes, and equally good at transmitting that happiness to everyone who walked in.

I arrived at my spot at the front of the store, right behind the plastic barrier. I took a second to look back over the store as it stood in its last moments of quiet. Before our customers would rush in and rearrange everything to their liking, as if a few thousand square feet of yellow lighting and carefully curated tables were their living room. Everything looked expensive and crisp. The folded corners of each shirt. The ironed-flat hips of a new set of jeans. The brand-new rack of five-hundred-dollar winter coats hanging in unison to signal that we’d arrived at the first week of August, just four months away from a winter that would never show up in Southern California.

Audrey folded the top shirt on a nearby table while dressed in an ironed T-shirt and jeans. I looked down at my own outfit, which didn’t look as clean as Audrey’s, but had more life to it. A fuchsia polo shirt with its collar popped, bro-style, and a pair of electric-blue leggings that made my legs look sharp, like pencils...

“It’s time!” Richard said.

He walked, with a style that suited the slim, sky-blue, three-piece seventies suit he’d worn to work, to the very front right corner of the store and pressed the button that opened the door. Its plastic panels folded up like fans on their journey to the corners of the tracking bar they hung on. I took in a breath of delicious mall air. It had notes of our folded clothes, a faded disinfectant aroma I associated with the mall’s interior tile hallways, a bit of fried-food smell from the Chinese place up in the third-floor food court, and the first morning note of faux butter from the movie theater right above us.

I loved mall smell. On my breaks I huffed it like glue. A five-minute commute took me to the candy store, where I could shotgun the scents of binned Oreos and Swedish Fish, their aroma dulled by plastic lids until someone opened them and sent a fire hose of sugar right up my nose. Three minutes from there stood our only pizza place, an aggressively seasonal counter that faced twelve stools and currently featured a summer picnic pizza covered in corn and tomatoes. The pizza was good. Really good! Even though there’s something about explaining where you source your tomatoes from that feels like too much effort in a mall. I only treated myself to the pizza once a month. I was still working on paying off my student loans.

Half a hallway and one left turn from the pizza place lay one of those plastic horses kids can ride if an adult drops in a quarter. Sometimes, when there were no kids, I’d lean into the horse and sniff it to get a whiff of plastic, childhood dreams, and dried piss. Yes, I know, nobody’s supposed to savor the aroma of pee, and I wouldn’t rank it first among the smells of the world, but pee is life. It’s humanity. It’s the mall.

The first customer of the day walked in. A white woman of average height in a shapeless sweatshirt and jeans. Despite the bad clothes, I could tell she was a size six shirt, size eight pants, size seven-and-a-half shoe on the knife’s edge between medium and wide. Size medium in belts and in coats due to a touch of width in her shoulders. She had small enough features that her sunglasses should never clear fifty-five millimeters in height from the top to the bottom of the lens, unless she needed to drown her face in a tragic sunglass accident.

“Welcome to Phoenix,” I said.

She gave me the double take that everyone did if they hadn’t read the store sign.

“Like the city?” she said.

“Like the bird,” I said.

“Oh, phew,” she said.

No, we weren’t in Phoenix. Our store, which was named Phoenix, was in the middle of a mall in Glendale, California.

“Can I help you find anything today?” I said, hoping that she’d need something in the front third of the store. If she needed anything in the middle of the store, I’d have to toss her over to Lanae, and if she needed to go straight to the back, that was Audrey’s turf. The only exception to this was if she wanted help, in which case I was allowed to follow her all over the store like high beams on an unlit road. I very badly wanted to get her into something more life-changing than what she was wearing. The best part of my job was leading someone’s sartorial transformation into a better person, and the worst part was when a customer refused to understand that clothes could take them closer to perfection.

“No, I’m just looking,” she said.

“If you need anything, let me know,” I said, but she’d already taken a step or two away, into just-looking land, the territory of cowards and scoundrels. What did people expect to find if they were just looking? Coats? Shoes? The void? Nothing, that’s what. I had every shirt memorized. Every pair of pants mentally indexed by size and fit. I had touched every belt in the store to understand exactly how it would wrap around a waist. If someone grabbed a pair of sunglasses that wouldn’t vibe with their face, my head would cough up a full slideshow of sunglasses that would, ready for that moment when the customer leaned over to me and said, “Do these look right?” I was a trained assassin, but for clothes.

But I was also on commission. To make my 20 percent, the just-looking types would have to decide I’d helped them out the most of anyone in the store. If someone hung with me for twenty minutes and two or three fitting-room suggestions, they’d probably give the cashier my name. Especially if I walked them back there. They couldn’t deny I’d helped them if I floated just beyond their elbow as they paid, with a winning smile on my face. But sometimes when people wandered away, I became just a greeter instead of a trusted assistant, or the friend you made for the duration of your time in the store. I could always see the sale slipping away in that moment, like a toilet flush.

Luckily, the next woman who walked in needed a handful of shirts for her new podcasting gig. Just because no one would ever see her shirts didn’t mean she couldn’t feel sublime in them. We spent a good forty-five minutes working our way through short sleeves, long sleeves, henleys, and satin blouses with darts. As Audrey rang her up, I stood at a close but not creepy distance, feeling the familiar lick of triumph that I associated with closing a sale. Some winning squads stormed the beaches at Normandy, and others left someone satisfied with six perfect tops.

Three customers later, the store settled into a dead period, and Richard went to the back room for what he called his retirees’ lunch, even though he didn’t expect to ever be able to afford to retire. Two hard-boiled eggs with a sprinkle of hot sauce that he kept in a corner of the break room, served at exactly ten thirty a.m. He scoffed every time we told him that we were pretty sure even retirees didn’t eat lunch that early.

He left the sales floor to eat. A customer walked out, and the store was empty. I listened to the standard mix of ten thirty a.m. sounds. My own feet squeaking against the tiles as I did a moderate-sized lap around my section of the store. The tinny sound of Muzak-ed Taylor Swift playing from the speakers above my head. The gentle swish of people walking past our store to other mall destinations. The silence of no customers, which I could always hear even if music was playing. An absence of sound that had its own weird sound, like tinnitus’s cousin. It swished in and out of my ears like beach waves. Lanae finished a similar lap of boredom and came over to stand with me.

“Richard look off to you?” she asked me.

“No.”

“Doesn’t seem a little sick or anything?”

“He always looks the same. A little stooped, hella tired, sporting the smile of the year anyway.”

“I told you we don’t say hella. That’s a Bay Area thing.”

“I like it!”

“Well, then you like being wrong.”

We laughed. I loved Lanae in that way that you love people who get on your nerves an acceptable amount. For three years, between similar rounds of boredom and laughter, we’d sold people clothes together. We’d sold earth tones and the faded neons that, like the forever-lingering smell of weed smoke, were evidence of an ever-present LA stoner culture. Even our more formal clothes had a Californian air to them. We had so many dresses in fruity colors that looked perfect under the sun, like raspberry and lemon and a shade of bright orange that looked downright juicy. We had lazy oversized neon polos. Pleated skirts that rich teens wore rakishly off-kilter. Mary Janes in neutrals and brighter pastels but with a pointed toe. We sold everything from basic T-shirts to statement dresses. When I looked across the store, I always caught sight of our neons and thought of Ryan Gosling walking through all that similar-colored light in Drive.

Lanae, who spent her nights and weekends singing punk music with her band, shunned our bright neons and our bohemian earth tones in favor of an all-black wardrobe. That day she wore a thin black sweater with nine safety pins attached to her chest in a square formation over black stretch pants that most customers bought in neon green or sky blue. To top it all off, she’d put safety-pin-patterned barrettes in the black shag wig she always wore over her braided-down Afro. In addition to being a good work conversation partner, I liked Lanae because, clothes-wise, she had a look that didn’t bore me.

Audrey took on a dull prep style to match her post behind the cash register. She looked short and severe in a rotating variety of crew-neck T-shirts and straight-leg jeans, the most boring cut in the jean kingdom. She wore only the most lifeless colors. Navy blues, pure whites, shades of tan that put me to sleep. Her hair was in its usual Black prep girl’s straightened ponytail. The ballet flats she always wore had all the excitement of unbuttered toast.

Lanae always implied that Audrey was a much more fascinating person than she looked. But no matter how much Lanae hinted that Audrey had spent serious time as a hacker and might have been fired by the NSA before she’d come to sell clothes in our mall, I could only see Audrey as a person who remained fatally without style. Besides, the government didn’t have style either. On school trips to DC as a kid, I remembered spotting government workers in their ill-fitting not-quite-suits, all navy “sport jackets” and tan pants just the right amount of too big to threaten to slide off their bodies in a gust of wind. If most people’s sense of style was tragic, DC style was the Titanic.

In my first days working at Phoenix, fresh from the humiliation of getting fired off my last film set, I craved coworkers with entertaining senses of style to soothe my job transition. Even if the aftershock of getting canned led me to give up on style at work myself. I always wore one of our polos over a set of leggings, like the marooned leggings-addicted aughts New Yorker I was. It was a look I did not believe in and would never condone in other people, but also a look that didn’t remind me of the high fashion I’d been addicted to before.

Besides, fashion is for the moment you’re in, and as fabulous as I used to be, I couldn’t imagine reporting to the mall in one of my outfits from before. If our customers saw me in a cream bodysuit, cream lace pencil skirt, pointy-toed flats, and a pillbox hat, they’d sprint down the mall hallway fast enough to slide through a just-mopped section of floor and crash into the kiosks, to suffer the tragic fate of being covered in key chains, or fake perfume, or vanilla cucumber charcoal lotion.

“Richard doesn’t look a little... peaked to you?” Lanae said.

“He peaked forty years ago,” I whispered back.

At the back of the store, Audrey rang up clothes with a look on her face that implied she’d been born without feelings. I was one of those people whose faces give away everything we’re thinking, no matter how hard of a shell we attempt to put on. I never understood the Audreys of the world, those people who were good at work face.

After a whirl of customers in the early afternoon, things were dead enough that I had time to clean out the fitting rooms. Fitting rooms are the id of a clothing store. They contain multitudes. People will leave their entire lives underneath clothes they don’t want to buy. I’ve picked up keys, pills, phones, half-eaten food, full diapers, used tampons, condoms both fresh and aged, notebooks with grocery lists long enough to feed an entire kingdom for a week, and once, a full bottle of wine. We gave its owner the usual forty-eight hours to come back for it. When that didn’t happen, Lanae and I took it to our version of karaoke night, where we split it in the mall parking lot, sang disco songs at the top of our lungs, and drove home not quite drunk.

I entered a fitting room with three separate piles of forgotten clothes. One on the left side of the bench, one on the right side of the bench, and one jammed into the space between the horizontal metal bar and the wall behind it. Three different rejected lifestyles.

I picked up the pile of clothes on the right side of the bench first, which had a very pool-party-at-the-porn-shoot vibe: Pleather miniskirts. Midriff-baring T-shirts. Bodysuits in pastels that made them look like swimsuits from a distance. Neon flip-flops. A gold watch fell out of the pile. My eyes fell with it. It hit the floor face up. Patek Philippe. Hot damn. Who the hell would leave a watch this expensive in one of our fitting rooms?

I hadn’t pocketed anything from a fitting room in two years. Back then, I could think of no greater thrill in life than poaching a watch, or a ring, off a fitting-room bench, and taking it to my jewelry guy, who would give me so little money for whatever I brought him that I’d feel insulted, yet not insulted enough to decline. I’d perfected the art of lifting the goods with the gentle touch that other, more boring people probably used to do something insufferable, like make soufflés. Using a pile of clothes as a shield, I could casually slip anything into my pocket that would fit. But I wasn’t a swiper anymore. I’d moved past that part of my life. I didn’t need someone else’s watch. With commission, this job paid well enough to let me very, very slowly chip away at my student loans and live alone in a janky one-bedroom in East Hollywood. It kept me from crawling home to my insufferable mother in Brooklyn and telling her that I’d failed at life. But when I looked at its face, all I could see was money. There’s something irresistible about a nice watch. Not simply its beauty, but how its worth hints at another life. A life where someone could afford to buy that kind of watch. Maybe a life with a house and one of those refinished seventies beamers everyone drove in the neighborhood next to mine and expensive, glamorous problems, instead of the everyday financial anguish that stumped me.

I eased three of the bodysuits over my arms in a way that turned them into a tiny blanket, and picked the watch up underneath them. Goodbye two consecutive years of being a better person. Hello watch. I said a silent prayer that my lowball guy would offer me at least five hundred, and looked at the watch under the sheerest bodysuit in my hands. Its golden strap had an elegance that I associated with wedding jewelry, and its gold-and-gray-accented face reminded me of those women who wore stiff wool suits and spent their Mondays flying from LA to New York to Geneva. It was such a gorgeous watch. I’d wear it in a heartbeat if I didn’t need to turn it into money. I heard footsteps. I picked up all three piles of clothes, left the fitting room with the watch in my pocket, and took my haul back to Audrey, who I knew would give me shit for the size of the pile.

Audrey stood in the position she usually took on when there were no customers waiting to pay. Arms crossed, a few inches from the cash register, as if it held a magnet that kept her within a fixed radius. She and Lanae and I had all started at the job in the same month three years ago, and Lanae and I had quickly slid into hanging out. I couldn’t imagine Audrey ever coming out with us. Or having friends at all. Or carrying on a conversation for more than two minutes. Or giving me eye contact that didn’t feel like she was x-raying my skull. I braced myself for whatever she’d say about the enormous pile of clothes I sat on her counter.

“Richard looks kinda sick, right?” she said while grabbing a hanger for the shirt on top of the pile.

“I don’t see it,” I said.

We both looked across the floor, where Richard excitedly explained pants to a woman whose face said she had never experienced excitement. The woman was short. Five-two-ish. Possibly Latina. With a hip-to-waist ratio that made pants a difficult math problem. This might have contributed to the downcast look on her face whenever Richard picked up a pair. If I was over there with her, I would have talked about high-waisted skirts or a couple of the jumpsuits that we’d all tried on and liked, despite Audrey and Lanae and Richard and I having four very different body types. But Richard was taking his customer to a different, equally pleasant place, one with wide-legged sky-blue stretchy polyester pants and a matching sleeveless, button-down shirt that tied at the waist.

“You don’t see much,” Audrey said, hanging the shirt on the rack behind her.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said.

“Nothing,” she said.

“I see everything. I see every customer here. Every place where clothes meet rack. Every piece of clothing. Every square of our tile floor. The dark corners of the fitting rooms. The bugs that scuttle under racks. You, me, the cosmos. It’s all up here,” I said, pointing to my head.

“Forget it,” she said.

Audrey turned away to sort the rest of the clothes I’d handed her, dismissing me. She whipped shirts into one pile, pants into another, and accessories into a third, all in the time it might take someone to blink twice.

I went back to the front of the store, stung. Who the fuck was she? I noticed everything. What the fuck did she notice? I noticed a dust bunny slowly ambling across the floor, nine hours from its inevitable death by vacuum. I noticed the tight fit between the square horizontal end of a coatrack and its square vertical brother-in-arms. I noticed absolutely nobody coming back for the watch in my pocket. Who forgot their expensive-as-hell watch? See, a customer just walked in. Here I was, noticing the fuck out of her. Tall, blond, formal, stiffly tucked into a T-shirt and jeans boxy enough to erase any hint of personal expression.

She had a rich-enough look that she had probably meant to wander into a more upscale part of the mall, like the housewares store that sold seventy-five-dollar spatulas. Nobody needs an expensive spatula. I knew a seventy-five-dollar spatula lady when I saw one. If I had to talk to them for more than five minutes, they’d reveal that they had careers that sounded great but didn’t amount to much, like art curator of their personal collection. They had family money, but they didn’t want to tell you what their family did because it probably had to do with killing your family in some way. There were so many petrochemical heirs in the seventy-five-dollar spatula ranks. Sometimes they’d switch it up by being DDDs, the demure daughters of defense contractors. If they didn’t watch themselves, they’d give one of us the slight pinch around the mouth that meant Audrey, Lanae, Richard, and I were a little too Black. The real question was, why did they come to the mall themselves? Didn’t they have servants who did their shopping for them? Or kids who could take a second away from helping mercenaries to hit up the mall? The going theory I had was that the mall represented normality to them. A place where they could shuck the weighty responsibilities of being the heirs to killing empires to take down caramel corn.

“Jada,” Richard whispered into my ear.

I jumped, since I hadn’t heard him come anywhere near me.

“Honey, we have customers. Go talk to him,” he said, nodding his head toward the entrance, where a lone and lost fiftyish guy had entered timidly, as if a clothing store was actually a shark pit. I looked around for the seventy-five-dollar spatula lady, who had taken advantage of all the time I’d spent ruminating about her to bypass me and wander over to Lanae. I took a moment to survey Richard as he walked away, figuring if something really looked wrong with him, I would see it with the clarity of stars in a cloudless sky. But he looked fine. Fresh, even, since his powder-blue suit made him look like he’d just stepped out of Soul Train.

The fiftyish guy was one of my favorite types of customers: a dad looking for something for his teenage daughter. It was almost his daughter’s birthday, and he’d been sent to the mall to figure something out. Teen-girl dads were annoying because they needed all the help in the world. But I could subtly pad their purchase by claiming to be the number one expert on teenage girls, and they were usually terrified enough to believe me. I had no idea what teens liked anymore, having not been a teen for a couple of decades. I could only pretend, since the teens came into the store and wandered off to look at shirts without me. Teens have never needed anyone pushing forty to tell them what they want to buy.

Half an hour later, I sent teen-girl dad back to Audrey with a pair of slim-fit neon T-shirts and one of the maximalist backpacks that I had watched teens buy without my assistance. The backpacks had neon swirls and protruding growths that looked like unicorn horns, and looked like someone had designed them at Burning Man while high on a new psychedelic drug that made them unable to focus on anything but backpacks. Teen-girl dad looked satisfied in the mildly confused way of people who had to shop for fourteen-year-olds. But on my return to the front of the store, I saw Richard trying to pretend he wasn’t slumping over one of the chest-high pants racks, a move I’d also tried, without success, when I was hungover and needed to look like I still knew how to stand upright. I ran over to him.

“Richard, do you need to sit down for a minute?” I said, gently grabbing his arm.

“No,” he said, springing back all the way upright. “I was just getting to know this clothing rack. She’s a real looker.”

“What, are you into girls now?” I said.

“Only if they’re made of metal.”

We both laughed. I stared at the rack he was talking about. It was the same gunmetal gray as the rest of our racks, and it held a pack of the sort of T-shirts Richard might wear if he was going to a rave. More elegant than the rest of our shirts, with three stiff buttons below a middle-of-the-road collar that wouldn’t be noteworthy if it wasn’t for the colors they came in, electric blue and acid green. That was Richard, formal but fun. I wasn’t quite old enough to have witnessed the rave era, just its poppier aftermath, where we thought older kids with glow sticks and hits of E were the coolest people in the world. Even if they were moving their arms like those inflatable car-wash dolls to music that sounded like synthesizers had been struck by lightning and burned to death. They looked like they were having so much fun doing it, and that was all that mattered. As much as I loved my mall, every once in a while I felt bored enough to dream of drugs, wishing I hadn’t missed out on all that raver E, stayed too scared to deal with cocaine through the aughts, and eventually moved to LA to be the only person who didn’t smoke weed. Any of the three felt like they might have helped with spending five days a week inside a mall.

Richard would be the dude at the rave who asked if everyone else there needed a glass of water. Yeah, he was my boss, and you can’t trust bosses, but if you could, he would be number one on my list of bosses I felt good about. He asked after Audrey, Lanae, and me like we were his children. He knew when we were trying to sneak into work with fevers just to get paid, and would hold up what we called the fever hand—a hand that could take our temperature from five feet away—and tell us to go home and rest. He asked about our pets and boyfriends and petty traumas with a degree of interest I associated with therapists. On cold days he brought in his special hot chocolate, which involved melted chocolate chips and cinnamon, and we’d hustle to the break room to down it in shifts before it cooled off.

Before I could ask him if he needed a glass of water, he collapsed on the floor, taking the clothing rack with him. I dropped to the floor to ask him if he was okay, and when he didn’t respond, I shook his limp shoulder and held one hand over his mouth. Fucking nothing. I didn’t know CPR, so I just sat there, breathing at the speed of light. Lanae rushed over, checked for his breath, and pushed down on his chest.

“You’re supposed to breathe into his mouth,” said Audrey, in her usual deadpan.

I was freaking out. Why the hell wasn’t she freaking out? Lanae leaned down to try to breathe into Richard’s mouth, but the horror of the situation hit her, and instead of doing CPR, she screamed.

“I’ll do that. You call 911,” Audrey said to Lanae, who took her hands off Richard’s chest and sank down next to me, in the corner for the useless. A ring of customers gathered around us to help out by staring at us in silence. Lanae called 911, and I waved away mall security, since Richard hadn’t shoplifted anything and wasn’t running through the food court at top speed, threatening to collide with a pack of teens. Mall security electric-scootered itself away, and the customers filed out, and then it was just the three of us with our unconscious boss. Where was 911? I laced my fingers together and squeezed until they hurt. Lanae was panting like she’d just run a marathon.

“Where is 911?” I asked Lanae.

“Sometimes they get stuck in traffic.”

“You’re fucking kidding, right?”

“Have you ever taken the 134?”

“Chill out, people,” Audrey said, taking a break from CPR to yell at us. “We’re not talking about freeways right now.”

“You’re not supposed to stop!” I said.

She went back to trying to get Richard to breathe. She got up after her second round of CPR and walked in a circle around a table full of polo shirts, shaking her hands like something was stuck to them. I looked down at Richard, because CPR usually worked, right? He wasn’t moving, or breathing, or doing anything more normal like getting up and launching into some entertaining story about some other time he’d almost died on the sales floor. I was so ready for that! I wanted to hear all about how last time he’d keeled over in front of the sunglasses, and four pairs fell on him, and he called it his next look! Instead the paramedics showed up and tried a third round of CPR. Then they put a sheet over his head, and I couldn’t move. They lifted him onto a cot and wheeled him out the store’s back door. It was official. The day had turned to shit. I lay down on the floor and looked at the ceiling tile. It was still fucking tan. Maybe I’d never have to get up. Audrey walked past me, and I heard her slide the store’s plastic front door shut.

I normally loved the music that played during work. It was traditional retail music, happy in its never-ending way. But right after Richard died, the store music pounded my head relentlessly in its undying upbeat loop. It was summer music. Pool-party music. Music for having a good time and buying tons of shit you didn’t need. It was not death music. No one’s death should ever have to be soundtracked to “Party in the USA.”

Lanae came and lay down on the floor next to me. Beyond my feet, I could see flashes of normal mall behavior. Rich teenage girls languidly passing the Phoenix sign, as if the mall was their kingdom, with their arms full of bags. Not-rich teens doing what I used to do as a not-rich teen—see how long they could be with their friends in the mall without spending any money. I had fond memories of moving between sections of the fancy bookstore near my childhood apartment in Brooklyn so they didn’t kick me out, and seven of us sharing a Cinnabon almost as big as our heads in the only mall we were allowed to take the train to. I still remembered the looping mall music of my teenage retail jobs, heavy on Faith Hill and Shania Twain. If you blindfolded me, cut off my tongue, and threw me into a pit, I could still sing all the words to “You’re Still the One.”

“They should give you a year’s pay if you have to watch your boss die on the floor,” Lanae said.

“Two years,” I said.

“Rest of our lives.”

“A big bonus on top of it. Just a waterfall of death cash.”

A white woman with thousand-dollar highlights banged on the glass at the front of the store. Lanae and I eyed her, but we didn’t get up.

“Have you seen my watch?” she yelled.

She was on the other side of the closed door and her voice was muffled, so her yelling and arm flailing made her look like an angry wind sock. But whether she looked stupid or not, I’d fucked up. Her watch was deep in my pocket, bumping against my hip. How could I walk over there, reach into my pocket, and hand her back her watch without her calling the cops on me? I couldn’t. I sank a little more deeply into the floor, to marinate in the knowledge that I’d backslid into being someone who took watches. I always thought of the thrill of pocketing something that wasn’t mine in the moment, instead of all the guilt and shame I’d be stuck with later.

“No,” I yelled back.

Lanae, who knew my history, gave me a look.

Audrey came and lay down next to us.

“What the hell was that?” she said.

“You swear?” I said.

“Now that people are dying at work, I figure I can say whatever I want.”

“If we still have jobs,” Lanae said.

“I’ll be here tomorrow,” I said. “I need the money.”

“All you need is Richard’s store key to get in here,” Audrey said. “Just go chase the paramedics down and get it out of his pocket.”

“Shit,” I said.

“Fuck,” Lanae said.

“Damn,” I said.

“Asshole,” Audrey said.

We all laughed.

“Maybe it’ll be all right if we never get up,” I said.

“Uh-uh,” Lanae said. “I have a show to play at seven.”

Lanae didn’t just dress punk. She lived the life. She was the lead singer of a punk band called the Donner Party. If she wasn’t performing with them, she was out seeing bands with names like Soup Full of Glass and Lupus. I went with her once, because she swore I’d have a mind-blowing time, and I did. My hearing blew out in minute two, and I spent the rest of the night confusedly watching everyone else around me perform the rituals of a 1920s silent movie. They flapped their mouths and waved their hands while I waited for the end of Prohibition. The show ended, the hearing flowed back into my ears, and the speakeasies closed. Never again.

“Whatever. I’m going to have a killer time right here on the floor with Audrey,” I said.

“Sorry, I’m going to meet up with my running club,” Audrey said.

“You would be a runner,” I said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You have the vibe of a person who runs.”

You know, runners. People who ate more vegetables than the rest of us in our entire lifetimes, because performance. People whose idea of a good time was getting up at five a.m. on a nonwork Saturday to run in the mountains instead of lazily lying in bed until eleven to celebrate the glories of sloth. Audrey had the slim twitchiness I’d always associated with runners. An inner motor that kept them in constant motion, like a cockroach.

“See you tomorrow if we can get back in?” Lanae said.

“You know it,” I said.

The other two got up and left, leaving me alone with the looping music and the cold floor. Just over my right foot was the spot where Richard quit it. This morning he walked in with his hard-boiled eggs, and now he wasn’t walking anymore.

When I was in film school, I went to a Target after class once to pick up seltzer and floss, and on my way in I passed a woman lying on the floor, moaning and surrounded by paramedics. She kept yelling, “I don’t want to die here!” and I looked at her with sympathy, because who the hell wants to die in a Target? But Richard had done it. He had more or less died in a Target. He had expired under fluorescent lighting, surrounded by racks of clothes, under an endless looping wave of Muzak instead of at home, or a hospital, or at least surrounded by people who didn’t work for him.

I felt a new level of horror. I, too, could keel over right here, at work. I could die among clothes, surrounded by the fried-egg-roll smell of the Chinese spot in the food court so strong it could make it down here from two floors above me. For a second it didn’t sound so bad. I’d rather die at the mall than in my dirty-ass apartment, awash in student loans. I couldn’t imagine reconciling well enough with my toxic mother to enjoy expiring within a thousand miles of her. But thinking about dying on the store floor reminded me of my costume-designer self, the one that had bigger dreams than going back to retail, until those dreams were killed by the Incident. I didn’t want to die here. Or work here forever. As much as I loved selling clothes to people, I promised myself I was not going to tap out at the mall.