Page 1 of Delivered and Devoured
1
Don’t Fuck This Up
Lorri
Twelveinterviewsinsixweeks. Eleven rejections. One callback. And the only thing standing between me and a humiliating comm to my mother tonight is a job interview I am about to walk into wearing a top that has, in the last forty-eight hours, betrayed me.
The mirror in the Level Two washroom has seen everything and still thinks badly of me, and it is currently telling me, in fluorescent unforgiving detail, that the lucky top is no longer lucky.
It used to come down to my hips. The dryer, in concert with the ancient station laundromat on Level Six and a setting I do not rememberselecting, has shortened it by three inches and tightened it by two and removed any pretense that this is a garment I can wear in public on the morning of a job interview that means everything. The neckline plunges with conviction, and the hem flirts with my ribs. Across my chest the fabric is doing a thing the seamstress in my colony’s market would have calledgenerous, sweetheartin the tone of a woman selling you back your own dignity at a markup.
Lucky, my mother said, when she pressed it into my hands the day I left home. “Wear it the first day of every new thing. You hear me, baby? Every single first day.”
I hear you, Mama.
Six years and three jobs into this top. The fabric is honey-colored and soft and the embroidery at the hem is hers, and I have worn it the first morning of every interview I have ever had, and I cannot — I cannot — show up at SNAG having ditched it because the dryer was rude. That is asking the universe to fail me before I have opened my mouth.
So I am wearing it. Under the only thing I had left in the duffel that fit over it. Which is a utility jacket two sizes too big I bought at the Finder’s Market the night I arrived, in a panic, because the freight company had lost my luggage and I needed something with pockets and the shop was closing.
Jacket open: the lucky top is on display in ways my mother did not embroider it for.
Jacket closed: I look like I have something in there I do not want anyone to know about, and the Level Two air is already two degrees too warm.
The zipper goes up. The zipper goes halfway back down. The zipper goes up. The mirror gives me the look a station auntie gives a bride who has chosen poorly.
“Okay.” Quiet. To my reflection. Both hands flat on the sink. “Okay. We are going to do this.”
The hazel eyes in the mirror do not look convinced.
“You walked here. That’s the hardest part. The application coach said. Walking through the door.” A breath. “You are competent. You are kind. You are — fine in this jacket. People wear jackets. People are wearing jackets all over this station right now. Nobody is going to look at your jacket.”
The fluorescent light flickers. The universe has never been subtle.
“You are going to walk in there, and you are going to be calm and friendly and professional, and you are going to answer the questions she asks you, Lorri, just the question, you do not have to volunteer your entire life story when she asks why you applied —”
The washroom door hisses. A station janitorial bot the size of a footstool trundles in, ignores me with the focused indifference of a small machine on a deadline, and begins to mop around my boots.
“Right,” I tell it. “Yes. Off I go. Thank you.”
It does not respond. It has more to do today than I do.
Bergamot reaches me from forty feet away, threading up out of an open door under a hand-painted sign that hangs slightly crooked. SNAG RECOVERY SERVICES. Someone painted the letters. Someone cared about the letters. Warmth spills from the doorway, a degree above corridor temperature, and I can feel it against my cheek before I am close enough to see anyone inside. My hand goes to the zipper again — up, then a half-inch back down, because the lucky top has to be in the room — and I make myself stop.
A dent in the wall inside the door, fist-sized, covered with a sticker someone has hand-drawn in marker. EVIDENCE OF STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE. Round handwriting. Tiny circle over the ‘i’.
Don’t laugh. Do not laugh. It is a structural defect with a sticker; you don’t know what is funny about it yet.
“Sweet Maker.” A honey-blonde head pops up from a brown notebook two desks away. “There she is. Lorri Vance, yes? Come in, come in, mind the dent.”
“Yes — yes, Lorri, that’s me, hi —”
Stop saying yes. She knows. She said my name.
“Florence Knight. Flossie. You and I spoke on the comm last week.”
“You said I had a friendly voice.”
She blinks. Then she smiles. The smile doesn’t move much on her face, but does a lot in her eyes.
