The café lady sticks the pen behind her ear where her undercut fades from blue to hot pink and then blond, and she smiles the same way that the mean girls used to smile before they said I couldn’t sit at their table in elementary school, like she’s waiting for a punch or some kind of prize.
“We really can’t do anything if you don’t have a résumé.”
A group of twenty-year-olds all wearing matching Converse swing in through the front door of the café and the undercut woman waves them in, grabbing menus from where she stands behind the cash register. Even the way she picks up the menus makes me want to slap the pen from behind her ear, her fingers pinching like the menus are too dirty for her to touch.
“I don’t have nothing to put on a résumé, so don’t really make sense for me to bring a blank page, do it?” My hands are resting on the glass counter, the sweet potato pie symmetrical and staring up at me, taunting.
The woman moves toward where the twenty-year-olds sit at a corner booth, handing them menus, returning to grab a water pitcher. The smile has faded, leaving only the grimace that comes before and after the mean girls tell you to get the fuck away. Funny how the playground follows us.
“Look, I don’t have anything to give my manager and, honestly, I think it’s highly unlikely we would hire someone with such limited experience.” She pauses, pouts. “Maybe try Walgreens?”
When I step away, I make sure to make a fist and pound lightly on the glass display counter. Not hard enough to risk breaking it, but enough that the twenty-somethings look over at me with fear in their eyes before I swing out the door and back onto the street.
I tried Walgreens last week, CVS the week before. Even tried the MetroPCS that shares its building with the smoke shop nobody ever steps foot in unless they looking for a deal or a phone cheap enough to last them until they get out of town.
It always goes the same way: I ask to talk to the manager and either some man comes out from the back, huffing, red-faced and ready for me to leave before I even start talking or they say the manager ain’t in and I try to negotiate with one of the employees. They start shaking their heads the minute I say I don’t got a résumé and the bell hanging from the door rings like a timer on my way out, telling me I don’t got much time before my world starts to crumble. It’s hours of this, and it sinks something in me so I’m not even sure what I’m doing and then I realize I’m just wandering, that there is no destination.
Walking in downtown Oakland is like trying to find your footing on an ocean floor. Everything is big here, not like back home in East, where we keep our buildings low to the ground and our feet to the sidewalk. In downtown, it feels like everything is airborne or underground. Like if there was a compass, we’d all be levitating above directionality. Marcus and I spent a lot of time with Daddy downtown, before they inverted the buildings and sprinkled gold on the sidewalk. Before we were unrecognizable. Back then, it was a ghost town and the only people out here was the ones who slapped Daddy’s back and offered us rides in the backseat of taxis they drove before Uber came in. Back then, we were royalty simply by association with Daddy, following him to his old friends’ apartments, the ones nobody wanted ’cause they were crusted in dirt and dealing.
Now there are too many cafés on these streets, too many of the same faces bent at the neck because, in downtown, nobody gives a shit where they’re walking, who they might bump into or stumble over. They’ve got their heads in a screen, their shoes laced so tight I bet their feet have gone numb.
The one thing downtown got that nowhere else in this city really does is a whole lot of bars, clubs, holes where people find themselves wasted and dancing. At two in the morning, somebody’s always out here barbecuing right before the clubs shut down, the weed mixing with the smoke from their grills.
There’s a strip club tucked underneath a yoga studio on the corner, its metal door painted a sparkling black. I can hear the faint sound of music and even though it’s only five or so in the evening, they’ve got the door propped open. I walk into a room dimly lit by those lightbulbs that look sort of like candles, and a few lone people are propped up on stools or sitting at circular tables, lurking in the darkest patches of the place, the poles looming large in the center, one woman aerial and another bored.
I wander over to the bar, where a man stands with a rag in hand, wiping down the counter. He looks like every other bartender I’ve ever seen and it’s sort of comforting how predictable downtown is, how it’s changing in the kinds of ways that only propel more of the same, how every building seems to duplicate like this man’s tattoos down his arm.
He looks up at me and I feel small in the expanse of dark. “Can I help you?”
I breathe in. I’m not sure I want a job like this or if I could get one anyway, but I’m desperate. “I’m looking for a job,” I say, not even bothering to ask for the manager as if it will make a difference.
He nods, the gauge earring in his left ear glinting as he moves. “I can give your application to my boss if you want. He’s always looking for more pretty girls.”
“Don’t got an application,” I say, waiting for that familiar pity smile. “Or a résumé.”
“Oh,” he responds, tucking a piece of his hair back into his ponytail. “I could give him your name and phone number, I guess.” He grabs a pen and Post-it from behind the counter and bends over, getting ready to write. He looks up at me again and his nose wrinkles. “How old are you, sweetheart?”
I flinch at the name. “Seventeen.”
He stands up from his bent position, the soft grimace finally making its way to his face. “We can’t hire anyone under eighteen. Sorry, darling.”
I nod, turning back around to where the light leaks in from the open door. I used to think the only thing you got from turning eighteen was the right to vote, but now it’s clear you get more than just voting and I wish my birthday would come a little faster. Before I make my way out, I hear my name. I spin back around to see a woman materializing behind the bar, her face foreign until I squint hard enough and she is suddenly familiar.
“Kiara?”
“Lacy?”
She smiles at me, her eyebrows pointing inward just like I remember, before waving me back to the bar and then walking around to pull the stool out for me. I sit down and she pats my leg.
“What you up to, girl? I know you not old enough to be in here.” She says it with that beam, the one that don’t seem to stop.
I never really knew Lacy, at least not like Marcus did. She was his sidekick back at Skyline High and I never saw them apart, not for almost four years. Then both of them dropped out a few months before graduation because neither of them had nobody to push them into fighting the hallways for that diploma, stuff them into the cap and gown. School’s got as many potholes as the streets, always chipping, always leaving us to trip.
“You know, living,” I tell her, because I don’t wanna lie like Marcus would, but it seems too intimate for this room to hear: how everything seems to be fraying.
“And your brother?” I watch her face turn inward, twist at the corners of her lips.