Chapter 3
Devon
If you asked a local, they’d swear that in Philadelphia, it only rained to screw up your plans.
They’d be right, in a small, sticky way.
The sky that morning was a mouthful of teeth—yellowy and thick—and the rain was less a gentle soak than an endless, spit-flecked argument with the world.
I timed my exit from the apartment to avoid seeing the building’s other tenants.
I was good at that. What I wasn’t good at was using the umbrella I’d bought from the dollar store, which was meant for toddlers, or maybe some breed of hairless dog.
The umbrella flipped inside out on the second block and became a conversation piece for the wind.
I crumpled it against my chest and hunched my head into the cold, letting the downpour sheet my hair against my face and soak the collar of my too-thin jacket.
I could have run, but running was a way to be noticed, and my goal was always the opposite.
So I kept my pace, measuring the distance by the color of the puddles—oily iridescence in the crosswalks, sulfur yellow near the curb, bruised blue under the traffic lights.
Wet hair clung to my cheeks and neck, but what bothered me most was the urge to hack it all off.
I’d had the same thought every day for a month: just take the shears and scalp yourself, Sinead style, and nobody will ever call you “beauty” again.
I never did it. A part of me suspected that the hair was the only thing about me that anyone found worth a second look.
Or maybe it was some core, lizard-brain vanity that kept me from looking like a sickly fourteen-year-old boy.
There was something perverse about having hair that still looked good after being washed with dollar store shampoo and conditioner and air-dried under a radiator.
Same for my skin: it should have gone to hell after months of off-brand lotion, late-night burritos, and not enough sleep.
But it didn’t. My face glowed like a thing carved out of snow, or maybe salt, and it made people stare.
At least until they got close enough to see the rest of me and decide I was nothing special after all.
I hit the edge of the industrial district.
Margie’s Diner squatted there on the corner of Girard and something, a chrome block that looked like it belonged in a history book about America Before The Collapse.
Inside, you could almost convince yourself time had stopped thirty years ago, which was probably the last time the seats had been reupholstered.
I stopped under the eave, checked my reflection in the battered window, and saw a drowned rat with pretty hair.
The thought made me smile a little, and the smile made me look even more Scandinavian.
Not that I’d ever met a Scandinavian, but I’d seen them on YouTube. I had the cheekbones for it.
That always led to the same dead end. Where was I from?
YouTube taught me about Volvo commercials and Christmas elves, and Norwegian death metal, but nothing about my life before waking up naked in a city park six months ago?
I kept waiting for it to come back, like a movie that had been paused for too long, but all I got were flashes: white rooms, the smell of alcohol, hands pressing on my face and chest, the sudden, thunderous boom of my heartbeat.
I wiped my hands on my jeans, twisted my hair into a ponytail, and stepped inside.
The difference hit like walking into another world.
The air was hot and close, tinged with coffee, old fry oil, and a pungent aroma that was probably just burnt toast but always reminded me of hospitals.
The place was already half full, mostly with regulars, but a few out-of-towners were hunched over their phones at the counter, trying to act like they weren’t casing the joint for the nearest exit.
At the far end of the room, Gwen was waiting for me.
Gwen fancied herself as the "head waitress," a title nobody had ever given to her. She looked like the sort of woman who’d been beautiful once and never forgave herself for what time had done to her. Auburn hair, salon-streaked, a sharp chin, and arms corded with the muscle of a lifetime of lifting trays. She always wore her apron cinched tight enough to turn her torso into a weapon. She hated me in a way that was pure and unadulterated, not the blandly performative kind you got from customers who didn’t like being served by a girl who looked like she ought to be doing TikToks in a suburban basement.
“You’re late,” she said before I’d even gotten my name badge out of my pocket. It was a lie, but her eyes dared me to challenge it.
“Sorry, rain,” I said, and gave her a half-shrug that might have looked like an apology if you weren’t paying attention.
She snorted and took a long, deliberate sip from her travel mug, which was probably half vodka at this point. “You look like you stuck your finger in a socket,” she said, not bothering to lower her voice.
“Guess I’m extra charged today,” I replied, forcing a smile as I squeezed past her in the narrow galley between the front counter and the kitchen door.
Everyone knew the dance. Gwen had it out for me, and she’d been here the longest so I just had to stick it out.
I did my best to get along. Margie gave me a chance when the halfway house I'd been living in called her and asked her to hire a girl with no memory of her past. She gave me a break, and I did my best to pay her back with my hard work.
In the back, I wrung out my hair over the deep sink and rubbed my hands together to bring some color back to my fingers. My name tag felt like a joke. “Devon,” it said, as if that meant anything. I remembered choosing the name when I saw it painted on the side of a moving van.
I took a breath, squared my shoulders, and walked back into the fray. The diner’s heat was worse than outside, steam from the dish pit curling up to mix with the haze of the fryers. I felt sweat gather under my arms and between my shoulder blades before I’d even clocked in.
I started my nine-hour shift with the counter crowd: the two truckers who always sat in the same seats and argued about football, the old woman with a crossword puzzle permanently glued to her hand, and a couple in matching raincoats who ordered in near-identical voices.
The couple asked if I was Russian, and I told them no, but they didn’t believe me.
I let it go. I couldn’t prove it either way.
The first hour was a blur of refilled coffee, clattering plates, and the weird, slow-motion horror of Gwen watching me from across the floor.
She’d perfected the art of silent sabotage: a glare here, a sigh there, a strategically misplaced order ticket.
I kept my eyes down and my pace even, hoping she’d get bored and move on to the busboy, but no luck.
By the end of the first rush, my hands were shaking from the combined effects of caffeine, adrenaline, and pure, undiluted fear.
Not fear of Gwen, not really; she was just a symptom.
It was the other thing, the thing that hummed in the back of my skull every time I touched something hot, or got too close to a customer with the wrong kind of smile.
The certainty that this was all fake, all borrowed, and that the second I stopped playing along, it would be taken away from me again.
At one point, I caught my own reflection in the window—hair already dry, skin shining—and for a moment I saw a girl who could have come from anywhere, could have belonged to anyone.
It hurt, the way looking at a picture of yourself as a child can hurt, because you know more than they do and you want to warn them, but you can’t.
If the first rush was a dull ache, lunch was a full-blown migraine.
The rain hadn’t let up, and with the roads a mess, every cop, meter maid, and utility worker in the county packed themselves into Margie’s like it was the lifeboat on the Titanic.
I moved between tables on muscle memory, refilling, clearing, smiling until my cheeks ached and my jaw spasmed.
My sneakers left damp prints across the tile.
My shirt stuck to my skin. The air in the diner was a stew of breath, body odor, and deep-fryer smoke.
If you’d told me the humidity was 150%, I would’ve believed you.
The only thing that kept me upright was the knowledge that, in another five hours, I’d be done and could go back to the neat little box where nobody looked at me or tried to pin me in place with their eyes.
Gwen kept to her side of the floor, but she managed to radiate malice like a heat lamp.
Every time our paths crossed, I could feel her sizing up the space, calculating the perfect moment for a swipe, a nudge, a snide aside.
She started small—swapping order tickets, hiding the sugar packets, intercepting my calls to the kitchen.
I ignored it, because that was the only thing you could do.
She wanted a reaction, and I wouldn’t give it to her.
At least, that was the plan.
I’d just cleared a four-top of city workers, balancing the dirty plates in a spiral arm formation that would have impressed a circus juggler, when Gwen swept past me carrying a tray loaded with the next round of entrees.
I was halfway to the dishwasher pass-through when she spun, making a show of “not seeing me,” and clipped my elbow.
The plates went everywhere—onto the floor, onto the wall, onto the city workers’ feet.
Meatloaf, gravy, mashed potatoes, coleslaw, all in an explosive radius that splattered my jeans and shoes and, in a small miracle of physics, managed to hit the one clean part of Gwen’s apron.
I froze. The world telescoped down to the sound of the plates hitting the floor, the slow-motion splatter of brown gravy, and the silence that followed as everyone in the room turned to look at me. My face went cold, then hot. For a second, I thought I might faint.