Chapter 10
Ten
“All right, here’s your receipt, a museum map, and an admission sticker. Make sure you wear the sticker somewhere we can see
it, like the stylish fashion statement it is. We have guided tours led by our highly knowledgeable, slightly geeky docents
every hour. If you’d prefer to explore at your own pace, you’re free to do so. Remember, no food or drink in the galleries.
Pictures are not only welcome but highly encouraged, just no flash photography, please. And no touching the artifacts. Unless
you have any questions, you’re good to go. We hope you enjoy your time here at the Nuclear Seasons Experience.”
The thirtysomething guest stares at me, wide-eyed. I’m not sure what’s confusing. I’ve sold enough tickets in the past two
weeks to get comfortable with the spiel and stop talking at that nervous, patter-song auctioneer pace.
The man sweeps his pile of tomorrow’s ephemera off the counter. He smiles and says, “Thank you, miss.”
My own smile doesn’t falter. It’s set with quake wax; it would take more than one tremulous, likely unintentional microaggression to—
It’s fine. I’m still smiling as he places the sticker on his button-down with a genteel nod.
My first few days at the register, every honorific that guests aimed at museum staff baffled me, until I realized they were
often accompanied by a telltale twang—that southern hospitality mentality that we Californian heathens tend to assume was
gone with Gone with the Wind. I guess they’d just call it manners.
Still, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been miss’d—and only miss’d. I’ve kept smiling, though I couldn’t be further from meaning it.
Because it’s not just occasional southerners doling out gendered honorifics.
Maybe five transactions back, I sold a membership to a family from Sebastopol. Before I closed the deal, the couple debated
the fiscal merits amongst themselves, as if I weren’t there. Except I was there, in their domestic spat, as an expert witness. She says this will save us money, the husband said. She probably gets a commission, the wife said.
I said I sold the membership. Do I really need to spell this out?
“Damn, Eli, you’re getting good at that.”
I startle at Lola’s voice. I have no idea how she got behind the counter without me noticing. I clear my throat with a tight,
asthmatic cough. “Pardon?”
“The ‘rules and regulations’ speech.” Lola taps her acrylic nails on the counter. “You’re doing jokes now.”
“I’m a regular Mrs. Maisel.” It’s not like I practiced in the mirror every night that first week, no siree.
“I’d watch your comedy special.”
I scoff on instinct, a not-so-witty retort on the tip of my tongue when I remember that humor is easy for Lola. Just like
she can befriend someone with a single handshake, she laughs like it’s her favorite thing to do. Despite her airy tone, however,
she isn’t laughing now.
“You okay?” she asks, quieter. If she heard my spiel, then she heard what came after it.
“Fine.” It’s not a lie. It may be a joke, but it’s not a lie. “What are you doing here, anyway?”
“I’m covering your fifty-two.”
“Already?” I squint at my watch. It doesn’t feel like lunchtime, despite Lola’s use of the museum’s official walkie-talkie
break code: 52 for lunch breaks, 51 for scheduled morning and afternoon breaks, and 55 for emergency bathroom breaks.
“Time flies when you’re having fun?”
“Fun,” I echo, remembering the kind, oblivious sincerity in that man’s eyes. “Right.”
“Save the chitchat for when you’re off the clock, girls,” interrupts Ford, my ticketing partner du jour. “We’re already behind
schedule, so make sure you’re back on time.”
I bite my tongue—for more reasons than one. Ford has yet to learn that I am literally the least likely person to come back late from a break, but this is my punishment for getting caught up in illicit concerted activities. No one takes me seriously as an employee.
Ford also doesn’t take me seriously as a guy, but Ford’s a dick to everyone.
I clock out as soon as I’m in the stairwell and set a timer for twenty-five minutes. That five-minute buffer should give me
time to clean up and get back downstairs.
I open the refrigerator, hoping it will leech the heat from my cheeks in the time it takes for me to fish out my lunch box.
Meanwhile, Efraín doesn’t clock out until the microwave’s halfway through defrosting his Amy’s Pad Thai bowl.
“Planning on closing the door anytime soon?” Efraín asks.
I slam the door, but I don’t dignify Efraín with a response. We sit at the same table—or he sits next to me. Neither of us
has an appetite for conversation.
Stanley rounds the corner whistling the NS theme song, and soon the glug-a-glug-glug of the water cooler fills the silence.
But if I’ve learned one thing about Stanley, it’s that he likes to talk. He’ll strike up a conversation with anyone, though
even he can’t spin conversational gold from my laconic misadventures in water cooler talk.
Said water cooler groans to a halt, and I catch a flash of silver in Stanley’s palm.
Even from halfway across the room, I know it isn’t a water bottle. I’m about to file the observation away in my mental archive, but once again, I’ve forgotten that I do not keep the universe alone.
Efraín leans halfway across the table. “Hey, is that a—”
Stanley darts another glance at the open space where the door would be, if management believed employees could be trusted
with doors.
“Why did you fill a flask with water?” Efraín asks, surprisingly quiet for a boy whose “inside voice” rivals my “outside voice.”
Stanley takes the chair next to mine. “Can you boys keep a secret?”
I’m not just a locked vault but a hermetically sealed doomsday bunker. I know Efraín can keep a secret because he wouldn’t
be able to pull off any of his pranks without covert tactical planning that would put four-star generals to shame.
“Why are you looking at me like you think I’m going to tattle?” I whisper to Efraín.
“Because you did.”
“What? When?”
“Freshman year, you told the librarian—”
“Because you were making her job harder! Ms. Petri was already planning a display on banned books. You didn’t need to raid
the shelves and bring in half your personal library. If you’d just asked—”
“What if she’d said no?”
“Then you would’ve found another way.” The rebuke has evaporated from my tone, leaving only raw, gritty sedimental sentiment,
and Efraín’s jaw slackens. I couldn’t testify under oath which of us looks away first.
“We can keep a secret,” Efraín confirms.
“I trust you.” If Stanley’s put off by our bickering, he hides it well. He surreptitiously pulls out a hip flask, burnished
silver, etched with a familiar radiation warning symbol. It could pass as a novelty item from the gift shop, if we sold flasks.
“You know it’s against museum policy to bring beverages into the galleries, right? But when I’m leading tours, it’s nonstop
talking-and-walking, between the galleries, where there’s no shade, or inside them, where everything’s humidity-controlled.
My throat gets dry; I get dehydrated. I can’t abandon my tour group to go to the drinking fountain, and the walkie’s only
for emergencies. Getting a little thirsty doesn’t qualify.”
“But you’re not talking about ‘getting a little thirsty,’ ” Efraín cuts in. “You said you get dehydrated.”
Stanley shrugs.
“If you feel thirsty, you’re already dehydrated,” I point out. “It’s a medical issue. Management has to make accommodations—”
“For real medical conditions,” Stanley agrees. “TJ’s diabetic, so he has special dispensation from HR to keep a water bottle
on him at all times. But I don’t have any relevant medical conditions.”
“Just the condition of being human,” Efraín says.
“And needing water to perform innumerable bodily functions,” I add.
Stanley smiles faintly. “Management doesn’t see it that way.”
“So you took matters into your own hands,” Efraín says, leaning forward, elbows braced on the table.
“So to speak.”
The flask is small, not much larger than my phone.
Efraín actually asks the volume, his tone cool, speculative, and, God, I wish I didn’t know where this was going.
“Eight ounces, if memory serves.”
If my memory serves, eight ounces is a single “serving” of water. Ten percent, at best, of modern medical recommendations for daily
water intake. Still, small as it is, the flask doesn’t fit under Stanley’s palm.
It begs the question: “Isn’t a flask a bit conspicuous?”
“A French tuck hides a multitude of sins,” Stanley says.
I’m deep down the “but a French tuck doesn’t hide hips” dysphoria rabbit hole when Efraín says, “Hydration isn’t a sin.”
It’s not the words so much as his tone that magnetizes my attention. He’s just so unbearably earnest; it hurts to look at him, but I can’t yank my gaze from his profile. I’ve never met anyone else who can flip from dry sarcasm
about all that ails our society to such naked compassion from one sentence to the next.
Multitudes and contradictions. It shouldn’t leave me surprised, let alone breathless.
If anything, I should be profoundly worried, because Efraín’s brand of empathy never stops at righteous indignation; it always leads to action, usually in the form of activist hijinks, from hauling his personal library into the school library to dyeing his hair pink.
Efraín already said he wanted to start a union, poke around, listen to the year-round staff for grievances and hopefully recruit
some of them to the Cause—once he settles on an actionable cause, that is. Now he’s getting ideas.
“I know water’s important,” Stanley says, “but try telling that to the powers that be.”
“You said TJ got HR approval with a doctor’s note, so they do take medical concerns seriously,” I say. “If you just went to HR and told them what you told us, showed them studies about
dehydration—”
Efraín snorts.
“What?”
“You still think management can be reasoned with?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you believe it.”
I think about Dagny and Anya and shake my head. I’m not convinced reason would work on either of them. But we’re not talking
about management; we’re talking about HR.
Maybe human resources would understand that employees are humans who can’t do their jobs when they’re unwell.
Efraín’s saying something to Stanley—and maybe I should be listening; maybe I should be concerned that he’s got the same look on his face that he had in Foxglove Apothecary’s hair care aisle—but I’m light-years away.
Because I have an idea of my own.