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“How many interviewsare you going to flunk before you just take the fucking job?” Kaylee asked as she popped a coffee pod into the machine. With the press of a French-manicured finger, it groaned to life. The smell of the beans like a siren song to my undercaffeinated soul.

Sleep had been avoiding me like an ex at a mutual friend’s wedding ever since I lost my job eight months ago. The insomnia only got worse when I had to choose between rent and my mom’s medical bills and ended up crashing on Kaylee’s couch in her tiny one-bedroom walk-up.

We made it work, but I knew that both of us were eager to have our own spaces again.

“Dunno,” I muttered, scrolling through Monstra—the country’s leading job-finding website—for what had to be the millionth time in the last several months.

Position after position sailed past. Half of them were fucking scams in the first place and the other half… I was either over or underqualified for. Annoying didn’t even begin to cover my feelings.

Irate was probably closer, but naming the emotion didn’t make it go away. If anything it only made me more annoyed that I had to spend any time thinking about it at all.

It felt like we had this entirely unhelpful conversation every. Single. Day. “And I’m notflunkingthem, Kaylee. The job market is competitive as fuck right now?—”

“Annnndyoustillthink you’re too good to work at a sex club,” she replied with a heavy roll of her green eyes. “Heard, Vi.”

“That’s not true,” I argued as my computer froze on an ad for a job I’d applied for ten times in the last six months.

Ten. Times.

I swore to God half of these companies were advertising and they didn’t evenneedanybody, which made exactly zero sense. Wasn’t looking at resumes they didn’t need just a huge waste of time for their HR department?

Realistically, it was hard to feel too good foranythingwhile crashing on my best friend’s sofa with my entire life’s worth of stuff collecting dust in a storage unit I could barely afford.

Whether I wanted to admit it or not, I’d been looking for a job for a long time. If I didn’t find something soon, sacrifices were gonna need to be made.

It wasn’t the first time Kaylee and I’d been roommates—that credit went to our time in the college dorms and the creaky, semi-mouldy old house we’d rented with half a dozen other girls after. But, unlike when we’d been fresh-faced juniors, this time—tragically—I didn’t have my own room.

Fucking. Brutal.

I was trying real fucking hard not to let her bottomless generosity feel like a backslide. A task made continually more difficult the more my back ached from the pullout, or whenever she floated the idea of me coming to work with her at Oagain.

Never mind that Kaylee herself only started working at the place, a glorified orgy bar dressed in burlesque speakeasy’sclothing, because she hadn’t managed to score any roles while auditioning for musicals in the Upper City.

Nostalgia for my years bartending to pay my way through school be damned, I wasn’t interested.

I could handle sleeping on her stupidly trendy, creamy cloud couch for a few more months until I found something in my field. It wasn’t a bad thing that I wanted to hold out for a job I’d be at for a while. It was smart.Responsible.

At least that’s what I told myself. In reality, it was getting harder to avoid the truth—my ego, feeble as it was, couldn’t take it.

There was nothing wrong with being a bartender, but a little part of me hoped that I didn’t waste all that time and money on college. That I’d gotten my education and, economic crash be damned, I’d eventually be back at the table as a creative director.

But… another part of me craved my own space almost as much as I missed waking up to something other than the sound of Pleasers on the honey-coloured hardwood. Kaylee might be graceful on stage but off it? Bambi fared better on the frozen pond.

The cold, hard truth was that if things kept on like this, I’d have no choice but to accept her offer anyway. My credit cards were getting dangerously close to the limit with little funds to make any kind of meaningful payment and my mom’s medical bills… I’d gotten to the point that picking up the mail from her postal box had become the source of so much anxiety that I couldn’t eat before unless I wanted to watch my lunch have a return trip.

“Yeah, yeah,” Kaylee said breezily, screwing on the lid of her travel mug and tipping it over the sink to make sure it wouldn’t leak in her bag.

“Do you mind throwing one of those on for me?” I asked, tapping my trackpad impatiently as the laptop slowly beganto load again. I closed Monstra to open my email, if only to stop myself from turning on another episode of Coffin Hunters International.

I didn’t know what was more depressing, the contents of my inbox or spending my days looking at houses I’d never be able to afford in countries I’d never visit.

Rejection. Rejection.Rejection. And—Oh! How exciting!—Another rejection.

My job search was quickly leaving slightly desperate to dive straight into hopeless territory.