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That night, I climbed into bed, pulled the covers over my head, and let myself cry until exhaustion finally took pity on me and knocked me out. When I woke up nine hours later—groggy and disoriented—there was a strange man standing at the end of the bed.

I sat up so fast that my head slammed into the underside of the upper bunk. My vision went fuzzy.

“Ouch,” I complained.

“What?” Above me, I could hear Lionel rustling awake. And then— “Oh shit.”

Lionel’s legs appeared over the edge of the bunk as he jumped down to the floor. He stood there in flannel pajama pants and a baggy T-shirt that read D.A.R.E., myopic and so naked-looking without his glasseson.

“Hey, Frank,” he said.

“Good morning, Lionel,” the man said. He was probably in his thirties, a sandy blond with a scruffy beard that failed to compensate for his prematurely receding hairline. “Didn’t expect to find you here on a Sunday morning. Don’t you have a perfectly adequate apartment?”

“I didn’t know you came in on weekends.” Lionel was patting around for his glasses. He located them on the edge of the couch and shoved them crookedly on his face.

“Thought I’d get a jump on the week.” Frank glanced at me and then looked quickly away, uncomfortable with the sight of me in my pajamas. “Please tell me you’re not having sex in here. You promised no one would be screwing in the office if we gave you guys the beds.”

“No!” Lionel lifted his hands in protest. “She’s a…friend, in need. I figured it wasn’t going to hurt anyone to let her crash here for a night or two.”

Frank’s eyebrows shot up. “Seriously? I’m trying to run a website here, Lionel. Not a homeless shelter. Ross will lose his shit if he finds her here. He already thinks digital is a lunatic asylum.”

“No, I get it. Sorry. We’ll figure something else out.” Fumbling, Lionel snatched up a dirty sock that I’d tossed on the floor. He picked up my backpack with his other hand, and shoved these toward me, his face slack with apology.

I didn’t take them from him. “I know HTML,” I blurted.

Frank’s head swiveled. His eyes met mine with an expression of vague puzzlement. “I’m sorry?”

“Lionel told me that you’re hiring anyone who knows HTML. I know HTML.” I climbed out of bed and stood in front of him, arms crossed over my chest.

He cocked his head. A tiny smiled tugged at the edges of his beard. “Is this your way of saying that you want me to hire you? A vagrant who has been squatting in our office?”

“ Vagrant ’s kind of a strong word,” Lionel muttered. “She’s more of an itinerant intellectual.”

I smiled. I liked this.

Frank looked me up and down. “How do I know you really know HTML? You have a website I could see?”

Yes, I thought, but I wasn’t about to pull up the Luddite Manifesto to show him. “It’s not online anymore. But I can mock up one for you now, if you want? You can watch me do it.”

“Christ, no, that sounds tedious.” He sighed. “You a college dropout? Stanford kick you out for smoking pot in the dorms?”

“Homeschooled. No college. But I can recite Baudrillard’s theories on hyperreality, if you like, or lecture you on Keynesian economics.”

Frank tugged at a particularly wiry tuft of beard. “CV?”

“What’s that?”

He sighed. “You’re killing me.”

“You’ll kill me if you kick me out.” It didn’t feel that far from the truth, and I was too desperate not to work every angle I had.

He raised an eyebrow at this. “Spare me the melodrama.” He turned to Lionel. “You can vouch for her?”

Lionel nodded. The nod was a little tentative for my liking, but I couldn’t blame him.

“OK, look, we were supposed to get a new production intern this week but she just bailed on us to do a project with Survival Research Labs. So you caught me on a good day. Plus I have a soft spot for Lionel here; he’s probably the straightest arrow we have in this office, keeps the trains running on time. So here’s the deal: I’m giving you a trial period of two weeks. It’s minimum wage. No benefits, no overtime. You’ll probably end up working sixty hours a week but we’re only going to pay you for forty. And you have to find somewhere else to sleep, OK?”

I breathed out, finally. “OK.”

“You got a name?”

“Esme Nowak.”

“ Esme. Welcome to the revolution, Esme.” He turned to leave but pivoted at the door. “And seriously, no fucking in the office!”

Once he was gone, I turned to Lionel, rumpled and shell-shocked, his glasses still askew. My head was still throbbing where it had connected with the underside of the bunk bed; I was a little dizzy, but that might have been excitement rather than a concussion.

“So,” I said. “What’s ‘minimum wage’?”