wo stores stand opposite Elisa’s bus stop. Thousands of times Elisa has stared at them; zero times has she visited either during business hours, sensing that to do so would be akin to shattering a dream. The first is Kosciuszko Electronics. Today’s deal is BIG SCREEN RECTANGULAR COLOR TVS WITH WALNUT GRAINED FINISH, and several models, each with legs like Sputnik’s antenna, are broadcasting the night’s final images. An American flag cedes to a “Seal of Good Practice” screen before signing off, a sight that confirms Elisa’s lateness. She prays for the bus to come. Who did the girl in the movie pray to tonight? Chemosh? Maybe Chemosh works faster than God.

She shifts her eyes to the second store, Julia’s Fine Shoes. She does not know who this Julia is, but tonight she envies her so much she is pinpricked by tears, this bold, independent woman with a business all her own, inevitably beautiful with bouncy hair and a bounce in her step, so confident in her store’s value to the Fells Point neighborhood that instead of turning the lights off at night, she leaves a spotlight upon a single pair of shoes placed upon an ivory column.

The gambit works. My, how it works. On nights when she isn’t running behind, Elisa crosses the road and rests her forehead against the glass to get a better look. These shoes don’t belong in Baltimore; she’s not sure they belong outside of Parisian runways. They are her size, square-toed, and so low slung they’d slip off the foot if not for the snug, inward-leaning heel. They look like hooves in the best way: of unicorns, of nymphs, of sylphs. Every inch of lamé is encrusted with glittering silver, and the inserts are as shiny as mirrors—she can literally see herself in them. The shoes stir in Elisa feelings she thought that the orphanage had beaten out of her as a youth. That she could go places. That she could be something. That all was within the realm of the possible.

Chemosh answers her call: The bus hisses down the hill. The driver, per usual, is too old, too tired, too spiritless to drive safely. The bus makes its hard right on Eastern, hard right on Broadway, and barrels north past the heartbeat of fire-engine lights and the blood spill of the melting chocolate factory. The leaping, licking destruction is, at least, a kind of life, and Elisa contorts herself to watch it, feeling for a minute that she isn’t rumbling through civilization’s scabwork, but rather darting through some vicious, vital jungle.

All of it shrinks from the long, sulfur-lit driveway of Occam Aerospace Research Center. Elisa presses her cold face to the colder window to make out the illuminated clock on the sign: 11:55. Her shoes touch a single stair on her bound from the bus. The changeover from the busy swing shift to the tiny graveyard shift is chaotic, and it allows Elisa to move quickly, gazelling from the bus and deering up the service sidewalk. Beneath the merciless outdoor floodlights—every light at Occam is merciless—her shoes are blue blurs.

It’s a single-floor elevator ride down, but some of the labs are more like hangars and the trip takes half a minute. The car opens into a two-story staging area, where stanchions direct staff along a narrowing path. Ten feet above the floor, in a Plexiglased observation chamber, stands David Fleming. Born with a clipboard instead of a left hand, he lowers it to review his subjects. It was Fleming who interviewed her for her job over a decade ago, and he’s still here, his hyena scrutiny pushing him up the throat of command year after year. Now he runs the whole building yet still can’t help meddling with bottom-rung employees. Over the equal period of time, Elisa has gone where janitors go: nowhere.

Elisa curses her Daisys. They stand out, which is the point, but there’s a double edge. Her fellow graveyarders are up ahead: Antonio, Duane, Lucille, Yolanda, and Zelda, the first three disappearing down the hall while Zelda searches for her punch card as if choosing from a menu. The cards go into the same slots every day; Zelda is stalling for Elisa’s sake, because Yolanda is behind Zelda and if Yolanda gets a shot, she’ll dawdle at the punch clock to make Elisa one crucial minute late.

It shouldn’t be this cutthroat. Zelda is black and fat. Yolanda is Mexican and homely. Antonio is a cross-eyed Dominican. Duane is of mixed race and has no teeth. Lucille is albino. Elisa is mute. To Fleming, they are all the same: unfit for other work and therefore easy to trust. It humiliates Elisa that he might be right. She wishes she could talk so she might stand on the locker-room bench and stir her coworkers with a speech about how they need to look out for one another. But that’s not how Occam is set up. As far as she can tell, it’s not how America is set up, either.

Except Zelda, who has always been protective of Elisa. Zelda is digging through her purse for glasses everyone knows she doesn’t wear, waving off Yolanda’s gripes about the ticking clock. Elisa decides that Zelda’s boldness must be matched by her own. She thinks of Bojangles and darts off, mamboing through yawners, fox-trotting past coat-buttoners. Fleming will spot her speeding blue shoes, and her behavior will be noted upon a checklist; at Occam, anything beyond a tired slump earns suspicion. Yet in the seconds it takes Elisa to reach Zelda, her dancing frees her from all of it. She rises above the underground and floats as if she’d never left that lovely, warm bath.