ntonio takes ten years to find his punch card. It’s the crossed eyes, Zelda figures. Lord knows how he cleans a desk without knocking all contents to the floor. Hostile thoughts, but Zelda decides she deserves them. Elisa had a whole weekend to consider Zelda’s question: Are we friends? The answer, it seems, is no. Here it is, the end of Monday’s shift, and Elisa hasn’t said a word to her. Won’t even look at her. Zelda’s had it. At least that’s what she tells herself: She’s had it. Maybe Brewster’s right. A white friend is only a friend for as long as she needs you. What sticks in her head, though, is how fish-belly pale Elisa’s face had been tonight, how she kept looking over her shoulder, how half the cleaning products she picked up tumbled from the uncontrollable shake of her hands.

Yolanda pokes Zelda in the back. The line has shuffled forward, and so she does the same, except when she reaches for her punch card, the most ordinary thing in the world, it takes longer than Antonio’s ten years—it takes a lifetime. It’s like she’s reaching across a bottomless chasm. Humiliation and anger, it seems, no matter how much she deserves them and wants to own them, are slippery objects to Zelda, as slippery as this punch card. It flutters from her fingers, lazing down like a broken wing.