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party and forces hundreds of thousands of people from the Champs-Élysées. We’re drunk and cold and have nowhere to go. The night quickly devolves into a riot. We ring in the New Year cloaked in a rolling fog of tear gas.
    Two weeks later, we return home to a stack of mail. Buried ten envelopes deep is a letter from the National Registry of EMTs. I have my numbers. I’m officially an EMT.

6
A Job at Last
    M idnight. Early February 2004. Atlanta has frozen over, and the gravel parking lot surrounding FirstMed Ambulance is buried in frost. I’m half-asleep in the back of an ambulance. My partner and her girlfriend are drinking Malibu rum in the warm comfort of the office. Just a few months ago, when I was in school, I pictured this EMT gig going differently. I expected dedicated and earnest medics crowded around a dying patient, all of them pounding futilely on his chest while telling him he’s not gonna die, not on their watch.
    This is not that kind of place.
    How I landed here, at FirstMed, is the punch line to a joke I’m not ready to laugh at. I text Sabrina—which is awkward because my fingers are numb—and tell her this isn’t what I signed on for. In all caps, I type I AM DONE. She texts back. Says I signed on for the weird. This is weird.
    I stuff the phone in my pocket, pull the blanket over my head, and swear to myself I’ll quit in the morning. Just as I’m starting to drift off, the front door opens. I bolt upright. As in most FirstMed ambulances, the dome light doesn’t work, so I can’t see what’s happening in the cab. I hear someone rifling through the glove box, the ashtray, the console. I’m waiting to hear the engine rattle tolife when the side door flies open and we’re eye to eye—me on the stretcher with a blanket, he wearing two pairs of pants and a ripped pink jacket. He has one black eye, a few cracked teeth, and a wild beard braided just below the chin and strung with plastic beads. His hands are cracked and caked with grime, and he has plastic shopping bags tied around his shoes. He’s half-drunk and fully homeless and takes me for a fellow traveler. After saluting my savvy sleeping choice and apologizing for waking me, he grabs a blanket and disappears into the night.
    Where he came from and what his story is, I can’t say. But my story—the one about how I graduated at the top of my EMT class and still wound up here, in this ambulance? Yeah, I know that one.
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    As soon as I passed the EMT exam, I quit delivering papers. After nearly a year of working late nights, seven days a week, it was good to be gone. I woke up the next morning and set about finding employment. I had high hopes, and why not? This was medicine, a field everyone will tell you is always hiring and has limitless possibilities, a career field where no two days are the same.
    My first call was to Grady EMS. They said no, told me I needed experience, and suggested I try the fire department. So I did. I contacted every department in the area and was told by every receptionist in every municipality that they hired once a year and then only through a meandering process of forms and test dates and agonized waiting. The only remaining option if I wanted to run 911 calls was Rural/Metro Ambulance, which covered the parts of Fulton County not handled by Grady. I livedin Fulton, I wanted to work 911, and this would help me get a job with Grady. It seemed like the perfect fit. I called. A woman answered and told me they’d just hired a bunch of people the day before but not to worry because they’d be hiring again soon. How soon? Six months. I told her I didn’t have six months. She paused, then: “Maybe you should try the fire department.”
    I left the house. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. I’d quit my job, delivered newspapers, attended EMT school, passed an exam administered by a nationally