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my dreams. And I knew that it would lead me to riches.
     
    At least I thought so at the time.
     
    ***
     
    I have to say though, the daycare center—Lila’s Daycare—was kind of low class. I’m sorry, but the people going there were the type of folk who didn’t know how to spell their names properly on their check books. Like, seriously, these were the type of people who didn’t even know how to drive properly, who couldn’t use the Internet to pay their bills, and who constantly complained about how much money they were paying for “high-caliber services.”
     
    Girl, we were next to a strip mall.
     
    Hell, we were in the strip mall.
     
    “I expect so much more than this,” a woman said as I walked in. She was the usual customer who stopped by our place, a woman whose name I didn’t know and who I didn’t care to know. She yelled and yelled and yelled like always. “When you people charge me per week for your daycare—”
     
    The woman was yelling at Lila, no surprise, considering that Lila was the one who absorbed all of the damage and heat. She wore head wrap around her head, wiping sweat from her brow, turning up the cheap white fan that she propped up on a stool to act as air-conditioning. “Ma’am, I’m sorry that you feel this way,” she said, “but you have to understand—”
     
    “Understand what? This big rip-off that you’re running over here. Yeah, I understand that. I want my money back.”
     
    This woman asked for her money back all the time. She and a legion of others. If the bathrooms weren’t clean enough, she wanted her money back. If she wasn’t given slave service, she wanted her money back. She was the type of person who wanted every single customer service personnel to basically prostrate themselves on the ground like she was a goddess.
     
    “I’m sorry that you feel that way, ma’am…”
     
    I walked past Lila, going into the back. She gave me a quick smirk, nodding at me. I met some of my coworkers, poor souls who basically gave me shy looks. I punched in my numbers, logging into our tracking system, and then I got to work, attending to some of the kids on the floor. They were already rowdy and loud.
     
    But they were still not as loud as the woman screaming at Lila.
     
    Eventually, the woman at the front calmed down, and Lila came to our side, sighing. I wasn’t exactly sure when I would drop off my two weeks’ notice, but it would have to wait until around lunchtime, when the craziness settled down. Lila looked incredibly stressed. You might have heard the saying, black don’t crack.
     
    But Lila looked like she had cracked in her teens, girl. She was cracked all over the place. Cracked by her lips, cracked by her eyes. Even her voice cracked. She parroted her old commands as she did every single day, telling us all to, “get into place already and get to work!” Finding a good time to bring her aside and tell her that her best employee was going to quit…
     
    Now that was the hard work ahead of me.
     
    “Hey,” I said, around 11 AM, chasing a little girl in pigtails. “Hey, don’t eat the crayons!” I barely even knew the names of our clients. There were literally fifty kids stuffed into a room that had to be no more than 2000 ft.². They were running all over the place, standing on top of tables, singing at the top of their lungs, wiping their asses all over the ground, pulling on my earrings when I bent down low to grab at them, drawing on the walls, breaking apart the mats on the floor, peeing on the bathroom tiles, yelling, screaming, shouting.
     
    Lila and us three who were at work—well, we had more than enough on our hands. Our establishment was borderline illegal. I couldn’t imagine Lila being in business a year from now. I could see on the face of my coworkers, fear and disappointment, a sadness creeping across their faces.
     
    What the hell were we doing with our lives?
     
    “Lila,” I said, at around 1 PM. “We have to