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I needed a safety net for my safety net. Maybe their optimism about my job search didn’t reek so much of naive wishful thinking after all.
     
     
    DAVID HAD scheduled us to see four apartments, three of which were within five blocks of each other. He wanted to stay as close to his job as possible, but he also wanted to keep me near actual parking and access to the train. His strategy made sense, but I wasn’t in the mood to be impressed by his logic. I couldn’t stop dwelling on my job interview.
    Working the mailroom at a translation company in downtown Manhattan—not exactly thrilling shit, but any idiot could do it, which should have guaranteed me the spot. Even so, I had my doubts.
    Two other people had interviewed for the job, and they’d both looked like David—polished, shiny, and college-educated, even though the job basically only required that you know how to fucking read. For years I’d heard people worrying about the economy and the plummeting job market for college graduates, but I had never thought twice about the implications. Now it was affecting my life. College grads with their fancy degrees were now after the handful of jobs I was qualified to do. And those jobs weren’t paying very much.
    At nearly a full grand less per month than what I’d been making as a casual dockworker, the job was still offering the highest pay of everywhere I had interviewed so far, but it was only just enough to make half the bills and rent for a craptastic apartment.
    “You look quite unenthused, considering we’re looking for your first apartment,” Nunzio commented after lunch. We were trailing behind the landlord in a walk-up on 37th Street. The building looked nice from the outside, but the staircase was so narrow that I didn’t have high hopes for the size of the apartment. “Aren’t you excited at all?”
    “No.”
    “Why not?” Nunzio pitched his voice lower so he wouldn’t be heard over David’s incessant chatter with the man who owned the joint. The landlord was a middle-aged guy wearing a yarmulke, and judging from his general apathy, he’d already showed the space to a number of people. “Is it because I mentioned the money thing?”
    “I just think this is going to crash and burn. But thanks for embarrassing me.”
    “Come on, Ray…. David doesn’t care about that.”
    “I don’t give a fuck if he cares. I care.” I jutted my thumb at my chest. “He doesn’t need to know the full extent of my scrub status, aiight?”
    Nunzio clapped me on the back in his overly touchy Italian way. I shrugged him off.
    “You think that kid considers you a scrub? Please. He’s so sweet on you, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s just scheming to get you to live in the same house as him.”
    “That’s not—”
    “Here we are,” the landlord announced. Fumbling with a massive key ring, he practically had to pry the door open because it was stuck in the frame. “I haven’t had time to clean up after the previous tenants, but the move-in date isn’t for a month, so I can have it repainted.”
    I shouldered Nunzio, giving the we’re-gonna-finish-that-convo-later message, and walked into the apartment. It looked more like a studio with two attached closets rather than a two-bedroom unit, but it was nicer than I’d expected. I’d assumed that everything outside of Manhattan or a wealthy neighborhood would be damp, dreary, and infested with roaches.
    “Not bad,” I said.
    “Not bad ?” David speared me with an incredulous look from his station by the window. “This is the only window in this room. It’s like a dungeon.”
    The landlord raised an eyebrow and looked at Nunzio—all, like, “control your kid.” I snorted out a laugh.
    “It’s not that dark.” Now that it had been brought to my attention, I realized the rooms were just as dark as my own back at the house in Queens, but playing devil’s advocate was fun if David was going to spaz out about natural light. “That’s what lamps