the surface, things probably looked about the same.
But nothing was the same.
That night with the rookie had opened me up in the most profound way. It’s like I was a flower bud on a time-lapse camera and I just exploded into petals and tenderness and color.
I keep thinking that if I’d walked into that locker room the next morning as my usual, armored self, seeing that graffiti would have smarted, yes. But it wouldn’t have shredded me like it did.
What choice did I have but to retreat after that? What choice was there but to armor back up? It was self-preservation.
But now I knew what I was missing. Now I remembered what it felt like not to be alone.
And now that I knew, it was unbearable.
But I bore it anyway. That’s what we do, isn’t it? That’s the thing I always love best about the human race: how we pick ourselves back up over and over and just keep on going.
Still, the loneliness after I turned away from the rookie was so excruciating, so physical, that I actually felt like I might wither and die.
And so, the next best thing: crochet club.
Maybe, I thought, if I soothed the loneliness elsewhere, I could find a way to be okay.
Josie and Diana were always delighted for me to join them, and they gave me a giant basket of yarn balls to wind. And even as I marveled at how low I’d sunk—winding yarn balls!—I had to admit that the softness and the rhythm of the motion were pretty soothing, after all. Especially the chenille.
To be truthful, it wasn’t just crochet club. I looked for every opportunity to be around either of them. I started showing up at the kitchen table for coffee. I helped prepare dinner. I volunteered to help Josie in her shop. When Diana invited me to go to the movies, I said yes. When she asked me to help in the garden, I did that, too. And when she hugged me, as crazy as it sounds, I hugged her right back.
It was like I was starving for human connection—and had been, all along—but I’d only now just figured that out.
My plan was to feast on friendship at home so that I’d be satiated when I got to the station.
It kind of worked.
Except that I never seemed to get satiated. The more connection I got, the more I wanted. You know, like when you take a nap, but when you wake up you’re somehow sleepier than you were before? That was me, all the time—with humanity.
To everyone’s astonishment, after Diana and Josie had failed to even coax me out of my room for so long, now they couldn’t get rid of me. To my relief, they were delighted. And they were also hell-bent on solving the Case of the Slutty Locker.
They treated it like a Nancy Drew moment, and they questioned me about each guy on the crew, trying to nail down our suspects.
“It could have been any one of them,” Diana announced one night.
“I say it was the captain,” Josie said. “He’s the one who saw her at the party giving the rookie a blowjob.”
“Can I just reiterate that I did not give the rookie a blowjob?”
“Not yet,” Josie said.
“The captain does make a good suspect,” Diana said, totally unflummoxed by the topic.
“Well,” I said, “he doesn’t think women should join the fire department.”
“That’s suspicious right there,” Josie said.
“Is he mean to you?” Diana asked.
“No, he’s mostly very nice. In his gruff way.”
“Is he harder on you than on everybody else?”
“He actually tends to use me as an example of how everybody should be doing things.”
“Does he like you?”
“I don’t know that I’d go that far.”
“But he admires your work?”
“Frequently.”
“Does he realize that you’re a woman?”
“He says I’m the exception that proves the rule.”
“Whatever that means,” Diana said.
“If he knows you’re onto him,” Josie suggested, “he could fire you.”
“He’s not going to fire me,” I said.
Josie smiled at me. “You’re adorable. Yes, he is.”
Diana nodded in agreement. “Yeah, he’s probably going to fire you. If it was him.”
“Who else could it have been?” Josie asked.
I shrugged. “It could have been anyone, really. Six-Pack has lost a ton of money—hundreds—betting against me. I absolutely annihilated Tiny in a game of hoops one time. DeStasio and Case were never thrilled to have a woman around. But there’s no obvious villain. They’ve all been surprisingly nice to me.”
“They underestimate you,” Diana pointed out.
“But not in a vicious way,” Josie said. “In a