The diner's bell coughs them back onto the street.
By the time they reach the school, the sun has traded softness for glare; the parking lot shimmers like a cheap mirage.
Lucia kills the engine and lets the bike tick down, metal cooling in tiny shrinking sounds.
The building looms the way old choices do—familiar enough to hurt, changed just enough to pretend it didn't.
She swings her leg off, plants both boots, and hands Sofia her backpack.
Traffic hums, a lawn mower chews distant grass into a green fog, a flock of uniforms migrates toward first period in clumps of chatter and headphones.
Lucia lifts two fingers in a wave. Sofia half-turns, then remembers who she is and who Lucia is supposed to be here.
— "Don't talk to me inside," Sofia says, low, quick.
— "Act like you don't know me."
Lucia's hand falls. She nods once, the kind of nod that means understood and of course and whatever keeps you moving.
— "Go on."
Sofia hesitates—just a breath, just enough to count—then heads for the doors, the helmet indent flattening out her hair, the lipstick smudged into something less sure.
She blends, because that's the trick you learn or you don't.
At the steps she looks back, opens her mouth, thinks better, and disappears into the swarm.
Lucia stays where she is.
9:02.
Her McDonald's shift runs to 10, but the thought of those lights, that register chirp, the coffee smell riding the vent like a ghost with a grudge—it's a wall her body won't climb.
She leans against the bike, visor up, eyes half-lidded, and lets the day press its thumbprint on her.
Time becomes a puddle she stares into: reflections wobble—clouds, birds, a plane that drags its own thin rumor across the blue.
She doesn't think; she drifts.
Migraine shadows move furniture in the back of her skull, then stop and listen to see if she noticed.
The little gray pouch sits quiet under her jacket like a secret well-behaved for once.
Bells ring inside the building, the first-period trumpet and then the late bell with its scolding nose.
A teacher's voice cuts the air and is pulled thin by distance. A skate wheel chatters past and is gone.
9:31.
She straightens, feeling every hour that never let her have it back. The side gate yields to the custodian keys she wasn't supposed to have yet and learned anyway. Concrete breathes its old cool into her ankles.
The halls smell like pencil shavings and disinfectant, the way memory does when it's been scrubbed hard.
The janitor's closet is a narrow ribcage of mops and plastic chemical jugs. A bare bulb hums above the lockers like it's chewing something.
She clocks in on the ancient punch with a thud that pretends to be official. The uniform hangs there on the hook: gray and durable, the color of resignation, with her badge clipped crooked where the hole wore wide.
She peels off the jacket, the gloves, the tank's damp, the night's salt.
The mirror in here is worse than the one at McDonald's: a rectangle of metal polished to a suggestion.
Still human hides under the collarbone's neat line and the day's new fabric.
The dotted lines on her wrists disappear under sleeves designed to turn a body into "staff."
She steps into the pants.
Pulls the drawstring.
Buttons the shirt.
Clips the badge where it always goes, over the lie of a heart that means well.
Tucks the gray pouch deep into the locker's back—out of sight, not out of mind.
The boots trade road grit for slick school tile. She ties the laces with a motion she could do blind.
The locker door shuts on its hollow echo.
The bulb hums approval.
The uniform fits like a sentence she's already serving.
The afternoon smells like lemon cleaner and dust wearing a school's perfume. Lucia pushes the barrel cart down the hallway, rags folded to rectangles, sprays lined like short soldiers. Doors open and close around her in a ticking pattern: bells, chatter, the hush that follows tests, the scuff of sneakers learning the difference between hurry and hurry up.
She moves by habit—trash first, then sweep, then mop—but the order is a superstition more than a science.
The floor gleams in strips behind her, a mosaic of diligent rectangles that no one will notice.
A teacher leans out of Room 212 with a coffee mug and a harried expression.
— "Hey, sorry—spill in here. Can you…?"
— "On it."
She ghosts in, ghosts out.
Paper towels surrender by the handful; a faint ring remains like a watermark on memory.
Back in the hall, she clicks the handle lock with the hip she always uses and keeps moving.
She crosses Sofia's orbit twice.
The first time, Sofia is nested in a half-circle of girls, laughing into the light of a phone, her hair doing that casual fall that says practice more than luck.
One of the girls glances at Lucia the way you glance at a sign you've passed a thousand times: registered, dismissed.
The second time, a boy tells a story with his hands, and the laughter arrives with too much volume, ricocheting off locker metal and putting itself back together as something meaner.
No one knows they share a last name.
Everyone knows the janitor once sat where they sit and didn't make it to the end.
That's enough to carry a rumor without words.
She empties bins in the staff room and loops fresh liners with the quick twist that never tears. She shakes chalk dust out of the bottoms of old trays.
She squeezes a mop until the head drips clear and then drips a little longer just to be sure.
Time dilates; then it snaps.
The big clock in the administration office clicks from 5:42 to 5:59 like it's choosing a side. The day exhales in the way buildings do—lockers thud, chairs scrape, the last bell shakes a ribbon of noise down the rafters.
Students pour out as if the walls learned to release them.
The sky outside has turned the color of a peeled orange.
Sofia leaves in a pack, a kaleidoscope of bracelets and brittle laughter, the kind of goodbye that isn't said to anyone in particular.
She doesn't look back.
Lucia watches until the crowd beheads itself at the door's lintel and reforms on the other side as smaller, faster creatures.
She sweeps the last length of a hallway and finishes with a push that feels like a period.
In the locker room, the mirror is still an insult.
She peels out of gray into black: jacket, tank, shorts. The stitched line under her collarbone sits clean, a quiet seam. The dotted lines on her wrists reappear like punchlines she's tired of.
She stares at herself and hears the thought in its flat, unforgiving voice: is this it?
Wasting a whole life mopping up after other people's day?
Breaking your back for a kid who only notices the floor when it's sticky?
Every time someone comes close, you shove.
Every time no one does, you ache. Look at you.
A gravity well with rings for soap and coins.
She snorts once, ugly in the echoing tile. The sound doesn't change anything. She buttons her jacket and the lie over her sternum disappears again: Still human.
Maybe.
Depends who's counting.
She slams the locker lightly so it won't bounce back, punches the clock with a knuckle, lets the machine cough out its tiny paper approval.
The corridor is empty now, all the color drained into custodial gray.
Outside, the lot has thinned to lonely faculty sedans.
Her bike rises from its shadow like a friend who knows better than to ask questions.
— "Night," the security guard calls from the booth without standing.
— "Night."
The engine learns her again—first the cough, then the smooth.
The helmet's foam cradles the day's leftover ache without consoling it.
She swings out of the space and takes the curb slow, then the street quick.
The construction site waits down the grid: floodlights stacked on pallets like false moons, rebar bundled into iron wheat, a foreman with a clipboard and a joke that won't be funny.
She angles toward it, the city peeling past in long, tired strips, and lets the road pull her forward.
The site wears its own weather—grit wind, halogen moon, the breath of generators pumping a hot metallic fog that tastes like pennies and discipline.
Rebar rises in bundled stalks, crane cables hum as if they're bowstrings aimed at the night, and plywood decks flex under boots in a language that says don't stop moving. Floodlights turn dust motes into constellations.
The whole skeleton of the building creaks the way a ship does when it remembers the sea it hasn't touched.
The foreman meets Lucia at the gate with a clipboard like a shield and a jaw that's practiced at chewing other people's minutes.
— "You're late-by-early again, Rodriguez. Quota's not a bedtime story—doesn't read itself. We're pouring on three by eleven, rebar ties are behind, and if staging looks like a yard sale one more time I'm marrying you to a broom. Put your harness on the right way this time; I'm not scraping anyone off a deck over paperwork."
She lets the monsoon pass over her.
Eyes forward, sign the sheet, helmet on, chin strap kiss, harness cinched.
The gear is more ritual than comfort.
She steps into the freight elevator with a stack of others, shoulders touching, everyone exhaling coffee and stubbornness.
The cage rattles up the shaft; floors blur past like excuses.
When the gate bangs open on the 20-something floor, the sound swims out into open air.
They scatter to tasks without choreography.
Lucia goes where the work is loudest—rebar grid on a deck sunburned by lights. Wire spools bounce against her hip, pliers bite, wrists turn, twist after twist after twist until the pattern sets into her hands.
Steel glints like wet teeth. A tie, a tug, a move. Repeat until the future happens.
Voices ricochet around her, none of them aimed at her, all of them filling the air the way dust does.
— "You see that Dolphins game? Trash. Absolute landfill."
— "That lotto ticket was hot. I could feel it. Felt like static in my fingers.
Whole thing was a lie."
— "Man, if I fall I'm suing God for poor architecture."
— "Tell Him to fix the rebar spacing first."
— "Tell Him to fix my ex-wife."
— "That's not even in the union contract."
A laugh runs along the deck and breaks around her like water around a piling. Lucia keeps tying.
The grid grows, a steel spiderweb ready to catch concrete and keep it from remembering how to fall.
A runner staggers past with a bundle of #5 bar on his shoulder, boots chewing the plywood with that hollow clop that makes supervisors nervous.
— "Heads!"
No one loses one.
The bundle drops into place; the runner keeps going, muttering a prayer to his lower back that sounds like a threat.
Down-deck, two ironworkers argue softly about music while measuring twice and cutting anyway.
— "Old salsa or I don't move."
— "You don't move either way."
— "My rhythm is internal."
— "Your rhythm is dead."
Lucia's world pinches to tasks: lift, square, tie, cinch.
She likes that the grid doesn't care about her mother or her sister or her name.
It cares about spacing and strength and whether the wire cuts clean. It's indifferent in a way that feels like mercy.
She steps across the bars with the cat-footed care of someone who believes in gravity the way other people believe in God.
Her mind slips the leash, does what it always does when her hands know the road.
Bills line up like a firing squad: rent, light, water, phone; the landlord's knock that syncopates with the slow ceiling fan at home; the McDonald's check that arrived thin as a rumor; the school district's cheaper smile; the foreman's promise that "maybe next pay cycle" is where overtime goes to church. Mom's been calling. The phrase sits in her head like a stone in a shoe. She wants more. Stones are all want, no give.
Quit the janitor job?
She tastes the thought and it's copper.
Quit here? The taste is concrete dust.
Quit both, go all-in on the hotline until the ledger screams?
The taste vanishes—no metal, no dust—just a clean antiseptic absence where right and wrong used to live.
The bat in her memory bumps the door to the room behind her eyes. She locks it without looking.
Shoes.
The word softens something even as it tightens her chest.
What does Sofia want?
Not need—want.
White Air Force 1s so bright they get dirty on the way home?
Vans Old Skool, black with the bone stripe, so she can pretend she's in a music video?
Adidas Superstars, shell toes like stage lights?
Chuck Taylors—the kind of classic that says you're trying not to try?
Heels? God help her—no.
Sneakers.
Something that tells the hallway she belongs to the tribe that knows what's up.
Size—6? 7?
A half size is a fight to the death; the clerk will roll their eyes; Lucia will buy two and return the loser later, except she never returns anything.
Returns are a luxury for people who keep receipts in a drawer that isn't labeled URGENT.
The crane groans.
A load wobbles in the sky, then steadies like a horse learning to forgive.
A guy in an orange vest signals with two fingers and a mouth full of curses.
— "Feather it, Tony! I said feather, not kill it!"
— "Tell him yourself! He thinks I'm his divorce lawyer!"
Concrete pumps drone, a mechanical heart somewhere below them pushing slurry through red artery hose.
Lucia feels the deck vibrate faintly underfoot, like it's thinking about learning to be a floor.
She drags a spool to the edge, drops to a knee, and ties the last quadrant of the grid.
The wire nicks her glove; she doesn't feel it through the callus.
The city opens its throat beyond the safety rail—bay a flat sheet of hammered pewter, causeway a zipper, towers like teeth in a grin that forgot to be friendly.
The wind comes at her sideways and leaves with nothing.
Banter rolls past, immune to weather.
— "Break at :30 or when he decides he loves us?"
— "He never loved us."
— "He loved me once."
— "He loved your timesheet."
— "My timesheet is very lovable."
The foreman's voice booms from nowhere and everywhere.
— "Thirty! Before I change my mind! Hydrate or die slow and make me write a report!"
Grins, grunts, a hundred small resignations.
Tools settle.
People slouch toward five-gallon buckets turned into stools by union magic. Someone cracks a joke about OSHA; someone else starts a story with "Back when Miami was Miami," which is how you know it's going to be a lie that contains a smaller truth.
Lucia peels away from the river of bodies and finds the ledge she always finds—upwind of the conversations, downwind of the crane, a slice of deck where the rebar grid ends and a mouth of air opens.
She sits with the harness clipped to a D-ring that would pretend to save her if it came to it, legs dangling into emptiness.
From here, the city is all rectangles and motion. From here, the sun is a welding mask you can't take off.
She pulls a cigar from a crush-proof sleeve—cheap, short, the color of old coffee.
The foreman would bark about it if he cared to look.
He doesn't.
She cuts the tip with the teeth of the lighter, old habit, lights it against cupped palm, draws until the bitter rolls in her mouth like a dark tide.
Smoke drifts sideways, torn into ribbons by the altitude. It tastes like pretending you're fine.
Feet swing in the hot wind.
Boots tap the air like a metronome teaching time to behave.
Her phone sits heavy in her jacket, a pocketed animal deciding whether to wake. She tries not to think of shoes and thinks only of shoes: the white that will get ruined, the black that will look older than Sofia, the checkerboard that will make her laugh for a day. I've got the money, she told her.
The ledger in her head tilts, unsteady. A gull carves a loop and calls her a liar in a language she almost respects.
She closes her eyes against the glare and lets the smoke write brief notes she won't keep. The rebar grid hums with other people's voices, none of them hers. Somewhere on the deck behind her a radio slips into a station that can't decide which decade it wants.
The phone in her pocket vibrates once—clean, precise, like a tuning fork learning its name.
Then again.
Then a third time, evenly spaced, a pattern that erases the rest of the sound the way alcohol erases smell.
The cigar pauses on her lip.
The wind forgets to move.
The fourth vibration doesn't come.
The fourth buzz never comes, so she caves and fishes the phone out.
Screen glare, thumb smudge, the uphill of her passcode. The thread is a slot machine of bubbles already spinning—Sofia's name at the top, hearts where punctuation should be, time stamps elbowing each other.
[ "luuuuciaaaa u alive??" ]
[ "dont b mad 🙏" ]
[ "ur the BEST sister like fr the BEST best" ]
[ "not drunk shut up" ]
[ "ok maybe a little lol" ]
[ "ty 4 breakfast it was cute" ]
[ "u looked tired :(" ]
[ "im sorry ab earlier i was being a brat" ]
[ "ur my rock swear" ]
[ "ily" ]
She can hear the voice behind it—sugary, slurred at the edges, the kind of warmth that comes in a bottle and goes out with a bill.
For once it doesn't scrape.
A corner of her mouth remembers how to lift.
The cigar burns steady; her feet swing over the void like a kid's.
[ "Where are you." ]
[ "Are you safe." ]
[ "Drink water." ]
The dots bubble up like they're giggling.
[ "im w/ nico n them" ]
[ "we were at jennas then beach then idk" ]
[ "dont yell at me pls" ]
[ "i got water see??" ]
A blurry photo arrives: a plastic cup sweating in a stranger's hand, glitter nail polish, a sliver of ocean like a lie.
[ "Tell me who you're with." ]
[ "Did you go to class." ]
[ "umm… yes" ]
[ "ok maybe 2 classes" ]
[ "dont b mad" ]
[ "i said sry" ]
[ "ur gonna get me those shoes?? actually i dont need them but like if u want 😭" ]
Shoes again.
The ledger tips.
The ash on her cigar elongates, thinking about falling.
[ "We'll see." ]
[ "Where exactly are you now." ]
[ "boardwalk" ]
[ "ish" ]
[ "nico says hi" ]
[ "he says ur scary lol" ]
[ "jk he's scared of moms" ]
[ "ur not a mom ur like…" ]
[ "idk ur u" ]
[ "ily dont be mad at me ok?" ]
Her smile is small but real.
The wind takes a ribbon of smoke and unspools it.
[ "I'm not mad." ]
[ "Text me when you head home." ]
[ "Stay with people." ]
[ "Don't get in a car if the driver's had anything." ]
[ "omg chill" ]
[ "fine" ]
[ "bossy" ]
[ "but cute" ]
[ "sis u rly are the best" ]
[ "promise ill try harder" ]
[ "i mean it this time" ]
The dots appear.
Pause.
Disappear.
Reappear, nervous.
Then nothing.
The screen waits, reflecting a sliver of her helmetless face and a square of white sky. Somewhere behind her, a crew radio crackles, laughs, goes mute.
The ash finally lets go and falls cleanly through the air.
[ "Sofia." ]
[ "Answer me." ]
Break ends itself; nobody calls it.
Lucia stubs the cigar on a scrap of concrete and flicks the nub into a coffee can that's already a short museum of bad habits.
Harness check, gloves on, mind rebuttoned.
She walks the grid back to the noise.
The pump is already thundering—throat-deep, patient, relentless.
Red hose snakes across the deck, trembles with each surge, its steel coupler twitching like a tethered dog.
She steps into the pattern she knows: spotter's hand signals, hose man easing the head, two finishers behind with screeds like long steel prayers.
Rebar disappears under gray like bones under skin. She stands at the leading edge with a rake, pulling the slump into corners that don't want to take it, leveling the future by inches.
Everything heavy pretends to be liquid just long enough to move.
A pair of rod-busters carry a last-minute bundle and pretend it's a joke.
— "You tie this grid or this grid ties you."
— "Too late, I'm married to it."
— "Condolences."
Concrete kisses her boots and retreats.
She rakes and rakes, the motion so familiar her shoulder stops counting reps.
The pump hiccups, catches, continues.
The foreman stalks the deck like a shepherd who likes his sheep a little afraid.
He addresses everyone and no one.
— "Keep it tight! We're not decorating a cake up here!"
Someone at the perimeter runs the vibrator—rebar hum deepening as the head buries, bubbles rising and popping like the slab is exhaling relief.
The sound crawls up Lucia's ankles and makes a low cathedral in her bones.
She shoulders a screed for two passes when a finisher waves her in, pulls it smooth, watches the surface turn satin under the blade. Wind lifts grit into her eyes; grit finds its way into everything.
Behind her, a couple of carpenters argue with a tape measure that learned sarcasm.
— "You're short."
— "No, this is short."
— "Everything's short."
— "Tell that to my alimony."
Loads swing in the dark on slow cranes—pallets of block, bundles of plywood—rising and landing in measured thumps, each one signed for, none of them hers.
A laborer in a paint-crusted hoodie walks past, clinking with bolts like a moving toolbox, whistling a line of a song that loses its key and finds it again.
Her mind slides sideways while her hands keep up. Shoes.
Wardrobe doors in stores she never enters except as a transaction: walls of white that think of themselves as new beginnings, walls of black that sell the idea of consequence.
Air Force 1—the kind that squeak for two days and then learn the floor.
Old Skool—black canvas, white stripe, a diagram of belonging. Superstars—shell toes like a grin that's trying to be clean.
Chucks—flat soles that say the pain is part of the look.
She pictures Sofia holding two boxes under lights too bright, pretending she doesn't care which, ready to care so much it hurts.
Sizes tick through her head—6? 6.5?—the half-step that drags you to a return counter you'll never reach.
The slab comes up to the line.
Edges get bull-floated; faces get magged, the surface turning from rough to obedient. The deck is a new map.
Lucia's shoulders burn in that good honest way that doesn't ask for applause. A carpenter hands her a broom to brush-in texture along the last long run.
— "Make it pretty."
— "Pretty don't pay," someone else says, and the broom writes a grain into the wet gray anyway.
By ten-thirty they're picking up the mess—hoses bled out and snaked back into neat coils, the pump getting hosed down, the splatter shrugged off with a grin and a prayer you won't slip.
She hauls buckets, stacks pans, drags the 2x4 screeds to the pallet, straps them loose.
A guy from rebar offers her a cigarette with two fingers.
She shakes her head; he shrugs without offense and smokes like a man trying to erase himself one draw at a time.
— "You see the forecast?"
— "Hotter."
— "Always hotter."
She folds her harness and hangs it on a hook by the freight elevator cage.
The cage groans downward like a reluctant confession.
On five, they offload trash to the chute; on three, they let a pair of drywallers shoulder their way in with grim smiles and powdered eyebrows.
When the gate yawns on ground, the site smells like wet clay and hydraulic oil and victory small enough to pocket.
The locker room is a shipping container that learned to sweat.
Benches carry the day's dents; coat hooks carry helmets by their chins. Lucia peels off the vest, the harness, the dust film that the shower won't beat so much as make peace with.
She wipes her face in the mirror with a paper towel until the towel looks like it lost a fight with a sidewalk. Still human hides under a strap mark and a smear she doesn't register.
She changes fast: shorts, tank, jacket; boots swapped for boots that have known different floors.
She shakes concrete dust from her gloves and watches it fall in a private snow.
Eleven-thirty, and nobody stops her; there's always more to do and never the one who does it, and tonight she has put enough of herself into steel and slurry to pretend she deserves leaving early.
She tosses the used earplugs, tucks the gloves, zips the jacket halfway. The pouch nests in the inside pocket with a soft thud.
The phone remains dark; Sofia's thread holds its breath.
Out into the night. The floodlights make the site into a false afternoon; beyond the fence the city has decided to be glitter. Gravel grinds underfoot, then gives way to the greasy smooth of the street.
Her bike waits where the chain-link shadow ends, a black shape with an engine for a heart. She unlocks it by feel. Helmet on.
Chin strap cracked against her jaw, clipped. Key in. Switch clicks. Fuel pump primes with a polite whine. The engine catches, coughs once, and then evens out into a purr that feels like being listened to.
She throws a leg over, sets a boot, rolls out of the slot, and noses toward the mouth of the street, night opening its throat ahead.