Chapter 1

Cassandra

The radiator wakes me thirteen minutes before the alarm.

It clangs like someone trapped a small animal inside and the small animal has opinions. I've submitted four maintenance requests since October. The landlord, Dmitri, keeps telling me he'll get to it. Dmitri also told me the hot water would be consistent. Dmitri is a liar.

I roll out of bed, and rolling is the accurate verb because the mattress sits so close to the wall that I have to push off the exposed brick to lever myself upright. The brick is cold and rough against my palm and it leaves a faint grid on my skin that I've learned to read like a mood ring. Deep imprint means I slept hard, which means the melatonin worked. Light imprint means I tossed. Today, it's deep. A small mercy.

My feet hit the floor and find the rug, a braided thing I dragged home from a stoop sale on Church Avenue last spring. Whoever made it used a teal that doesn't exist in nature. I love it. I love ugly, specific things.

The apartment is a studio in Flatbush, and the listing said 450 square feet, but that math must have included the hallway and possibly the stairwell outside. Kitchen, bed, desk, rack of clothes, all visible from any point in the room. I can stand at the stove and reach the foot of my bed. I've done it, stirring oatmeal with one hand and pulling the comforter straight with the other, because mornings require that kind of choreography.

The bills sit on the counter where I left them. Four envelopes, stacked and slightly fanning out under the weight of a ceramic mug I use as a paperweight. ConEd. Spectrum. Something from a collections agency I've been pretending is a catalog. And the one from Navient, which I know by the font on the envelope the way you'd recognize a relative's handwriting. I walk past them.

Coffee first. Always coffee first.

I grind the beans by hand—a Hario Skerton I bought when I started at the café because Rafael, the head barista, told me I couldn't pull a decent shot if I didn't understand the grind. He was right, and the purchase set me back forty dollars I didn't have, and now I can't start a morning without the sound of burrs cracking open something dark and Colombian. The ritual takes two minutes. I pour the grounds into a single-cup Melitta filter balanced over the same mug that was holding the bills, because I only own three mugs and one of them has a crack down the side that weeps.

While the water heats I pull the ironing board from behind the clothing rack. It unfolds with a squeal that I've started calling its morning greeting. The uniform hangs on the back of the bathroom door: black button-down, black slacks. Café Lisse requires "refined monochrome presentation," which is corporate language for we want you invisible.

The iron hisses. The radiator clangs. Steam from two directions. I press the collar flat and work down the placket, moving the iron in the straight strokes my grandmother taught me when I was nine. She pressed everything. Church clothes, school uniforms, pillowcases. "Wrinkled clothes tell people you gave up before you left the house," she'd say, and I'd watch her hands move and think she was sculpting.

I hang the shirt on the doorknob and pull my portfolio from under the bed. It's a black nylon case, scuffed at the corners, zipper replaced twice. Inside are eleven sketches on bristol board, each one sleeved in a clear plastic protector I bought in a ten-pack from Blick. Tonight is the intermediate draping class at FIT's continuing education program, which costs $485 per semester and meets in a basement room with dingy lighting that makes every fabric look like it's recovering from an illness. I can't afford it, but I keep enrolling.

I flip through the sketches to make sure nothing got bent. A wrap dress in bias-cut crepe, a structured jacket with a neckline I've been fighting for weeks, and a pair of wide-leg trousers with a waistband detail that my instructor, Professor Yun, called "ambitious." The way she said it could have meant good or it could have meant foolish. I've decided to hear it as good.

My phone buzzes on the nightstand. The screen says Mama and the time says 5:14 AM, which means it's 5:14 in Atlanta too, which means she's up before the school bus route starts, sitting at the kitchen table in the house on Campbellton Road with her coffee in the mug I painted at a ceramics studio when I was twelve. She keeps it even though the glaze is chipping. She'll keep it until it shatters.

"Morning, Mama."

"You sound like you've been up."

"Radiator."

She laughs, the sound I associate with Saturday mornings and the smell of turkey bacon. "I saw on the news it's supposed to get cold up there this week. Twenty-something."

"It's been twenty-something."

"Twenty-something and wind. You wearing that coat I sent?"

"Every day." The coat is a puffer from Burlington that she shipped in a box with two cans of collard greens and a note that said eat something green that isn't a smoothie. I wear it because it's warm and because it smells, faintly, like the dryer sheets she uses. Gain, the lavender kind.

I tuck the phone between my ear and shoulder and pour water through the filter. The coffee drips in a thin, steady line.

"How's the job?"

"Which one?"

"The coffee one."

"Fine. Tips were decent last week. There's a regular who leaves five dollars on a three-dollar cortado. I think he's in love with me or confused about decimal points."

She hums. A silence opens up, one she uses when she's building up to something. I hear her spoon clink against the side of her mug.

"Cassie, I got a call from your aunt Denise. She said her friend's daughter just graduated from Spelman and started at some marketing firm. Making sixty-something."

"Good for her."

"I'm just saying."

"I know what you're saying."

"You didn't move up there to be broke, baby."

The sentence lands the way it always does, soft on the outside and heavy in the center. She means it with love. I know that. I know she watches me choose this city over stability and wonders what the return on investment will be. I know because I wonder the same thing at least once a week, usually around the time I check my bank balance.

"I'm not broke, Mama. I'm investing in myself."

"Mmhm."

"That's a real thing."

"I didn't say it wasn't." Another clink of the spoon. "I just want you to eat. And sleep. And not have that look you get."

"What look?"

"The one where your jaw goes tight and you change the subject. That look."

I scoff. "I have to get ready for work. I'll call you Thursday."

"Thursday, then. Love you, Cassie."

"Love you, Mama."

I set the phone down and drink my coffee standing up, leaning against the counter, looking at the four envelopes. The coffee is good. The coffee is always good now. Rafael would be proud.

Then I open the laptop.

The Navient portal loads slowly; the Wi-Fi in this building pulses like a heartbeat, strong and weak and strong again. When the page finally renders, I see the number: $73,412.18. That's $47 more than last month. Late fee. Again. I'd set up auto-pay but the last time auto-pay ran, it overdrew my checking account and the bank charged me thirty-five dollars for the privilege of not having enough money, and the resulting cascade took me two weeks to untangle.

I close the laptop.

The portfolio case sits at the edge of the desk, zipper slightly open, and I can see the corner of the last sketch in the stack. The one I didn't sleeve. The one that lives in the back pocket of the case because it's not for class, not for critique, not for anyone.

I pull it out.

The paper is soft at the edges from handling. The drawing is in graphite and colored pencil—champagne gold for the bodice, a warm ivory for the skirt. An asymmetric gown, floor-length, with a single-shoulder construction and a cascade of hand-pleated panels that move from structured at the top to liquid at the hem. I've been sketching variations of it since last March, in the margins of notebooks, on napkins at the café, on the back of a ConEd bill I'd already paid. This version is the one. I feel it in my hands when I hold it.

Professor Yun would call it a thesis piece. A garment that anchors a collection, that tells the buyer who you are and what you believe cloth can do. Producing it would require fabric sourcing, a dress form, muslin for toiling, and access to an industrial sewing machine for at least forty hours. Conservative estimate: twelve hundred dollars in materials alone, before labor, before anything.

I trace the neckline with my fingertip. The graphite is smooth and slightly waxy.

"One day," I whisper.