the last five shifts

Shift one. 1:40 in the morning, sitting on the floor of my apartment because the couch got sold to pay for the certification class I took in March.

Dear me, here's how it went. I was walking the fence line on the east side, the mud came up over my boots past the laces, and I saw Nigel in the shadow of the stage ramp talking to a girl with a green wristband, the kind you get for three-day entry and nothing else. He handed her something flat and orange and she handed him a folded bill and they both smiled as if it were nothing at all.

Orange laminate means backstage. I know that because I am twenty-eight years old and I have spent three years learning what every color on this festival grounds means so that one day somebody would pay me like I know it.

I did not say anything. I walked the rest of the fence and I filed a report that said east perimeter clear, no incidents, and I signed it B. Vickers, and my hand did not shake, which surprised me. He is my friend. Three years of drinking cheap beer on his porch while he complains about rigging hours, and I could not write his name in a box that would cost him his crew pass and probably his job with the stage crew too.

But here is what I actually feel at 1:40 in the morning on my apartment floor. That report was mine. Every clean report is one step toward the supervisor job, and Jeremiah Ramirez is watching me with the same intensity a cat watches a mouse hole, and he would love nothing more than to write me up for sloppy reporting. I gave him a perfect night. I hated that it was perfect.

I am not a snitch. I keep coming back to that sentence like it is a rule written somewhere. It is not written anywhere. It is just easier than writing that I am scared of losing him and scared of losing the job and I can only keep one.

Shift two, Sunday, 9:15 at night, parked in the employee lot because I cannot stand the inside of the booth after ten hours.

I handed Jeremiah my incident report at the end of the shift, the one with the laminate thing left out, and he took it and read it standing up while I waited, and he did it slow, the way he does everything, and then he looked up and looked at me a little too long and said, "Quiet night, Vickers?"

"Quiet night," I said.

"Easiest festival I ever ran, then," he said, and he smiled, and his smile has always made my skin feel like I left it out in the rain.

He knows something. Or he suspects something, which for a man like Jeremiah is almost as good as knowing. He has hated that I talk to crew since my first year. Fraternization, he calls it, like I am carrying on with the entire lighting rig instead of eating gas station sandwiches with Nigel on break.

Dear page, I am not a snitch. I want that understood. If Nigel gets caught it will be because he got sloppy, not because I sold him out, and if I lose the supervisor job over an empty report then the job was rigged from the start and I will find another festival, another city, another badge. That is what I tell myself in the car with the engine off and my lunch bag on the passenger seat and the smell of fried onions in my jacket.

I keep writing sentences I do not believe. Good sign of a bad week.

Shift three, Tuesday night, booth 4 again.

Nigel texted me at 8:02, which is a thing we do not normally do on shift, and the text said, hey, tell your cameras the east side cable tray is a dead zone for like twenty minutes, swapping a burnt cable, do not make it a whole thing. Fine. That is a real job. Stagehands swap cables, that is the whole trade, and I put it in my log as scheduled maintenance, east stage, and I even liked how official it looked.

Then at 9:30 I walked past the back of the merch tent and there he was, and there was no cable anywhere on that man. He had a kid's festival ticket in one hand and he was folding cash into his front pocket, the same pocket, and the kid walked off with an orange laminate and I stood there behind a dumpster like an idiot with my radio in my hand and my thumb on the button.

I did not press it. I do not know what I would have said anyway. Jeremiah, I found my best friend committing fraud, please log it, signed the woman who wants your job.

When Nigel passed me ten minutes later he did that little two-finger wave off the brim of his cap and he said, "Dead zone handled," and I said, "Sure," and my voice came out flat and he heard it, I know he heard it, because he stopped walking and looked back and did not say anything else.

Shift four, Wednesday, in the booth, and I am writing this at 2 a.m. in the booth itself because I do not want to go home yet.

He came to the booth on his break and I told him. I laid it out. I said, "I saw you behind merch, I saw the cash, and I am five shifts from a promotion I have bled for, and every one of your laminates is sitting in a box with my name on the report that does not exist."

"It's small," he said, and he said it easy, leaning on the counter with his sleeves pushed up. "Brenda, it's forty bucks a pass, it's beer money, the festival charges these people two hundred for a water bottle, I am redistributing wealth."

"You are committing fraud and I am your alibi, that is what you are doing."

"Nobody's getting hurt."

"I am getting hurt. If this comes out I lose the job, and the job is not beer money to me, Nigel, the job is three years and a certification class and every boring shift I ever worked."

He went quiet then and he looked at the monitors for a while and then he reached over and pressed his hand down on mine on the desk, flat and warm and heavy, and he said, "One more night. I'll knock it off, I swear, one more night and I'm done."

I did not pull my hand away. That is the part I keep chewing on. A hand on my hand should be nothing, we have bumped fists for three years, and instead I sat there looking at his fingers over my knuckles like it was the first interesting thing on any screen.

Shift five, Thursday, and this one is not a report, this is a letter I am never sending.

Dear Nigel.

I keep thinking about your hands. Not in a sweet way, in a way that annoys me. Last month I came by the shop and you were running the laminate press, feeding blanks in one at a time, and your hands were quick and certain and there was ink on the side of your thumb and when you handed me a fresh pressed pass, still warm, our fingers touched for about a second and something went down through my chest like a dropped tool.

I have had three years to notice you and I filed it all under friend, which is a color-coded system that worked fine until Wednesday in the booth when your hand was on mine and