Free All We Ever Wanted Was Everything by Janelle Brown

suddenly back down to terra firma. And with six eyes fixed on her, with the burden of her friends’ faith in her riding heavily down, she feels like she has no choice but to answer it. Even though she knows better, her hand plunges down into the satchel’s leather depths, almost as if it has a will of its own, and comes back out with the cell phone, vibrating in her palm like a fish. She flips it open—the table silent, her friends watching her expectantly—and lifts it, excruciatingly slowly, to her ear.
    “Hello, is this Margaret Miller?” asks the metallic woman’s voice on the other end.
    Margaret gazes at the tabletop for a long minute, trying to think of the correct answer to this question. She touches a finger to a particularly large bread crumb on the table and, when it sticks to her finger, brings it up to her mouth. She crunches the morsel between her teeth, chewing it twenty times, as if it were the last bite of food she will ever eat.
    “Yes,” she finally says in a flat voice, knowing exactly who the person on the other end is—it doesn’t matter which one of them it is, there are a half dozen of them, maybe a dozen, but they are all the same. They have been torturing her for weeks now, months, disembodied robotic voices calling to collect her soul. RESTRICTED NO.
    “I’m calling from the collection agency on behalf of MasterCard,” the woman barks. “We’ve left eighteen messages for you already and sent you four notices in the mail. We would like to discuss the $22,353 debt on your credit card. Are you aware that if this is not paid expeditiously MasterCard has the right to take you to court and put…”
    Margaret pulls the phone away from her ear, slowly, methodically, and shuts it so gently that it doesn’t even make a click. She puts it back in her purse and looks back up at her friends. They are studying her very strangely. Claire appears vaguely panicked, Alexis’s brow is wrinkled, and even Josephine is frowning with concern. This time, Margaret can’t muster a smile.
    “Is everything okay, Margaret?” asks Claire, her voice a nervous squeak. “You look pale.”
    “Wrong number,” Margaret says, and stands up so suddenly that the room begins to spin. She stabilizes herself with a hand on the table, her other sweaty palm clutching the handle of her purse. Oh my God, she thinks. I just threw away my last $300—on microgreens. Three hundred dollars. At 29 percent interest! I owe a hundred thousand dollars and I spent my last buck on a salad? “I’m not feeling so well, actually,” she stammers.
    “You’re leaving? You can’t leave!” Josephine moans. “We have a table reserved at that new Russian vodka lounge!”
    “No,” Margaret says, “I think I need to go home.” Without waiting for the usual formalities, she begins the long, agonizing walk toward Acqua’s front entry, back past the almost-famous starlets and the Slavic hostess and the men in their Prada suits, and feels for all the world like a convicted prisoner shuffling out of the courtroom.
     
    by the time she reaches her apartment, in the back of a moldering eighties-era apartment complex marred by graffiti tags from the nearby gangs, Margaret is descending so rapidly into despair that she is not in the least surprised to see a note taped to her front door. She opens it carefully and reads it in the dim light of the hallway. Written on blue notepaper in spidery old-fashioned script, it reads, “Margaret—Your rent is two months late. I regret it’s come to this, but if I don’t receive the past rent by the end of next week, I’m going to have to ask you to move out. Thanks, Al.”
    She crumples the note in her fist, stuffs it in her purse, and unlocks the door. All she can think of is her bed: If she can just go to sleep now, maybe in the morning everything will be better. In the dark, she gropes for the light switch and flips it on. Nothing happens. She stands in the main room—the only room—of her