My eyes are having trouble staying open as I lie on the top bunk, trying my hardest to stare at the ceiling. I try to sit up, but I groan instead. Below me, my older brother Eli is getting ready. He was woken up by Mom just a minute before I was. I hear the bunkbed creak as he gets up from bed and walks out into the kitchen, his soft thuds against the carpet reminding me to follow. Last night I fell asleep at 10 p.m. after watching TV, and now my eyes hurt from the blue light that the computer screen casts across the room. I pull my blanket over my shoulders and close my eyes, trying to sleep a little longer and hoping Mom is sympathetic to my not wanting to go. It’s 2:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning.

“Come on, love, it’s time to get up. We have to go!” my mom exclaims about ten minutes later. When Mom calls a second time, it means something. ­

I groan but sit up, throw my blanket off, and climb down the rungs of the bunkbed, cold air pressing against my skin. Taking my time with each piece of clothing, I dress myself in white plaid shorts that go past my knees and a gray polyester shirt before making my way out into the kitchen, its incandescent light barely making it through my squint. I flop down on a kitchen table chair. They’re large wicker chairs, big enough so that I can curl up in them with their arms wrapping around me. Instead, I sit hunched over, rubbing my eyes and yawning. I look around and see Eli’s playing his Nintendo DS and Mom is putting her glasses in her purse and just grabbing her keys. She woke me up long before we actually had to leave. Maybe she wanted me to eat breakfast, or maybe she knew I’d like the few minutes of sleep more if I had to wake up for them first.

“You ready?” Mom asks. I nod and say “yeah,” and we walk out the door, followed by Dad and Eli. Mom and I get in her SUV; Dad and Eli get into Dad’s truck.

I should’ve gone to bed earlier. I wish these drives were longer. I’ll go to bed earlier next time. These thoughts echo in my head through the music of the 2000s hits radio station mom plays. She smiles and nods her head along, singing the lyrics to herself. “I never forget the lyrics to a song,” she’d always tell me. Eventually we pull into the parking lot of a large unbranded warehouse. Orange sodium street lights bathe the long stretch of parking spots to the side. Mom pulls into a space by the entrance, right alongside the Hondas, Toyotas, and Fords, and moments later Dad’s truck pulls up too. This work never feels real to me until I unbuckle my seat-belt and step outside.

We walk through the front doors of the warehouse. Sterile, fluorescent lighting from 20 feet up yanks me from the solace of the streetlights. In front of us is a stretch of walkway about seven feet wide that extends all the way to the back wall. Flanking the walkway are long, gray tables that go on to about five feet from the edge of the warehouse walls. At almost every table there’s a person working, and almost every single one of them is Mexican. My mom, my dad, Eli, and I walk to a table towards the back of the warehouse. “I’m gonna grab the sheet,” Mom says as she walks over to an office off in the back-corner. The rest of us don’t say much. Eli and I wear our frowns and baggy eyes openly; Dad simply waits quietly, thinking to himself. Mom comes back with a paper in her hands. “Okay, so we have… 95 New York Times, 36 Arizona Republics, 43 USA Todays, and two Tribunes. That’s not too bad. We should be done in maybe an hour and a half.”

All of us walk over to the back wall where there are stacks of newspaper bundles. On Sunday, the paper’s big enough that it’s assembled by section; each of these 20-pound bundles contains one section. Each bundle is laced in yellow plastic strapping, one crossing vertically, and the other horizontally. I hoist a bundle of New York Times inserts, take it back to the table, and plop it down. I hook my fingers behind the strapping, the dry, peeling skin around my nails scraping against the paper. God, I hate the strapping. Pushing down on the bundle with my left hand, I pull up with my right as much as I can bear. The strapping’s edge and checkerboard texture dig deep into the crease of my fingers, turning them red, and as the pain becomes too much, my arm jerks back as the strapping gives way. I sigh and do the same thing to the horizontal strap, this one giving much easier. Later on when my hands are weary,  I’ll start asking Mom and Dad to rip it for me. I secretly love getting too tired to rip them. At the same time, I wish I could do it easily on my own.

Eli and I set up our newspapers on the right side of the table while Mom and Dad set theirs up on the left. We organize our sections, I pass him the newspaper bags, and we rip the remaining strapping from the bundles and set up our newspaper assembly line. With all the sections laid out, each section will be inserted into the section to its left until we have a complete newspaper, and then we’ll bag it and toss it into bins we have for our papers. Mom and Dad have already gotten started, and I hear Mom making conversation with Dad in Spanish — that way Eli and I don’t understand what they’re saying. For a moment, I watch Mom assemble newspapers, flipping sections open with one hand while tossing the next section in-between; palming one edge of the paper to the opposite edge, grabbing the edges together, and gliding the paper into a blue bag just big enough to fit the folded paper end to end. How did she learn to get that fast?

“Do you want to fold and bag, or do you want to assemble more?” Eli asks me.

Both jobs are difficult. Folding and bagging is hard because of those small bags, and assembly is worse on your hands the way it dries them out and cuts them.

“I’ll take assembling,” I tell him.

I kind of like the rhythm of assembly. I get used to the hand movement, and I like reading the article on the front page of the sections. I can only do it for a moment at a time since I’m constantly moving sections off the stack, but it’s a nice distraction if Eli and I are working in silence. Sometimes even an ad falls out and I get to think about all the things I’d buy at the used car lot or K-mart. Eventually though, all that’s left is contemplation. My mind is doing the same task for so long and it starts thinking about everything else: I think about my crush and how I like that she knows German. I think about why anyone works here, how awful it is to wake up in the middle of the night. I think about how I’m scared that Dad wants to send me to a charter school for high school. It’s an infinite space in which I can reflect. I start thinking of things I haven’t thought of in years, getting deep in the monotony of grab, grab, insert, grab, insert, stack. Grab, grab, insert, grab, insert, stack.

~~~

I remember a conversation I had with Mom a couple months ago:

“Hey mom, how’d you find this job?” I asked. She was assembling the last newspapers of the night.

“You know my friend Martha? Her friend works here and recommended it to her. That’s him, right over there. The manager hires people who don’t have social securities ‘cause he can pay them cheap.”

“No social securities?”

“Yeah, like people who cross the border. They still need to make money to put food on the table, ya know?”

“How much do you get paid?”

She tossed another finished paper into the bin. “About 40 cents a paper.”

Fuck, I thought.

“Dang,” I said. I think this is the first time in my life I thought about unions.

~~~

I turn to Eli. “I’m gonna use the restroom real quick,” I tell him. The monotony has gotten to me; I don’t even have to go that bad. After I use it, I look at myself through the graffiti on the mirror. My eyes are red and my lower eyelids are puffy; now that I’m looking at them, I notice how much they hurt. I shake my head and look down at my hands. The paper has filled in their crevices with ink, and as I run my thumb over my fingertips, I feel their smooth and bouncy texture. I turn on the faucet and try to wash it off, the soap burning against my dry skin. It won’t all come off, but that’s okay; I guess it’s a part of me now. I scrape my inky hands with a paper towel and look at myself one last time before heading back out.

We finish packaging the papers and carry them out in bins to my parents’ cars. Half go into Dad’s truck bed and half into Mom’s SUV, splitting the route down the middle. It’s about 4 a.m. now. The sky’s still dark and there’s about an hour of delivery left in my night. I tell Dad and Eli bye, and get in the car with Mom.

An hour passes by more quickly than I expect, since most of my work was done at the warehouse. Every few minutes I have to take a paper and run it to the door for people who request that, but mostly I can sit in the backseat and hand papers to Mom when she runs out of them up front. It’s a perfect time to relieve exhaustion, but I get carsick easily and I can feel hunger creeping in, so instead, I look out the window and listen to the thwap of the papers hitting the edge of the driver side window as Mom throws them. Finally, the end of our route gives way to a burning blue and orange sky as the sun rises.

We start driving home, relief soaking into my body and my eyes trained forward on the road, hoping desperately that we get McDonald’s as a reward for our labors. At this point I’m not feeling too bad about throwing the paper; it sucks, but it’s something we’ve gotta do. Suddenly mom says to me, “Do you want to go to WhatABurger?” It’s our favorite fast food place, and an irresistible joy seeps into me. McDonald’s or nothing is what I normally expect, but this is next level. She takes a right at the next street and pulls into the parking lot. We take a moment to order and sit down in the booth in the corner of the restaurant.

Mom points out the window behind her. “You know, I used to go to that high school across the street here,” she says, turning and nodding her head to the building across the street. A blue “NOW ENROLLING” banner is hanging up in front of the building.

“Yeah, you went there your last year of high school, right?” My mom had mentioned this school before when we’ve passed it.

“Yeah, Summit High. I went there for a year and a half before I met your dad. I wish I had finished school, but nobody ever pushed me; nobody ever gave a shit. The only time anyone ever cared was when I was in Texas for eighth grade. Uncle Peter and Aunt Donna gave a shit about my schooling, and I got honor roll that year, but I came back and nobody gave a shit anymore.”

A worker approaches our table. “Order 26?” he asks, setting the food down on the table.

“Mhm! I love the biscuits and gravy they have here; have you ever had it?” Mom asks.

“No, I’ve never even had biscuits and gravy before.”

“Here, try a bite.”

I take a bite of sausage and biscuit smothered in a warm, bright gravy. It tastes like comfort.

 

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