Turn 13 of 233

Spend the entire weekend doing the same process. On Monday, I join a construction crew because I always loved working with my hands. I fit in amongst the crew without changing who I am. I also stop shaving

The weekend dissolves into a rhythm that feels like breathing. She wakes Saturday late, eats whatever is in the fridge — leftover pizza, cold noodles, a whole block of sharp cheddar eaten in thick slices standing at the counter — and then drops to the living room floor and works her body until the sweat runs down the soft channels of her belly and her muscles burn warm and deep. Push-ups, squats, lunges, planks, and new things she invents on the spot: bear crawls across the carpet that make her shoulders shake with power, wall-sits that turn her thighs to trembling iron. She eats again. She masturbates on the floor. She sleeps in the dirty sheets. Sunday is the same, only she orders Chinese this time — two entrees, a quart of wonton soup, a bag of pork buns — and eats it in bed with the containers balanced on the swell of her stomach. She doesn't shower. She doesn't brush her teeth. She runs her hands through her tangled hair and leaves it. The scale on Sunday morning reads 181, and she steps off it with the same calm she would step off a curb.

Monday she wakes early for the first time in days, before the alarm she never set, her body pulling her upright with a readiness that has nothing to do with the office. She stands naked in front of the bathroom mirror and looks at herself — the full heavy breasts, the soft round belly, the wide hips and thick thighs, the strong shoulders and arms — and for the first time the looking isn't about cataloguing changes. It's just her. She runs a hand down her side, over the curve of her hip, and her fingers catch in the coarse dark hair growing along her inner thighs, her calves, the line below her navel. She hasn't shaved in over a week. The stubble has passed into something fuller, darker, visible against her skin. She looks at it in the mirror and feels nothing but the pull of curiosity. She grabs the razor from the sink, holds it for a moment, then drops it in the trash. The hair stays.

She finds the posting on her phone while eating eggs at the counter — a small construction crew looking for laborers, no experience required, starting immediately. Jensen & Sons, residential framing, work sites across the city. She calls before she finishes eating. The voice on the other end is a man named Walt, gravel-voiced and direct, who says they need bodies that can lift and haul and show up. Can you show up? She says yes. He says tomorrow at six. She says she'll be there today.

The site is a half-framed house on a quiet street in the east end. The crew is six men — Walt, who is fifty and built like a barrel; Marco, who is twenty and never stops talking; two cousins named Daryl and Ray who work in silent synchronization; a lean older man named Frank who measures everything twice; and a guy everyone just calls Tuki, who is enormous and gentle and carries lumber like it weighs nothing. Lena arrives barefoot in a tank top and loose cotton shorts, her belly visible beneath the hem, her hair unwashed and tangled, her legs unshaven, and she smells like herself — three days of accumulated musk and sweat and skin. She stands at the edge of the site and Walt looks her up and down, and his expression does not do what Priya's did. It does the opposite. He grunts.

"You're six-three?" he says.

"Six-three."

"Can you lift a hundred pounds?"

"I think so." She hasn't tried, but the answer comes from somewhere deeper than thought, from the body that held a handstand on Friday night.

"Grab that stack of two-by-tens and bring them to the frame." He points. The stack is waist-high and dense. She walks over, bends at the knees, feels the weight settle into her arms and shoulders and core — the soft belly compressing, the strong thighs bracing — and lifts. It is heavy. It is not impossible. She carries it fifteen feet to the frame and sets it down, and her arms tremble for three seconds and then stop. Walt nods once.

"You're hired," he says. "Boots are required on site, but we've got extras in the trailer. Grab a pair."

"I don't wear shoes," Lena says.

Walt stares at her. Marco stops talking. Tuki looks up from the lumber pile. The silence lasts four seconds, and then Walt shrugs — a massive, rolling shrug that seems to accept everything at once: the bare feet, the belly, the unwashed hair, the unshaven legs, the woman standing in his construction site who just hauled lumber like it was groceries.

"Then watch for nails," he says, and hands her a hammer.