Chapter 1

I was working a double shift at Pizza Hut when the news broke that the state of Minnesota was going on lockdown. All dining rooms are being shut down until further notice, and only essential places of business will be kept open. To me, that’s a dream. The bitchy customers can stay outside and leave me to make their endless pepperoni pizzas in peace. My boss put the news on TVs mounted in the dining room and listens to people discuss the merits of a lockdown, followed by the opposing side adamantly proclaiming that a lockdown will do nothing but destroy our economy.

“The lockdowns didn’t slow down Covid-19 in the 20’s. Why should we expect it do anything now?” A middle-aged man in a blue suit argued on the screen. Greg, my manager, nods along with the naysayers. I fold the cheese into the umpteenth stuffed crust today, barely paying attention, and dream about when I’m a doctor. Then, I can afford to be the one ordering in on a regular basis, making it some other college student’s job to feed me.

A family of four walks through the door and Greg huffs in the waitress’s direction. It’s her first day. I don’t even know her name yet, but I do know that it’s Greg job to train her and he’s been crabby about it the whole shift. She greets them the way she’s been taught and seats them in a booth that’s just out of my line of sight, but Greg keep his sour expression on her even as she returns and inputs their order. Thin crust pepperoni. Very original. I retrieve the dough from the refrigerator, and come back out to an angry Greg yelling at the wide-eyed new girl who doesn’t seem to know what she did wrong and is on the verge of tears. I don’t know what she did either, but I’m not about to get in the middle of it. I set the completed pizza on the oven conveyer belt and rush off to the dish room in case he decides to go in on me, too. Greg isn’t the friendliest person even on his best days, but he is usually a little more mild-mannered. Today, he’s almost an entirely different person.

I check my watch. It’s only 8pm, so I still have four more hours to go. Sighing, I fold open my Cast, which is a modern take on the old “phablets” that people loved in the past, but instead of just being one large brick screen it’s a standard cell phone size when folded closed, and a large tablet when opened up. Technically, ‘Cast’ is the brand name, but when they came up with the design, they knocked their competitor’s way out of the park in terms of sales, and now Cast is used synonymously with the name of the design of the phone, even though Samsung and Apple both still have versions of it. Much like Legos, the brand has completely over taken the phone-tablet-laptop combination industry.

There’s a sudden shout from up front, and my curiosity pulls me to the dining room to see what just happened. One of the kids is on the ground, his wiry hair lying flat on the floor beneath him. His parents are panicking, trying to wipe blood from his nose. The waitress is yelling for someone to call an ambulance. I pull out my Cast and dial 911 as quickly as my fingers will allow.

“He’s still breathing. He still breathing,” repeats the father, who strokes the kid’s dark curly hair franticly while piling napkins under his gushing nose. His mother is nodding along with one hand massaging a bandaged wound on her shoulder absentmindedly, the other tightly holding onto her son’s hand.

“911 what is your emergency?” A polite female voice asks.

“We have an unconscious child at the pizza hut on Hennepen. 2313 Hennepen,” I answer, trying to remain calm in the middle of so many panicking people. Losing my nerve won’t help anyone. New-girl, for her part, is pacing back and forth with her hand over her mouth behind the crying mother, decidedly not keeping her cool.

The father runs out of napkins and pulls off his overshirt to stem the bleeding instead. The small boy can’t be older than four. He weakly opens his eyes and tries to talk, but instead chokes on his own saliva. His dad rolls him to his side, all the way repeating affirming statements. I can’t tell if he’s talking to himself, his son, or his wife. I hear the siren of the ambulance making its way here quickly as the family descends further into a panic, and my coworkers and I stare on helplessly. I walk behind the counter and pull a container full of napkins off the shelf and move to do something productive, since clearly nobody else is going to. The dad nods in thanks when I pile the clean napkins under the still-gushing nose. His tiny chest moves up and down at a slower and slower pace, and by the time the ambulance arrives, I am sure I’m going to have to perform CPR. A small voice in the back of my mind reminds me that I’ve never had to do this in real life, and I can’t start with a child this small. I shove the thoughts out of my head with a reminder that I’ve practiced on so many dummies that as long as I stick to clearly defined instructions, I can’t go wrong.

Before I can even position his body properly to get started, a paramedic bursts through the front door, ready to take over. My shoulders relax with relief while he gets to work doing what he’s done for real people hundreds - if not thousands - of times. Within minutes, the little boy is loaded into the back of the ambulance, and the sirens are wailing toward the nearest hospital. The mom loaded up with her son. The father and preteen daughter, whose expression never changed through the entire ordeal, as if this happens all the time, follow behind in the family vehicle. The sound of the siren gradually fades, and as it does, the three of us get back to the rest of our evening routine. New girl cleans up the half-eaten pizza from their table, Greg nulls their order since they left without paying, and goes back to amending the schedule to account for impending shelter in place order, and I clean off the kitchen surfaces and sweep the floors.

“Alana, a minute,” Greg says, gesturing for me to come into the office. I follow and sit down, wondering what I can be in trouble for. “Without an open dining room, we don’t need two full time evening cooks. Tim has seniority, so I cut your hours down to two shifts per week over the next two weeks. You’ll keep your Wednesday/Thursday next week, and the one after. Then it’ll be back to your normal schedule.” He wipes the sweat accumulating on his brow.

“You feeling okay?” I ask, instead of responding to the news that he cut my hours with a week’s notice. He won’t be sympathetic anyways.

“Long day,” he nods, and then waves me out the door, having already said what needed to be said. A line of dark red starts to run from his nose, just like what happened to the small child hours earlier.

“Uh, your nose ... it’s...” he rushes to wipe it away.

“It’s fine. Seasonal allergies,” he answers, waving me away. I nod and close the door behind me, satisfied that it is May, and therefore allergy season is in full force. The situation earlier combined with the news talking about a lockdown is just making me paranoid.

When we close up at 1230am, I drive my beat up old Kia the short 10-minutes home, dreading having to call my parents to ask them for rent money. This late, the roads usually are mostly clear and peaceful so it’s my favorite time to drive, but tonight police sirens wail past regularly, cutting through the quiet. I wonder in passing what happened, but my mind quickly bores with the made-up scenarios and moves on to important things, like quizzing myself for my upcoming finals. I pull into my normal parking spot, behind another ambulance that’s pulling an elderly lady out of her first-floor apartment. Her skin looks like it’s losing color by the second as she is wheeled into the back of the emergency vehicle. Weird day, I think to myself, shaking my head and pulling on my mask in case all of this craziness is contagious.