The Last Shift
The alarm goes off at 6:45 like a tiny screaming demon, and Travis Lean Phio Refentse Aasim Lerang Bakang Liam Mikeal Ugly Jayden opens one eye and immediately wants to go back to being unconscious forever.
He does not move. He lies there in the tangle of his blanket, staring up at the water stain on his ceiling that has looked like a duck for as long as he can remember, and he thinks: *today I graduate.* The thought should feel enormous. It should feel like fireworks going off behind his ribs. Instead it feels like someone dumped a bucket of cold dread directly onto his chest, because right underneath the thought *today I graduate* is another thought, smaller and meaner, that whispers: *today I also have to go to work first.*
He groans into his pillow. The pillow does not care.
On the nightstand, propped up against a half-empty water glass, sits the little card he printed out three days ago at the copy shop on Brook Avenue — his official graduation card, the one with his full legal name on it, the one he is supposed to hand to Principal Munhg's assistant so she can read it out loud in front of four hundred parents, God, and the entire junior class. Travis reaches over, grabs…