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walked through the plaza and toward the Silver Spring Metro stop. There were hipsters and skaters and yuppies and homeless. All of them walked through, parading their stories on faces. I started thinking that I overreacted last night.  
    On the other side of the Metro station was a Starbucks, a Caribou Coffee and an Einstein Bagel perfectly placed to gouge the desperately late commuter set. Across the street was the NOAA, you could always hear their fountains.
    As I neared the fountains I saw a woman in her early twenties pitched over, hysterical. She was crying, her screams cut and echoed off the tall buildings surrounding us. She screamed, “Please someone help me! My baby is drowning!”
    I felt my throat close, I ran over to her, assuming the child had slipped into one of the fountains. “Where’s the kid?” I screamed.
    The girl turned to me. “She’s drowning!” her crying stopped immediately. “Drowning in pollution, that is,” the girl pulled a clipboard from behind her backpack. “Hi, I’m Becky from the NAOCIWS & WT, which I am sure you’ve heard of before as the National Association of Overly Chemicled Inland Water Supplies and Water Tables. Did you know that the sewage system has been found to be polluted with consumed chemicals from the various people digesting medications? We are concerned that those chemicals are getting into the water supply…”
    DC is crawling with canvassers. Every cause that you could ever imagine, and many that you never could, have a nonprofit office in DC. They employ young people and all of them perform these kinds of public hysterics to hook you, insisting you contribute money to various crucial causes. I didn’t normally see canvassers because I work so late at night. This is why I was the only one who fell for this woman who wanted me to give her a monthly gift so that her organization could fight against medicine. She pitched me for a couple of minutes while I stood there catching my breath; I resisted the urge to slap her and walked away without saying anything.  
    I went into Starbucks, fell into a comfy chair, and listened to idle conversation and overhead music. Considering I was falling into a spiral of anxiety, this noise was the last thing I needed. I closed my eyes, slunk back into the chair, and tried to calm down. I decided that distraction was the way to go. I resolved that tonight, I would do anything I could to keep myself from thinking about things that made me anxious.  
    After a while I was calm, I looked down at my watch. It was 8pm, good enough. I got up and walked back to the office, through those familiar revolving doors, and entered the lobby blissfully unaware that tonight would change everything forever.
    There. Like I said, I only needed three quick chapters to set it up. Now let’s go back to the truck.

5
    I felt like a man spared from execution, happy to be doing my job, when I walked across the linoleum toward my station. The radio terminals were all the same. They were on long black island tables that ran the length of the room, facing a row of cubicled terminals. The cubicled terminals were everyone’s desired destination, the stars broadcasted from them. I spent ten years working at that network and all I got was a microphone in the middle of the room.  
    Amy was sitting down at a table on the far side of the room, her skinny legs drawn to her chest. She was leaned back in the dirty chair with a blank expression on her face. She was concentrating on a desktop monitor in front of her but would take the occasional look over to the brown stickered laptop just to her right, gazing at it with her glassy blue eyes.
    I said hello to Amy every day. She didn’t always respond back. Most days she would just keep staring at her computer screens but some days she would respond, either with a greeting or a wave. In those days, that made Amy the person who I talked to more than anyone else.  
    Amy was 19; her good looks got her an easy job at