It would’ve been a weird summer anyway. I’d graduated, but the lease on my college apartment wasn’t up until September, so I stuck around through the transition, biking to Panera in the morning, where I would take advantage of the air conditioning and reliable wireless connection, freelance web producing and refilling my small Dr. Pepper all day. At night, I drank beers on the porch while my roommates played guitar, attracting stray cats and strange neighbors who shared too much about their sex lives.

My freelance gig kept me pretty solidly in porch beers and popsicles, but when I saw the posting seeking a $15/hour social media intern for a local coffee shop chain, I figured it couldn’t hurt to apply. I could use the extra money to put toward a security deposit when I moved to the city in the fall, and our journalism professors constantly repeated that as young people who understood Twitter, we were automatically more attractive job candidates to older employers who viewed social media as Gandalf does the One Ring: aware of the power it could bring them, but too afraid to dare wield it. I have since found this to be only sort of true. I sent my resume to the proprietor, who preferred a diminutive nickname to his real one. We’ll call him Buddy.

"As much as I wanted to tell this woman—whose skin was as white as mine—that you don’t need to be toting two kids or living in housing projects to find yourself in need of help with buying groceries, I said nothing to her."