Welcome to Envy Park

Fire Prevention Month

When someone in your life remains jobless for more than a month, has their first meal at noon, and has color-coded sweat pants for each day of the week, you might feel concerned about them. And you would be right about it, but you should not have worried about me.

If I had a job, I wouldn't have been able to do everything I'd accomplished my first few weeks back. Steps 1 and 2 of the plan would have stretched out for months, no joke. 

I also wouldn't have been able to get into the glorious habit of sleeping until ten every morning. And spending most of my day in sweat pants, that was not as depressing as I thought it would be. I regretted nothing about my lazy new lifestyle.

Until Fire Drill day.

The thing I had forgotten about coming back home was that March was Fire Prevention Month, and if you were working or living in a building that had a fire escape, you were likely going to be asked to try it out then. It was a planned thing, with announcements posted in the elevators and the bulletin board in the mail room, but I couldn't tell my Mondays and Thursdays apart anymore so it didn't matter.

At eight that particular morning, the fire alarm woke me up. I tried to ignore it, but it kept going, and then I jumped out of bed when I realized that the building might be on fire. 

Please no, not my new furniture! I was thinking, as I quickly made myself decent. Not enough time to change my outfit, so i just slipped on a bra and put my night shirt (yellow with a Winnie the Pooh on it) back on, and didn't change out of my pink sweat pants. While figuring out where my passport was, I heard a knock on the door.

"Miss Vasquez?"

The voice sounded strangely calm. I ran to the door, cracked it open, and saw (my favorite) security guard Alan on the other side. "What's happening?"

"Ma'am, fire drill. You have to go to the fire escape now."

"I will, I will, I just need to...wait, no fire, right?"

"Yes, just lock your unit, we should be done in an hour."

"Okay, let me just get--"

"Ma'am, you have to go now. We have to evacuate the entire building in a short amount of time."

And that was how I wound up in the fire escape stairwell in my Winnie the Pooh shirt and pink pants.

My apartment was on the tenth floor of a fifteen-floor building, so that didn't sound so bad to me. I mean, it could have been worse. Walking ten floors down wasn't so bad, way easier than going up. I could hear voices on the stairwell but they were all below me. I was probably one of the last to be led out.

At the ninth floor, someone joined me. Blue shirt, khaki pants. Of course it was 9th Floor.

He usually didn't say hi to anyone, but it was difficult to pretend not to see me in that small space and with my Pooh shirt. He smiled and fell into step beside me. "I overslept this morning too," he said.

"Oh, I didn't oversleep. I'm really in bed at this time." 

He laughed a little. 

Eighth floor.

"I'm Moira," I said. "Tenth floor."

"Ethan," he said. "Ninth floor."