It was a humid Boston July when a major software company passed through town and threw a carnival at City Hall Plaza.

My roommate Drew and I were banquet servers at competing temp agencies in Boston, and we were both assigned to work the carnival. Neither Drew nor I were thrilled but we needed money, it was the summer, and there weren’t a lot of alternatives. That time, I’d fallen back into temping after getting fired from the pastry assistant job I was about to quit; sick of dysfunctional chefs I’d sworn to take my time looking for the "right job."

A month earlier, our third roommate, Vera, an art student who stayed up all night playing guitar and whose unwashed, brittle hair clogged our shower drain and stuck in the corners of the floorboards, developed a massive crush on me. I’d once been attracted to Vera, and I’d always been moved by artists, so I told her we could try dating, though I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to date someone I lived with. "One date," I said. "I’ll go on one date with you."

So she bought me Japanese food, then asked me to pay for ice cream, and as we walked the long blocks to our apartment I couldn’t look at her romantically. I tried for a few weeks after, pushing her away as she tried to kiss me only to find myself wanting her as we biked through Franklin Park when the sun pouring over her dark hair made her look beautiful. I told Vera that I couldn’t give her what she wanted, and she’d been distant for a while. Lately she’d started coming up behind me in the kitchen, leaning into me while I put the water on for coffee, and whispering apologies in my ear. It was good to be out of the house, and if I let myself get caught up in the details of the function, I didn’t have to wonder if the situation with Vera was just sad or if I’d been cruel somehow.

While the food at most outdoor gigs was disgusting, I had reason to believe the carnival fare would be better. The agency that won the carnival bid, Gourmet, was and is a premier caterer. My first event with them was a costume party at the Cyclorama, where several guests dressed as an Indian princess and her coterie of servants, and a man walked on a wine barrel around the dome’s perimeter, his hands rigid in the air for balance. We sent out meticulous plates of thick chicken breasts with thyme jus, and served petit fours and whole cakes for dessert. When they cut the temps early I was disappointed; it was the only party I’d worked where I wanted to be a guest instead of a server.

City Hall Plaza was closed down with tents and a giant soundstage. There were

rumors that Coldplay was booked, but the musical guest turned out to be Train, whose first hit "Meet Virginia" sounded through the halls of my college dorm about six years ago. The opening act featured a girl in tight leather pants and an electric violin, and from the nervous way the group performed sound check, you could tell this was big for them.

I was assigned to a mobile slush cart, complete with plastic spoon-straws and brightly colored slush cups. The slush was packed in liquid nitrogen, and our cart came equipped with two metal ice cream scoops, the old-fashioned kind that hurt your wrist. Our cart was positioned directly in front of a clam roll and french fry cart, and when the wind changed direction the odor of grease and frying seafood blew in our faces.

This wasn’t the kind of relationship I’d wanted to have with food. When I entered culinary school I thought you were supposed to learn all the secrets, and then go out to do the best you could with the raw products. I wanted every dessert I made to have the power to knock words away, so that silence was the only immediate and possible reaction. I knew there was no way to be that good working with caterers, and I knew most of the desserts in banquet service were put together in a warehouse and were not made with love. Every time I had to serve those products I felt myself slipping further from the person I wanted to be.

There were four of us assigned to the slush cart, including myself and a melancholy lesbian named Nia. Nia was eighteen, though she looked more like sixteen with a spattering of freckles across her round, olive face, and like many of the young temps she hadn’t gone to college. She liked music and she was trying to figure out what she wanted to do with herself. When she asked in her quiet way if I liked Kate Bornstein’s book Gender Outlaw, I said I’d found it too simplistic. I’d read the book a few years earlier and thought it was kind of fun, but not very complex. Well what more would you want? Nia persisted. Thus I found myself in the position of trying to defend my dislike of a book I hardly remembered while discussing transgender identity in front of two straight guys also assigned slush duty. After the Kate Bornstein discussion, we lapsed into silence, the opening band took the stage, the foul fish smell continued to waft toward us, and darkness fell.

I wanted to like Nia. Her unruly dark curls reminded me of an old girlfriend’s, and there weren’t a lot of dykes at the agency. I wanted to be pleasantly distracted by someone there was no real chance of falling for. I was glad to be working, or doing anything that got me out of the home. My friends had grown distant in the aftermath of Vera’s behavior. It was hard to do much in the hot July days other than wait in my air-conditioned room, and spend my nights drinking with Drew on the breezeless back porch, keeping our voices low so Vera couldn’t hear. I was still in love with a girl that looked like Nia, a girl I could barely call because the soft tones of her voice sent shivers through my body, a girl I needed in my life whether or not I had the strength to stand those awkward phone conversations. The other girls I distracted myself with were not right for me, and I would fuss over them for a while before inevitably turning away.

While the food booths were well lit, our slush stands were not. As the crowd finished their dogs, chowder and clam rolls, they hit up the booze tents over the dessert carts. I lined up slush cups while the guys scooped, and Nia sorted them into rows of lemon, cherry, or combination. As employees wandered by, we tried to give away the slush. Mostly we waited for customers that never came.

When the crowd broke up we were asked to comb City Hall Plaza for every lick of trash littered by the attendees. I put on foodservice gloves to pick up the cigarette butts, torn plastic cups, greasy napkins and other carnival detritus. As I maneuvered my way through the now-empty plaza, I kept looking for Drew. My body wanted a real meal, but first it needed a drink. Without one I knew I’d remain on edge and slightly feral. Very stressful functions always had this effect on me.

The bar where I’d seen Drew had shut down, its tenders disappeared—probably shifting the leftover booze from the tents into a truck somewhere—and I continued to walk the perimeter of City Hall Plaza, stooping to throw napkins and broken plastic cups into my bag. I couldn’t find Drew. It was likely he’d be in a pub anywhere between where we were and the Downtown Crossing Orange Line station, but should I try Silverline or Beantown or Kennedy’s, or my personal favorite dive, the Tam?

I handed in my bag of trash. I waited in line with the other temps from my agency to return my oversized white polo. I walked alone through the hot night down the length of Boston Common wearing a wifebeater and polyester tux pants. I wasn’t ready to get on the T at Downtown Crossing or at Chinatown either. Drew didn’t answer his phone. I walked past my graduate school, where I was one class away from a master’s in creative writing, and where everyone was poor and going into debt to pay for their degrees.

Mainly after shifts like that I’d crawl into bed with my laptop and some booze and watch back episodes of The L Word. Usually, I didn’t return the calls my friends made to my phone asking me to stop by their house after work. I wouldn’t do anything unless there was a drink in it for me. By the time I got back to our neighborhood, Jamaica Plain, the package store by the T with its barred windows and bulletproof glass would be closed, but if I knew Drew there’d be a twelve-pack of Bud Light in the fridge. I would be home soon, and it would be over; I didn’t have any more shifts that week.

I saw a temp walking ahead of me, a gay kid taking a semester off from Columbia, and I rushed to catch up with him. Together we walked to the next stop on the T, and I listened to him talk about how he’d gone to Miami alone for the white party, how crazy he was about his new boyfriend. It’s possible I talked to him about my women troubles. We split directions at the T and I ran into more temps on the train and bitched about the shift until my stop came.

When I slunk home, Drew was on the porch, our back door cracked open. He was working on a can of beer and a pack of Parliaments. He got no tips, he said, and everyone was rude, and he’d had to work with a backstabbing friend. I popped open a can of beer for myself, feeling grateful for the metallic taste of the beer, the chill of the can against my fingers. I brought my dog out on the porch, and we curled up next to Drew while Vera’s cat rubbed back and forth against our legs, whining for attention. Vera herself was out.

"They were so awful to us," I said.

"At least you were allowed to eat," he replied. His team hadn’t been offered anything.

I asked Drew if he’d seen the clowns on stilts. He hadn’t. I told him how they walked around juggling bowling pins, but how nobody paid attention to them. Or to our slush cart. We’d stood still for over four hours, practiced our best bored stares and eager service smiles.

"I’m so through with them," Drew said. He got up for more beers and brought me a can without my having to ask. Already, the event seemed far behind us, its details hazy. I couldn’t remember the names of the guys I’d worked with, or what I’d done to waste all that time. Only the small things mattered now—the wind blowing through the leaves overhead, the lighter’s click as Drew lit another cigarette, the whir of the industrial-sized kitchen fan we’d stolen from the basement —and they were the details of our lives together in that dirty, cheap apartment I’d soon be leaving.

"Me too, honey," I said. We always made these vows. We’d done our final thankless task, hefted boxes without being offered food for the last time. We were finished.