If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery

Author:Jonathan Escoffery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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If you ask Silver Towers’ property manager, he’ll tell you I’m the administrative assistant at this federally subsidized senior housing scheme. And that I’ve been assisting for just over a year now. I’d been a month on the job, though, when our assistant property manager—the original resident wrangler—went MIA, and I’ve been covering her workload, without a proper promotion, ever since.

The property manager’s job is not so much to chase tenants as it is to squeeze from them every cent the Department of Housing and Urban Development will allow him to, and he does this through rent increases—increases justified by the findings of my interrogations and the paperwork I process.

Paperwork means, Tell me what you’re worth, so I can see if you’re lying to me. It means, Tell me, and I’ll tell you if you can still live here. I could tell you about verification forms faxed to our residents’ banks and their employers—their assets and income determining how much rent we can legally charge them. But that’s not what you’ll want to hear about. You’ll want to know how I came to spend my nights tucked into the building’s various crevices, scurrying through darkened halls like an Ocean Drive alley rat. We’ll get there.

Here’s the important part: My manager says that if we get rent increases to a high enough bracket by the end of the fiscal year, he’ll convince our head office to reapprove the assistant property manager position and promote me. As the APM, I’d be able to move out of my car and rent my own apartment; I could live like a fully formed twenty-first-century North American human. I need this.

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