Luckily, just as hope seemed all but lost and I’d kissed all of my prized belongings away, including, most important, my stack of laminated résumés and, less important, my six-year-old laptop computer, a man on the platform—the man with the clipboard no less, at whom I’d scoffed minutes earlier—noticed my bag, and my wildly frightened face in the window, and he started waving his arms wildly at the conductor, and another person closer to the front of the train started waving their arms, and together they managed to get his attention. And just as the train was getting ready to lurch forward, it calmed to a halt and the doors opened.

I’m already prone to sweating, but I’m especially prone to sweating in humid summer heat, and I’m especially prone to sweating when I just got pinned against a train door. When I was in high school, I’d apply two coats of clinical-strength deodorant every morning before school and two again after gym class, and every morning, I’d wear an extra T-shirt underneath my clothes as a sort of buffer cloth to catch the excess moisture. There’s a paradox in a buffer sweat shirt, considering that the extra sweat-catching layer adds another piece of cloth to trap heat, but I did what had to be done to minimize the amount of visible leakage.

When I finally made it downtown, took a bus, and got off at the stop closest to the law school, some four blocks away from the building I was interviewing in, I walked through the humid Chicago heat in blaring sunlight. By the time I reached the building, I’d already sweat through the entirety of my buffer shirt and it was starting to leak through the outer layers. I flicked some water on my face from a water fountain on the first floor and stood with my legs and arms spread apart for a few minutes in an attempt to will away as much of the moisture as I could. But I was already running late.

And to make matters even fucking worse, there was no elevator and the office was on the fourth fucking floor. That’s the thing about these old university buildings. They tell you, “Oh, we’re such a great university, we’ve been teaching law to smart-asses since 1851, but also, our buildings were built before elevators existed so have fun walking up three thousand steps in the blistering heat because also air conditioners didn’t exist when this building was built either.”