“You said temps could move up.”

“Not all the way. It’s the difference between—”

“I get it,” I said. “You don’t have to explain.”

“I didn’t mean anything bad. I was only saying you shouldn’t feel scared to talk to her.”

I wasn’t scared, exactly; it was just that when I thought about talking to her, I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Which I felt about a lot of people besides her.

One time she brought us bags of chewy coconut cookies. “These are treats from my country,” she said. “I hope you enjoy them.”

“Thank you.”

There was a pause.

“Okay,” she said. “Good luck with your morning.”

At our group meeting, Stan whispered to me, “Honey, you’ve got crumbs.” I saw he was right. Bits of cookie filled my shirt creases like dandruff. I brushed them off. I looked up and noticed April staring.

Eventually, I learned what to do with names that matched up to crimes or criminals on our database. “When the name is medium,” Sylvia explained. “It’s our bread and butter.”

This was the language of our program. “Medium” was the tag that appeared when the client’s name matched a criminal. Usually, it meant that some rich boy in Connecticut had the same name as a tax evader in Ireland or a drug dealer in the Bronx.

“What does ‘medium’ mean?” I asked Stan. “Why that word?”

He rolled his eyes. I knew he wasn’t rolling them at me. He was bored to death in his cubicle, and his face seemed to say; You must be, too.

“It means ‘medium risk,’” he said. “Like they could be serious trouble, but thousand to one they aren’t.”

“Does it ever come back high?”

“Osama bin Laden comes back high. And maybe Saddam Hussein back in the day. But that’s about it.”

I wasn’t sure if he was kidding.

“I wouldn’t try searching them, though. The office doesn’t like funny business.”

I smiled. That was a phrase my mother used when me and Dora played our tricks: dropping flaming paper bags of dog shit on people’s porches and ringing their doorbells. Dora only did it for a year before she started telling on me. Funny business. It was odd to have the same words show up in different parts of your life. It felt like going to sleep in your bed and waking up somewhere else.

Every day I made a little stack of stapled reports, one for each medium file, and turned them in to Sylvia. I’d never had a job that involved so much paperwork. When I packed my papers in Nevada, I barely had enough to fill a box. I liked the clean heat of pages from the printer, the smell of marker when I highlighted relevant names and dates. I was careful to let each page dry before I piled another page on top.