Work Experience
In the intern cave we are hungry. It is Wednesday and we were promised pizza for lunch, but no one knows when it will arrive, or who will be called to retrieve it. We started expecting it at noon, and then stopped expecting it until 1 pm, and now at 1:31 pm we are wondering if it will arrive at 2 pm, or if we misunderstood about the pizza, or about the part of its being for lunch, and we are checking our emails for any reference to the pizza, and finding just the one line in last week’s email from our boss: No need to bring lunch on Wednesday, we will be providing pizza. None of us brought lunch today, not even Casey.
If anyone knew anything, it would be Max. Max is the favorite. But at 1:13 pm Max said, “We were getting pizza today, right?” and a few of us nodded, and since Max has not made alternate plans or unearthed any backup snacks from his bag, shoved squarely underneath his metal chair, we have to assume that we are still getting pizza, or that Max assumes we’re still getting pizza, which amounts to the same thing. In the meantime we address our laptops. Casey arrived late again and is on the broken swivel in the corner, so no one can see what she’s working on. We have only the dimmest sense of what anyone else is working on, despite how often we look over each other’s shoulders, which is easiest to do when walking slowly back from the bathroom, which is just outside the intern cave to the left, down a low-ceilinged hallway. We suspect that Casey doesn’t work very hard, or, worse, that she doesn’t need to work hard because of some innate talent that she has that we don’t. No matter how poorly we time our morning commute, Casey always arrives last, after we have filled up the ten seats around the fold-out table. The seats at the table are not comfortable either, but the discomfort feels voluntary because there are so many to choose from, unlike the broken swivel chair, of which there is one.
From upstairs comes the wood-scraping sound that signals the start of a meeting, or the end of one. We have never been inside the conference room upstairs, though we have seen all the other smaller rooms on the second floor, where they sometimes need us to deliver boxes or stacks of mail. There is a third floor that only Max has been to—he is the favorite. According to Max, the third floor is very small and cramped, and the assistant who sits at the desk up there thanks him silently with hand gestures because behind her is the door to an office where her boss is on an important phone call. But he’s only been up there a handful of times, Max has. He is good-natured about his status as the favorite and answers our questions when he can, although he is unable to answer the question we most want answered, which is how we can become more like him. Three weeks ago Evan was the favorite—the favorite is usually but not always male—but Evan has fallen out of favor. He was called to staff the front desk for an hour, the kind of chance all of us long for and dread in equal measure, and he incorrectly triaged two client calls. Evan is good-natured about his decline. We are all good-natured in the intern cave, because it’s such a competitive industry that what would be the point of falling to petty infighting, just a drop in the bucket really, adversity-wise.
It is Evan who offers to go upstairs and check on the status of the pizza, to see whether we should abandon ship and seek our own lunch. It is 1:46 pm. Only Evan could suggest a thing like this. We let him go upstairs and dodge one another’s eyes afterwards. We have allowed Evan to be our martyr, and we don’t feel right about it, but we are hungry. It is a specific kind of hunger, the kind that gnaws in from the left, an asymmetrical hunger. Max’s chair is empty. Casey in the corner has opened her phone to look for nearby food options. She says she could bring back enough for all of us if a few of us would go with her, and we could venmo her. Casey is not saying this because she is a martyr but because she is playing the odds. She has gone out for lunch several times without getting caught, and she thinks she is invincible, and she might be—we have no way of knowing. But even Casey will not leave the room until Evan comes downstairs, if he comes downstairs. Assignments can strike at any time.
The door shudders open. Max has come back in from the hallway, where we go to take our phone calls when they come, which they rarely do. We look at our screens with our fingers motionless on our keyboards so that he knows he can tell us if he wants to. He doesn’t.
“Anything exciting?” says Hilary. “I didn’t get the ALX job,” says Max. He says it like the gift he knows it is, and we are all relieved and indignant, in that order. If Max can’t get hired, what hope is there for us? But, also, if Max gets hired then the countdown will begin. We are three months into our five-and-a-half-month internship, but everyone knows that the five and a half months are not a term but a maximum sentence, and that we’ll be released when we get offered a real job somewhere in the industry, or when time runs out. Interns still here at the end of the five and a half months are sometimes allowed to extend the internship another five and a half months, we have heard. This is a last resort we are not yet clinging to.
The door shudders open. Evan comes in gesturing apology. “They were in a meeting,” he says. “There was no one even at the front desk.” We can tell that Casey thinks she has been vindicated. “I’m going to Fourway,” she says. “Who else wants to come?”
Our cracks are exposed, in moments like this. Not the cracks between us but the cracks in our own resolve. We have all, one time or another, been absent at the crucial moment. Just yesterday Hilary was called for an assignment, and she was in the bathroom. “Well, is Alison there?” our boss said. “Send me Alison.” All Alison did was move some boxes from an office on the first floor to a closet on the second, which she told Hilary when she came back, and we mostly believed her. But still, Hilary and all of us knew that Hilary had lost standing. She has been on edge ever since, vibrating at anything that sounds like a phone or a footstep on the stairs. She will volunteer for anything from now on to forever, if only she is given the chance.
“I’ll go with you,” says Evan to Casey. Evan is being generous again, but this time we regard him with distrust. What if he misses being called for an assignment, on top of everything? Doesn’t he care about trying to regain standing? If he doesn’t care, then he might be a threat to us. He might try to persuade us not to observe the rituals that we know are important, like postponing our bathroom and coffee breaks and eating lunch with a fork in small bites so that, if we are called on assignment, we will be clean-handed and empty-mouthed.
Casey is leaned back motionless like she’s not going anywhere until we declare ourselves. We look studiously at our laptops. Darren is typing rapidly; we suspect he is faking it. Somehow we are all always getting work done even as we check to see if everyone else is getting work done faster. “I’m going to run and fill up my water bottle,” Hilary says. “Text me if anything happens.” This is the thing we always say to each other, like asking a stranger to watch your bag, knowing the stranger won’t run off with it but they also won’t chase after anyone who does. When Hilary comes back we tell her nothing happened and we can see her whole body relax. If she rations the water, she can make it to the end of the day now without having to leave the room.
The one who eventually says yes to Casey is Fatima. Fatima does not speak much, either because she does not like us, or she is shy, or she is a hard worker, or she thinks we will be interns in this cave forever and joining forces with us means never making it out. If we felt certain that this was the choice, we would all choose, of course, to make it out and leave each other behind. But we are not certain of much. For example when Casey asks for our orders we say nothing. This feels like a test—everything here might be a test—and we are determined to pass. The pizza will come as soon as we give up on it and spend the money we’re not making on a superfluous lunch. Hunger feels like obedience. We will wait to do as we’re told.
Casey’s group leaves for the stairs. We are promised food on their return, and insight into the goings-on upstairs, and in exchange we promise to recap them on anything that happens here in the cave. Promises are flimsy here, subject to a higher power, the way rock yields to paper. We do not necessarily believe that Casey will bring us food, nor do we expect to update her fully on whatever happens here in the meantime, not if knowing something she doesn’t could put us at some obscure advantage. But there is a window of opportunity here, we can all feel it. The higher powers are in a closed meeting, and the building, for a ticking-bomb moment, is ours.
Alison retrieves yesterday’s hummus from the upstairs fridge. Jamal returns with a paper cup of coffee from the upstairs Keurig. Max switches out his earbuds for headphones, the expensive, heavy-duty kind. We are not supposed to have either down here. (What if we miss a call from upstairs?) There is a rumor that every semester one of the interns is a plant who reports back to the boss on our activities. We have agreed that we don’t believe this, although no one knows how or by whom the rumor got started. Perhaps it stays in the cave, seeping out through the clogged heating/cooling vents, as a group of us leaves and another takes its place.
Max, we feel sure, is not the mole. It would be someone unobtrusive, someone we all get along with perfectly, someone who makes the right number of mistakes. It is certainly not us, we think privately, wishing of course that it were. There is so much that we could reveal about each of us, details that would surely make the difference in who gets the crucial recommendation, who is called upstairs, whose name gets put forward for the industry job we know is out there waiting for us in the world outside the cave.
We are typing not looking at our screens so that we can watch each other type. If the mole is anywhere they are here in the room with us, and for a moment we feel our minds loping along behind Evan and Casey and Fatima out in the scaffolding-shaded streets, i.e. wait up, we’re coming. The silence is broken sometimes by our stomachs, which have started to audibly roil. It is 2:49 pm, which means the pizza did not arrive at 2. There is a current of stress in the room that never settles, though when we type and shift in our seats in syncopated unison, like trying to match a lover’s breathing, the effect is almost peaceful. But now Max’s phone rings again, and with great self-conscious calm he rises and we give him nods of solidarity, of envy, and he does not look at us of course and slides out through the door’s quarter-swing opening. The door shudders shut.
It’s a heavy door, hence not opening properly, and we can hear only the rises in Max’s speech, not the falls. Great, he says at one point. There is very little typing happening now in the room. The building is old and the basement where we stay is especially old. The wall shelves are precarious with stuffed and water-warped files balanced just near the edges. We are awed more than intrigued by these files and have never touched or rifled through them; there is something sour and daunting about them—and besides there could be cameras in this room. There are probably not cameras, but there always could be. Some of us have heard stories from others who were here before us, and someone once was kicked out of the internship for something that no one could have known about except via camera, et cetera. We are typing at the speed we imagine an engaged but not frantic intern would type.
Sounds great, says Max outside.
If the news were good, we would be hearing more through the door. “Probably a second interview,” Tyler says, and we nod without looking up, because to show interest is to admit complicity in the thought. The door shudders open. “It was just a call to schedule another interview at GNF,” Max confirms, meeting our eyes, because he has to. “Congratulations!” we cheer. We are buoyed momentarily that we too could receive second interviews for all the first interviews so far endured. “That would be such a great fit for you,” we say. “Thank you,” Max says. We do not remember much about GNF, except that we applied to that position too.
The landline’s ring is an intent bleating as sudden as a jump scare. When it goes off we all shift gravitationally towards it, even though it’s Alison who sat closest to the phone this morning and answers. “I need three of you,” our boss says. The words come out both loud and muffled, as if smashed up against the receiver, and we all hear them, including Max with his headphones just on and now off again. “Me and who else?” says Alison to the room; our boss has hung up. “I’ll go” and “I don’t mind,” a few of us say at once. “Hilary,” we decide, and Nathan also is standing and we let him go too. It is moving boxes or sorting mail, almost certainly, if he needs three of us. If it were anything important, he would have been more discerning. Those of us left in the room agree that this must be true.
The silence afterwards is a sludge of keys clicking and stomachs settling. It is now 3:26 pm and we are making evening plans on our surreptitious phones, conditional plans that depend on whether and when our boss descends for an impromptu intern meeting. There is no pattern to when these meetings occur—Evan has noted every instance so far to check. Six thirty but could be more like seven, we tell our friends and partners. Max is jogging his pen’s click top down and up. Jamal is cracking his neck, side to side, for longer than seems necessary. We have received no new emails in the last hour and a half, thanks to the meeting upstairs, and we keep feeding ours into the clean void of sent and replied. We have almost come out the other side of our hunger into a sharp, grieved focus. The afternoon pools around us like a permanent state.
Casey is first audible but Fatima is first visible, rounding the door with paper bags aloft. “What did you get?” we clamor, letting Casey play the savior because she’s earned it, and as she lists out their purchases (falafel, fries, hummus, tabouleh) we are appropriately grateful, hyperbolic in our hunger. Evan sits among us and we smile real smiles at him. There is a flurry of venmo; Bea passes out paper plates. “Where’s Hilary?” asks Casey, and we tell her that Alison, Hilary, and Nathan were called upstairs. “He just asked for any three of us,” Tyler clarifies, and we can see the quickly stiffened shoulders of our three heroes relax again. “This is amazing. Thank you, Casey,” says Max, and we all nod in agreement, because even if the other two helped, it was Casey’s idea first. In fact as Casey hands out forks and passes around the two buckets of fries we reappraise her, we see how in her late arrivals and early departures there is something unwavering, some steady dignity that we respect and maybe even the higher-ups here would respect. Casey might surpass us one of these days. Casey is not the mole—the mole would surely show up first to take note of everyone’s arrival time—unless the mole were so secure in their position and perceptions that they could treat the whole internship casually, arrive just minutes before our official start time at 9, leave to grab lunch whenever they wanted… The fries taste limp in our mouths. But no, we have to trust each other. If anyone’s the mole it’s probably Bea.
We keep our voices low and our laptops open, but nonetheless there is something festive about our late lunch, everyone’s hands equally greasy, everyone equally ravenous reaching for seconds and thirds. “Better than pizza anyway,” Evan says with his mouth full, but this is the only mention anyone makes of the promised pizza. We ask Max more questions about his interviews and we learn to our surprise that Fatima had an interview yesterday we didn’t know about. We talk about where past interns have ended up and what it’s going to feel like once we’re out of the intern cave and working in the industry for real. “This is probably the hardest it’s ever going to be,” Casey says, and we shake our heads instinctively: no, can’t be. We know that jobs in this industry are hard—that’s why the internship is so intense, is to prepare us. “But think about it,” says Casey. “At least we’ll be getting paid.”
This is the thing that shouldn’t be said aloud, even if it permeates every inch of the intern cave, even if it lodges in the folds of our clothes and the bags under our eyes like dust, like humiliation. We are scheduled to work here from 9 am until 6 pm five days a week, though most of us arrive a little after 8 am and leave a few minutes before 7 pm. We are gaining essential experience and credentials, without which it’s impossible to get a foothold in this industry, an industry we want very much to be a part of, an industry of passion, of doing it not for money but for love. It’s true that they are not paying us. We have heard that some years interns are given a free unlimited metro card each month, for transit to and from the internship, but we did not even get that. We are trying not to think less of ourselves for accepting the internship despite the absence of the free metro card. We are trying not to think about the jobs we haven’t been offered, despite this internship on the top line of our resumes, despite our boss’s assurance that no other kind of experience is worth as much to the hiring managers out there as this particular internship, especially with his recommendation behind it, which if we earn he’ll enthusiastically give. “And we’ll have more control over what we work on,” says Max.
“I wonder how we’ll look back on this,” Evan says.
“We’re learning so much,” says Bea.
We all emphatically agree, we have already learned so much, but then we look around the table and wonder just for a moment if the others are learning more than we have. We spend all day in the intern cave; we have only interacted with our supposed supervisor once or twice via email. The boss comes down to see us, and sometimes the assistants call us up for meetings, the assistants who assist the higher-ups who are officially our supervisors, though the assistants are paid to assist them and we are not. Our boss tells us that we will learn the most by closely watching the pros at work, and by doing everything that they do. But, besides reading their forwarded emails now and then, we do not really get to watch them.
“Is the meeting still going on, do we think?” says Fatima. We have not been listening very closely to the sounds from upstairs; our plates are mostly empty or in the trash, though a few of us are still picking at fries. “Probably,” we say to Fatima, or we shrug.
“Evan, you know someone who did this internship just a few months ago, right?” says Casey.
“Yeah, they’re over at VXC now,” says Evan. We have already heard about this friend of his who works at VXC, but some of us were out of the room at the time, and so Evan answers again all the questions we can think to ask, which are not very good ones. “His advice was just to hang in there and to apply for everything, even the positions we aren’t really suited for. You just have to get your foot in the door and start somewhere. And if you see a position open up on the job board you have to apply right then. Sometimes after twenty-four hours they’ve received enough applications that they just delete everything that comes in after.”
Sober nods, especially from those of us who have been slow with our applications in the past. Back when Evan was the favorite, we asked him questions like this all the time, and he still commands our respect, just in a different way. It’s too late for Evan.
“I’m excited for when we get to do some interview practice,” says Max, referring to the part of the internship where the boss corrects our resumes and cover letters, and stages mock interviews with the rest of us ringed around watching like spectators at the Coliseum. Hold up your hand if at any moment you get bored, or you’re not convinced, or the candidate is overselling it, our boss will say to us who are watching, and slowly in his periphery the candidate will see our hands go up one by one. We know all about this because the boss has told us about the process many times, though he has not told us when it begins. When you’re ready, he sometimes says. We believe that he will know when we are ready. We wish however that, since some of us are already getting asked to interview at various low-level companies in the industry, we could skip ahead to learning how to interview properly.
“We could start practicing down here, just with each other. To get some practice in before we start the interview boot camp,” Tyler says, and Max says, “I personally would love that.” “We should do it,” we all say, with genuine and surprised enthusiasm, and we are discussing the logistics of when this could happen (“Maybe on those days we all plan to come in at 7:30?”) when Casey says, “Someone’s on the stairs.”
“It’s probably Alison and the others,” says Bea, but when the door jerks open (no knock) it is one of the assistants whose head pokes through.
“Oh,” she says.
She has in her hands a large white box stamped with the insignia of a nearby pizza chain. We sit up straight in our chairs; those of us with fries in our hands quickly drop them, reaching for our discarded paper towels.
“You guys got takeout?” she says.
There is nothing we can say to this. The assistant waits, looking at each of us, but not a steady look, more like she’s looking through us to the backs of our chairs. It’s the assistant who works for Max’s supervisor. She has a flat grim affect and we have never seen her smile.
“We told you you were getting pizza,” she says, when no one speaks.
“We thought maybe that was a different day,” Casey offers.
“It was today, the day of the meeting.” Any of us would wilt under the look that the assistant is giving Casey now. “Well, whatever,” the assistant says, setting the box on the edge of the table, which those of us closest to it are hastily quietly clearing. “If you don’t want it, just give it to a homeless person or something.”
She leaves. No one moves. Our laptops are still open but the screens have long gone dark. “It’s 4:49 pm,” Max says, as if to himself. We can hear someone coming down our staircase and we all hunch back over our computers, waking them up, but when the door shudders open it’s not the boss but Nathan, and then Alison, and then Hilary. “Hey guys, what’s up?” they say.
“Not much,” Max answers for all of us. Nathan and Alison and Hilary sit down. Someone ought to ask them what they were called to do upstairs, but we just keep pretending to type out emails, stricken. Finally Nathan says, “Do we think the boss is going to come down today?”
If there is a pattern to the intern meetings, it is that they usually come at the end of the day, just as a few of us are starting to think of packing up. The meetings can be ten minutes but more often they last an hour. On Monday the boss showed up in the intern cave at 5:51 pm and kept talking until 7:45 pm, as under the table we texted to cancel drinks plans, and then dinner plans. The meetings, past interns have told us, are the most important part of the internship program, and we should make sure not to miss any of them.
“I don’t think so,” Casey tells Nathan. “We got in trouble for ordering food.”
“Oh, because of the pizza?”
“We just assumed they forgot,” Tyler says, as if apologizing, it’s not clear to whom.
“They did forget,” says Hilary. “The boss remembered fifteen minutes ago and sent Nathan out to buy one. The meeting upstairs was catered by some other restaurant. Salads and things.”
“We were alphabetizing books,” Alison says.
“That whole time?”
“Yeah. Except when Nathan went to get the pizza.”
We find that we don’t have any further questions. After a minute Max puts his headphones on. A few of us eventually do eat slices of the pizza, which is just okay. No napkins or paper plates have been provided and we have already thrown away most of ours. “Well,” says Max, at 5:59 pm. “We’ve survived another day.”
“We don’t think he’s going to show up at like 6:05, do we?” says Evan, meaning the boss.
Casey is already collecting her things, zipping her laptop into her thin leather shoulder bag. “Get out while you still can, is what I say.”
A few of us laugh, and we wave to Casey and say “See you tomorrow.” Alison is the next to go, at 6:01 pm, telling us with some embarrassment that she has dinner plans. We say goodbye to Alison and Darren and to Fatima too, and to Evan. At 6:15 pm Max stands up. “See you all tomorrow,” he says. We wave goodbye to him and we keep typing, even though our supervisors’ assistants have not sent us any further instructions since before the meeting, probably catching up on more important correspondence. Bea is not even working it turns out but online shopping. Still, no one moves. Upstairs seems very quiet; probably most of the higher-ups have left for the day. We reach for another slice of pizza. We are making progress on next week’s assignments. Finally at 6:45 pm Nathan starts gathering his things, and then Tyler and Jamal. “See you tomorrow, have a good night,” we tell them, and we mean it. Bea shuts her laptop and waves to us on her way out. When the room is this quiet you can hear the air conditioning’s faint rattle, and sometimes footsteps upstairs, chair wheels rolling back and forth overhead. “It’s probably safe to leave,” says Hilary. It’s 7:04 pm. “Right?”
“Definitely,” we say. “We’re just catching up on a few things.”
“But you should go, if you have somewhere to be,” we encourage.
“I’m probably going to head out soon myself,” we say, and we smile at Hilary and we keep typing.
“Right,” says Hilary. She sits upright, motionless like a rabbit, her hands hovering around her laptop like she’s ready to press it closed. Her hands are especially clean and there is no empty plate or napkin beside her. Come to think of it, we’re not sure we’ve seen her eat anything today. “Right, well,” she says. “Have a good night.”
“You too,” we say.
But we don’t move, and neither does she.
Devon Halliday is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer whose short stories have appeared in Ploughshares, One Story, Ninth Letter, and Adroit, among other journals. Her debut novel is forthcoming from McSweeney’s in 2026.