Lauren sat on the edge of her bed in the small bedroom and stared at her laptop.
An old one.
Secondhand.
Hinges loose.
Battery unreliable.
She opened it anyway.
The screen glowed to life.
She checked job sites.
Again.
Customer service.
Warehouse inventory.
Part-time receptionist.
Junior developer positions requiring recent certifications she didn’t have.
Hybrid roles in cities too far to commute.
Remote jobs with six hundred applicants.
She rewrote her résumé for the fourth time that week.
She removed dates.
Added keywords.
Took out the job from the office that had let her go after months of comments about “fit” and “image” and “client-facing culture,” even though she had barely seen a client in her life.
The real reason never got said clearly enough to prove.
It lived in looks.
In meetings she stopped being invited to.
In the new supervisor who told her she might thrive more “in a support environment.”
