We sat indoors under fluorescent lights and waited for dawn to spread across the horizon. Outside the sliding glass doors, a crowd of people huddled against the cold.

When I knocked on the glass before my shift began, before the store opened, someone crouched over coffee told me to get to the back of the line.

Loraine let me in. There were old doughnuts and orange juice in the break room, she told me, then she stepped outside and said, “Ten minutes.”

Jason leaned against the countertop near the register. “Those people are sick.”

“How long have they been out there?” I asked while taking off my coat.

“Tuesday. They’ve been camping out since Tuesday. I guess that means management didn’t grant your time-off request, huh?”

I nodded.

This wasn’t our first Black Friday. Last year, people began pitching tents on the concrete beneath the store’s awnings the Monday before Thanksgiving.

One year Jason and I spent our Thanksgiving together, as neither of us could afford to go home, and requests for vacation were blacklisted until the new year. We watched football and ate store-bought turkey. Toward the end of the night he turned to me and said, “Let’s drive around. See how many people are lined up outside the store.”

We took his dog and rolled the windows down in the backseat. Jason drove down the expressway. Because the stoplights were all green, because we didn’t see any other cars or people around, it felt like we were the sole survivors of some horrible catastrophe.

Jason slowed down once we passed our store. He entered the parking lot and we took a few laps around the mall. While some people sat in tents, most played with cell phones or laptops, maybe a tablet or two here and there. These were the people who stayed up to make sure no one tried to steal their position in line while they slept. Long bags of skin dripped from under their eyes, illuminated by glacial-blue light cascading from their palms. Jason’s dog barked at them as we passed, but not a single face looked up at us.

“Animals,” Jason said. “Don’t they realize they’re telling corporations how little their time is worth? Look, I work. You work. And you and I both know our time is worth much more than minimum wage, so when we’re not working, we’re enjoying our time off. And for these people to be sitting here for 96 hours just to save 200 bucks on a flat-screen television … What is that? Around $2 an hour?” Jason stuck his head out the window. He yelled out, “You’re telling them your time is worth nothing! You’re sick!” We drove off with his dog still barking and crashed at his place.

“It’s time,” Jason said. He punched a few keys on the register.

Loraine opened the doors. The people waiting outside sighed when they entered, from the warmth, I think. They looked around and smiled at us gratefully, as if this were some sort of salvation, as if shelter was something that could be bought, wrapped up and bagged in plastic. I checked the clock, thought about what I would do when I was off.

– Mason Schoen is a creative writing graduate student.