The phone arrived at four in the afternoon and he left the box sealed until nearly midnight, saving it. Twenty-three, five months out of work, living in the room he grew up in. He got a thumbnail under the corner of the factory film and pulled, slow and even, and it came away in one unbroken sheet with no bubbles, no snags, no tear anywhere along the edge.

He held the sheet up to the lamp for a second before he binned it. Downstairs, forty applications sat in a spreadsheet with the status column mostly empty; the follow-up email to the recruiter had been drafted for nine days. He set the phone down feeling, briefly, like a person who finished things. Then he opened it and applied to nothing until two.