The Handbook

The orientation for the bridging program was on a Saturday morning in a classroom at the college, a room with grey carpet, too many chairs, and a projector that took twenty minutes to agree to work.

There were twenty-four nurses in the room. Lina counted them, out of habit. Twenty-four people who had been nurses somewhere else, for years, sometimes decades, and who were now working as aides, cleaners, cashiers, care workers, and one, a tall man from the second row, as a security guard at a shopping mall. They had the same tired faces and the same careful hope. Lina recognized it immediately. She saw it in the mirror every morning.

The coordinator, a brisk woman with short silver hair called Dr. Ambrose, welcomed them, explained the schedule, and then held up a thick document with a blue cover.

"This is your program handbook," she said. "Forty pages. I know nobody reads handbooks. Please read this one. Every year, somebody gets into serious trouble because of something on page seventeen."

Twenty-four nurses laughed politely. Lina didn't laugh. She turned to page seventeen immediately.