It all started when the Ministry of Equality implemented its Diversity Program. I’d been out of a job since forever and the new law made it compulsory for all companies to diversify their staff. Things were getting pretty desperate, so I was immediately drawn to the first listing I saw on the government website: LOOKING FOR A FLEXIBLE JOB OUTDOORS? LIKE TO WALK? MAKE MONEY WHILE STRETCHING YOUR LEGS. I was surprised that El Cobrador del Frac still existed because it had been a long time since I’d seen one of their debt collectors, the guys in coattail suits and top hats. Anyway, it was better than being a cashier in a supermarket, sitting on my ass all day, getting headaches from the fluorescent lights and the small talk about vouchers and seasonal discounts. So I applied.

On the day of the interview, I was very nervous. It didn’t help that the walls were covered in hunting trophies. Everywhere I looked, a dead animal. Goats, lions, rabbits. A bull. “The CEO is a successful hunter,” said Pedro, the manager, while

I stared at his nose because he was cross-eyed. The whole process was quick. None of the other women who showed up had a driver’s license, so they gave me the job on the spot. Pedro congratulated me. He said I was the first woman in history to be a Cobrador Del Frac—or in my case, a “Cobradora.” “You’re making history!” he said.

Pedro went over everything with me: On my first day at the job, I’d show up to change into my uniform, study the files on the debtor I was supposed to track down, and then grab the keys to one of the company cars. Except instead of “the debtor,” they said, “the individual.” This made me chuckle, but I noticed it bothered Pedro, so I cut it out. I didn’t want him to think that I was laughing at him. Because of his eyes, I mean.

One of the things I was most excited about was the uniform, but when I asked about it, Pedro said we had to buy our own. He told me to see it “as an investment,” a tool of the trade. Noticing my disappointment, he said he’d lend me one for the time being. We left his office and walked through a large room of cubicles until we reached a closet where the agency kept all its promotional pens, brochures, and spare top hats. All the office workers stared at me. For some reason, they looked pale and sad, almost defeated. I don’t think they were happy to see me. This had been a male-only environment since its founding in 1978. My presence announced the beginning of the end. I didn’t blame them. They were right.

The only uniform available was a size XXL, but Pedro said it didn’t matter so long as I didn’t trip over the pants and the top hat didn’t block my vision. Besides, he said, after I got the commission from my “first catch,” I’d be able to buy one that fit—maybe in a kid’s size, which was cheaper anyway. “Women always have it easier,” he said. I was about to tell him that wasn’t true, but I just nodded and said, “thanks.” “Remember, you’re the first one! You’re making history!”

I exited the offices onto Calle de Orense feeling like I was on top of the world.

That was about it for the day. I pinned the hem of the pants and practiced walking around my apartment wearing the uniform. I chased my cat Lila and told her that she owed me money, and that she hadn’t paid rent in her whole fucking life.

That night, I could barely sleep. My stomach was full of butterflies, just like before the first day of school after a long summer. In the morning, I woke up before my alarm went off.

*

I arrived at the office the next day, changed into the suit, grabbed the paperwork on the “individual,” and drove away in the company car. I didn’t have any information on the debtor besides his address and the name of an obscure company called Varsovia LLC. As soon as I got there, I noticed that the address was just a sad looking storefront where the glass had been covered by a myriad of different peel-and-stick window stickers, which didn’t look promising at all. If the individual didn’t show up, I’d be stuck waiting for the entire shift—which sucked.

Walking up and down the street I quickly learned that one of the worst parts of the job was that everyone hated me. I went into a café to pee, and they threw me right back out into the street chasing me with a broom, which tested my ability to run in such an oversized suit. To wear the uniform of the cobrador was to become a leper. Nobody wanted to be anywhere near me. Children would stick their tongues out at me, and their mothers would speed past. Most people were afraid that I was hunting them down. From the girl who shoplifted a dress from Zara to the lady who had forgotten to pay her electricity bill, everyone ran away from me.

I had been looking for hours at the many patterns of the different peel and stick window stickers when it happened, when I suddenly heard someone fidgeting with the store lock. Boom. The door opened, and my heart jumped. A short man came out wearing a blue baseball cap. I was so nervous that when I attempted to yell at him, a faint squeak came out instead. Shaking, I ran up behind him and tapped his shoulder. He turned around, confused. And me? I just stood there, stunned. Varsovia LLC was Manu—the German Teacher. We just stood there, frozen. Speechless.

*

In 2004, I was a junior in high school. I was having a great time. My best friend Raquel and I were weird, but never got bullied. We looked hot, drank alcohol, and had sex, which made us cool in everybody’s eyes—until “the incident” happened, of course. We were inseparable and sat together in every class. And to make sure things remained this way, we took the one language nobody else wanted to study: German.

The classes started off well. We had this handsome charismatic teacher who would tell us jokes and stories about his time abroad. He was fit, tanned, eloquent. Everyone loved him. He was the coolest guy in the world. Everything was perfect about him except for his heart. And when he left to get a heart transplant, he was replaced by a weird, stumpy little guy who was always in a bad mood: Manu. Everyone was disappointed. Almost as if to pledge allegiance to our former tutor, everybody started calling Manu names. There was “Baby Panda,” because of the circles under his eyes, and “Axe,” because he reeked of BO. Eventually, everyone settled on “3-in-1” because his personality was a combination of three of the seven dwarves: Sleepy, Grumpy, and Bashful.

They really made his life hell. Each morning, he would show up more defeated than the last, and that just made everyone meaner. Everyone but me, that is. What nobody knew, not even Raquel, was that I was completely in love with “3-in-1.” Every time he showed up to class, all drowsy and dragging his little feet, I wanted to jump on top of him and smother him with a million kisses.

It all started the day I wore this punk T-shirt from Bershka. He asked me if I liked Joy Division. I didn’t understand what he was saying, because the second he got close enough to ask, I could smell his hair and I froze. I liked his smell. He said he’d burn me a CD so that I wasn’t walking around wearing the T-shirt of a band I’d never listened to. I nodded. I didn’t know what to say. “Damn, he’s mad stinky,” Raquel said after we left class.

When he showed up with the CD, I couldn’t believe it. I assumed he was going to forget all about me, so when he came up to me after class and whipped it out of his “cool” army-style cross-body messenger bag I almost melted. “Ugh! I’m gonna have to set this thing on fire when I get home, it’s like totally contaminated,” I lied to Raquel trying to hide my feelings.

When I got home that day, I listened to the CD over and over again. I only stopped to go to my swimming lesson. But even there, in the pool, I just floated aimlessly, thinking of him. I looked at myself naked in the locker room mirror and wondered if he’d like my body even though I still didn’t have tits yet. I thought to myself, They don’t have a fucking clue calling him 3-in-1. This man is special, he cares about important things like art and cinema. They just don’t get it.

Two days later he came up to me after German class to ask about the CD. I told him my favorite was The Clash and that I was a little weirded out by Kortatu, with all their Basque separatist terrorist stuff, but that they were still cool and all. He burned more CDs and stayed after class to discuss them with me. “God, he’s like, obsessed with me. He’s mad creepy,” I told Raquel, when in reality I was madly in love and willing to marry him.

He kept on giving me CDs until, one day, he stopped. Something had changed. I waited a few weeks but he seemed to be intentionally ignoring me all of a sudden. I was devastated and confused. Why would he do that? “He must have gotten a girlfriend, go figure, to each their own I guess,” said Raquel. That even she noticed it made me mad. I was dying to get his attention back. I switched up my outfits to catch his eye. More punk. I picked up a bunch of patches and buttons from the anarchist bookshop. More punk. I chopped my hair into all kinds of shapes. Nothing. I dyed it purple. He just ignored me. I wanted to die.

I flipped out and started calling him “3-in-1” just like everybody else. But I was obsessed. Angry. I wanted to play with his feelings like he was toying with mine. I wanted revenge. I made up my mind that I was going to seduce him by any means necessary. I had an idea: I would play sick on the day of the exam so that I’d have to make it up after school one day. All alone, with him.

When the day came, I wore a pair of super low-rise jeans with my pink thong peeking out the top. I kept pretending to drop my pen on the floor so that I could bend over and flash it. It must have been quite a humiliating spectacle, because, finally, he snapped. “Amaya, please, what the hell are you doing?” Almost angrily, he told me that he could see my underwear.

“It’s called fashion?” I blurted.

I finished the exam and brought it up to him, dragging my feet, annoyed. By that point, I’d lost all hope, but when I plopped the exam on his desk, he blocked my hand onto the exam and stared into my eyes.

“I have more CDs at home,” he said, looking back at the floor.

The rest was history. Once a week I’d go over to his place to listen to music, smoke weed, and fuck. I loved going over there. He would tell me about all kinds of things, and I’d stare at him wide-eyed, deeply interested in all he had to say about underground comics. One day he told me he loved me. And I told him I loved him, too, like in the movies. I was in a haze. I was fifteen and realized that I didn’t know the first thing about love or orgasms, but I did really like him. So even if I was lying, it was only partial. I may not have known quite what I meant when I used the word love, but I did know I meant something by it, something I didn’t know any other word for.

After two months, we got busted and everything went to shit. They fired him immediately and after a few more months, I had to be sent to another school because everyone kept on calling me “Snow White.” I never saw him again, but worse of all Raquel was mad at me for keeping my secret from her. I will never forget her disappointment. Unlike the rest, she wasn’t judgemental about it and even recognized that drunk enough, she may have banged him too. She was hurt that I’d broken our trust. So yeah, that’s what I mean by “the incident.”

Everyone acted like he’d abused me. And I get it, he was thirty years old. But when they said he manipulated me, I would remember dropping my pen and bending over to show him my pink G-string, and that made me feel so bad for him. If he was such a loser and such a wimp, like everyone said, hadn’t I seduced him? How come he was suddenly this powerful and manipulative man in control over me? I wept for weeks. My therapist said I cried because I had been traumatized, but I cried because I felt guilty. Had I done nothing, Manu would have simply stopped bringing me CDs. I had fucked up his life for good and it was all my fault.

*

So we just stood there, frozen. Speechless. I finally hugged him and broke down in tears. He led me into the vacant store and brought me to an old Ikea couch. We sat there for a while, gazing into each other’s eyes. He finally broke the silence to ask me how long I had been doing “this” for work. I told him it was my first day. He laughed and gave me a big hug. We sat there in each other’s arms until I noticed he was hard. I told him, “You’re hard.” He let go of me, a little embarrassed, so I pulled him back and fucked him on the linoleum floor. It wasn’t that different from back when we used to do it after school except that now, I knew how to reach orgasm.

After fucking, we talked for a long time. He told me that after“the incident,” he was never again allowed to work as a teacher and sank into a horrible depression. Eventually, he met a librarian from Cuba, fell in love, got married, and had a baby. He said this was his way of forgetting everything that had happened between us as quickly as he could. This was why he got married so quickly, without being totally sure of it. I told him that it was okay if he really was in love and that it wouldn’t make me feel jealous. He said it had nothing to do with me, and that made me feel a little stupid.

In reality, everything was pretty good between him and the Cubana until their kid, Rafita, got a little older and they realized something was off. He became a real handful as he got bigger. Screaming all the time. Breaking things. They took him to a specialist, and the doctors said that Rafita was autistic.Without much of an explanation, the Cubana left, and Manu got stuck taking care of their son. Rafita was now 13 and had been kicked out of every school he had ever attended, so Manu had to work from home. He was an operator for a hotline that counseled women who had abortions or miscarriages. Manu said this helped him with his depression because it reminded him that there were people who had it a whole lot worse than he did. That even if his son was exhausting sometimes, at least they had each other.

He told me all this while we lay on the ground naked, and I played with his curls. Nothing had changed between us. A delicious peacefulness had come over the empty shop. We had nothing else to say. Our words dissolved into the silence of a golden light in which we basked like two little lovebirds at rest. Until a ray of sun reflected off a coffee pot straight into my face and snapped me out of it. “What time is it? I have to return the company car!”

I broke the peace like a tornado. My mind started racing. The individual was my Manu! What the fuck was I supposed to tell them once I got back to the offices? “So you live here?” I yelled, searching for my panties.

Yes, Manu lived in a commercial storefront because it was cheaper.

“And how come you owe 7,000 euros?,” I yelled from the bathroom.

Manu answered, “Me and Rafita were at Mediamarkt when some gadget beeped, spooked him and he knocked one of those giant flatscreens onto the floor.”

I gave him a kiss and ran out of the shop to drive back to Madrid. I was so happy I could have driven myself straight into a lamppost. When I got back to the office, I checked myself out in the hallway mirror and realized that I looked like a mess. Like an actress in her dressing room before going on stage, I straightened my bowtie, spruced myself up the best I could and prepared myself to lie: “The individual at no point appeared at the address provided in the report.”

*

Pedro said it was no big deal—it was normal not to find the individual on a first attempt. I’d just have to go back the next day. And that’s exactly what I did. I went back every day for a week until I started alternating a little so I wouldn’t blow my cover. Sometimes I would arrive in Leganés and spend the whole day in my civilian clothes, hanging out with Manu and Rafita in the park or at the Islazul Mall, looking at clothes we couldn’t afford. My whole life revolved around them, and my existence outside of this bubble came to a halt. I felt like I hadn’t been to my apartment in years, everything in my fridge was moldy and my cat Lila resented me. I was obsessed with Manu, with saving him, with giving back what I’d taken from him. When we were alone, I’d spend the day naked. Sometimes Manu would work the abortion hotline while I touched myself on the other side of the empty shop, watching him. We’d make funny faces and crack each other up. I wish I could describe some of the happier moments, but I actually don’t remember much of anything. Happiness always slips through one’s fingers. All I really wanted to do was jump into bed with Manu and get so close that everything else just became a blur.

Unfortunately, I needed money, and since I worked for commission, the days I didn’t go to Leganés, I had to work for real, in my uniform, chasing down other “individuals.” One time, one of those individuals turned around and clocked me right in the face, but profusely apologized when he realized I was a woman. He felt so bad that he agreed to square up everything he owed that same day. Back at the office, we celebrated. It was my first successful hunt. Pressing ice against my eye, I handed the cash to Pedro. This would end up becoming part of my shtick. I would follow my targets, trying to act as masculine as I could until I would get assaulted by them. Then I would cry, reveal that I was a woman, and guilt them into paying. It worked every time.

After a month of this, I was in shambles, bruised and aching all over. I wanted to stop lying and getting beaten up by strangers, but I still needed the money. I didn’t know what to do. I was consumed by desire, guilt, and trying to save Manu. But ultimately, I had to quit. There was no other way. I was waiting for Manu to guide me, to give me a sign and to tell me what to do but the only certainty I could get from him was that he’d be waiting for me at his place and he’d hug me if I showed up. His lack of drive was also the source of our bickering. He could be so passive that it drove me mad at times. But then he’d hold me and it would pacify me. I could never truly hate him. It doesn’t sound like much but his body had become my only source of nourishment. I felt like a junkie gravitating to an opium den over and over again.

In the end, it was Lila who gave me the ultimatum. I had neglected my apartment so much that, forgetting to clean out her litter, she had no other option than to pee on my bed. The smell of ammonia snapped me out of it. I threw the sheets in the garbage can and spent the night on the naked mattress, staring at the ceiling, plotting my way out and rehearsing what I would say to Pedro the morning after.

But things didn’t go as planned. On my way to the office, determined to quit, I found myself blocked by a group of angry customers hollering in the entranceway. They claimed that El Cobrador Del Frac had indeed retrieved their money from their debtors, but they had never given that money back to their customers.

Working my way through the crowd, I made it up the stairs, confused. When I entered the office, I ran into an overwhelmed Pedro, who begged me to speak with the protesters. Since I was a woman, I would have more tact than “the rest of those assholes,” he said looking at the men in the office. The plan was to pay everyone off that very same day before the press arrived with their cameras. I asked him if that was true.

“What? That they’re a bunch of assholes?” No, that we have the money. “The money is always here, in the safe, before it gets transferred to Marbella at the end of the month,” he said. “Come, I’ll show you.”

With all the commotion, I couldn’t express to Pedro my desire to leave. That night, I didn’t sleep, because I couldn’t stop reading the company’s endless negative reviews online. Thousands of people had gotten scammed. There’s a saying in Spain that goes, Quien roba a un ladrón, tiene cien años de perdón: he who robs a thief deserves a hundred years of forgiveness. Pedro fucked up when he showed me where they kept the money.

After that day I started paying real close attention at the office. I began to arrive a little earlier than usual every day, so I could check out the folders of my coworkers’ assignments and get an idea of the size of the debts they were collecting. I calculated that they’d have around 20,000 euros in the safe at the end of the month. Raquel had moved to Berlin and she could hook me up with a job at the Pizza Hut she managed. “Let’s go to Berlin!” I said to Manu. In Germany, Rafita could get a better education and Manu could teach again. “Come on, we’ll start over from scratch.” I unbuttoned his shirt. He broke out his Leonard Cohen impression and sang in a deep, low voice: “First, we take Manhattan, THEN WE TAKE BERLIN.” I told him we’d never been to New York in our lives and he jumped on top of me and started tickling me.

For weeks, I would give him the instructions before, while and after we fucked:

On the 29th of April, you’re going to meet me at the airport, in front of the McDonald’s that’s right after the security check. Once we see each other we will walk to our gate keeping our distance, boarding the plane separately, and we will fly to Berlin. Raquel is going to pick us up. We will be low-key for a while, but we’re going to have a new life together. You, Rafita, Lila and me. It will be wonderful, I promise. Just bring the essentials, leave everything behind. I love you.

And then I would cum, ecstatic for a new future. Just the word “airport” would get me going. This was my new dirty talk and Manu seemed to enjoy it. I would show him Berlin streets on Google Maps and he would smile, hopeful, while rolling a joint. I wrote all the instructions neatly, put them in a nice blue envelope and left it on top of the bed while he slept. He bought me flowers the next day.

The 29th came. I finished my shift and waited in the bathroom for everyone to leave the office. It was surprisingly easy to get the cash, even if it was far less money than I had expected. Because El Cobrador Del Frac were crooks themselves, their ways were still very analog. No cameras, no digital footprint. Just extortion, brute force, and fear.

I went to my apartment, put Lila in her carrier and got in a taxi to the airport. I threw my phone out the window to not get tracked. And that was that. There was no going back. By the time we got to the terminal, my heart was beating so fast, so loud and so hard that I wondered if I needed a transplant too, just like our first German Teacher, the handsome one. Things were in slow motion and sped up at the same time. A blur of screens, timetables, departures and arrivals. I had no idea how nerve-wracking it was to carry so much cash. Lila remained silent as if she knew what was about to happen. Of course, she knew. I waited for Manu in front of the McDonald’s right after the security check, just like I had told him the night before, but he never showed up. I looked for a payphone, but they don’t exist anymore. I asked someone to borrow their phone but my two attempts went straight to his voicemail. I arrived at the gate as they were about to close it, breathless, and walked into the airplane.

As I sat down, I looked so tense that the woman next to me thought I feared flying and held my hand. Once I felt her touch, I started sobbing. She was trying to console me, but then I cried so ugly that we both ended up laughing. And we were laughing so hard that other passengers started laughing too. When we finally stopped and an awkward silence took over us, a giant wave of relief washed over me: I was free, at last. We landed in Berlin, and I walked through customs without issue. Raquel was waiting for me on the other side. She was holding a heart-shaped sign that read: “Amaya + Lila 4ever.”

“What took you so long?” she said, with a big smile.