Early

He'd let himself into their apartments and watch their televisions; he'd make popcorn in their microwaves, use their drinking glasses for water, and forget to flush the toilet in their bathrooms. "Whataya gonna do about it?" Early's action said and, as the building super, there was little they could do. How a grubby little man with the intellectual agility of Swiss cheese could get past high-tech security protocols and find every hidden camera (Early would wave and, sometimes, pat the place next to him on their sofa as if to invite them to join him). Beyond desperate, they hid their valuables under floorboards and hunkered down, unable to find either a city official that would help them or affordable rent elsewhere. It was Cheryl who found it: Early's weakness. It was Cheryl who listened to her tapes over and over and put his mutterings into a narrative that they could use. Early hated rats and was obsessed with keeping the building rat-free. She began to leave him little notes about noises in the wall and, over the course of the next month, mentioned a sighting or two of a pink tail with the diameter of a nickel. Cheryl told everyone and, together, they slowly, carefully, and strategically led Early to believe that the collapsed tunnel in sub-basement was the likely place for the nest. Although Cheryl was the mastermind, it was Randy who went down into the depths with Early (who believed rats were on the list of Manly Things To Be Dealt With), emptied the syringe into his neck from the back, retreated up, and pulled the lever to release a metric shit ton of cement into the hole. They made Randy the new super, quickly voting in an HOA fee that would serve as a small but dependable salary on top of the free rent. His first task was to smooth the cement work in the basement and work with stains to age the fill appropriately. They toasted Cheryl on Pizza Night and apologized to each other later for making drunken "Late Early" jokes (which all agreed were freaking hilarious at the time). Cheryl had a little ceremony for Early - a moment between them that was private (standing on the slab under which he'd been buried alive); she asked him to forgive her and forgave him in turn, and then she read him a few pages from "Moby Dick" which were meant to serve as an explanation for why it all went the way it did. Cheryl felt neither guilty nor self-congratulatory; she was a nurse and knew that life was never a free ride.