The problem was that I’d never held a job with dental insurance.

The problem was that I didn’t want one. The problem was ancient. The problem was teeth. The problem was urgent. The problem was money. The problem was that I hate to work and I always have.

When we were little, my sisters’ stuffed animals became astronauts and firefighters and chefs. Mine took vacations and naps and watched TV. My sisters started working as soon as they could at the local ice cream shop, which employed children through some legal loophole because it was on farmland. They showed off the little biceps they’d developed from scooping, hard knots on their ropy eleven-year-old arms, and tried to recruit me. But I didn’t work until sixteen, when I had to start paying for my share of the phone bill. “It’s called a family plan for a reason,” I tried to argue, but my father put his foot down.

My first job was in a specialty pet store for reptiles, cleaning snake shit from the tanks—wet, oblong pellets full of hair. The owner told me that he normally only hired teen boys, but he was making an exception because I reminded him of his daughter, who was in jail at that point, for reasons never disclosed to me. The snakes eyed me curiously, sometimes wrapping themselves around my wrists as I worked. If a tank was too clean, I was to soak the snake in warm water, a surefire cure for reptilian constipation.

A few months after I started, my colleague, Justin from Geometry, left a heat lamp on overnight and baked a chameleon to death, its mouth gaped open like it was screaming, and I was promoted from snakes to chameleons. “A promotion in title only,” the manager clarified when I asked about a raise.

I surprised everyone, even myself, by embracing the role. I read every online chat board I could find and all of r/Chameleons. Every post underscored the enormity of the task ahead of me. “This is an animal for people who love this animal so much, they will arrange their life around it, and do not mind that it not only won’t love them back, it doesn’t ever want to see them,” wrote a reptile breeder named Donna. “This is worse than an orchid. This is an orchid that hates you.” Chameleons, I learned, do not suffer fools.