And for the first time in her life, the city didn’t feel like a trap. It felt like a deck she’d finally learned how to shuffle.
Peg laughed. It was a sharp, percussive sound, like a pinball hitting a bumper. “I don’t get buffaloed. I do the buffaloing.”
Because in that moment, Peg Dahl realized she didn’t want to escape Buffalo. She wanted to own the parts of it that everyone else was too tired to fight for. The abandoned warehouses on the East Side. The loophole in the city’s towing ordinance. The old men who still settled bets with envelopes of cash and a handshake that meant nothing and everything.
But that was the problem. Buffalo, New York, had buffaloed her. The city was a grimy, snow-choked funnel of dead-end streets and cheaper-by-the-dozen lawyers. Peg had tried to leave twice—once for New York City, where she was too loud; once for Chicago, where she was too honest about being dishonest. Both times, the city had pulled her back like a rubber band. Here, she was a big fish in a puddle. A grifter with a GED and a gift for small-claims chaos. buffaloed 2019
The last time Peg Dahl felt truly alive, she was holding a counterfeit parking ticket and a straight face.
“That’s service ,” Peg had replied. “I saved two spots for people who actually need them.”
Now, at twenty-six, Peg sat handcuffed to a radiator in a Buffalo Police substation, her leather jacket smelling like regret and stolen staplers. The charge was “aggravated mischief,” which was just a fancy way of saying she’d repossessed a motorcycle from a deadbeat who happened to be the nephew of a city councilman. The job had been clean. The paperwork had been forged beautifully. The problem, as always, was that Peg couldn’t resist the encore. And for the first time in her life,
She represented herself. That was the first mistake everyone made, assuming Peg Dahl needed help. She stood before the judge—a weary woman named Castellano who’d seen three generations of Dahls pass through her courtroom—and laid out her case with the manic precision of a game show host.
She had never been happier.
Her new business card read: Beneath that, in smaller letters: We don’t get buffaloed. We are the buffalo. It was a sharp, percussive sound, like a
She smiled.
“No,” Peg said, tucking a bill behind her ear like a flower. “I’m just from Buffalo. We’re born holding an ace and a grudge. Everything else is just the weather.”
In the end, she got sixty days. Double the offer. As the bailiff led her away, Peg looked over her shoulder at the courtroom—the flaking ceiling tiles, the flickering fluorescent light, the portrait of some forgotten mayor with a face like a disappointed potato.