Page 258 of Across His Line

Waleska, R. — 1 G, 1 A. Barnes, K. — 2 PIM.

I don’t know what Barnes did, but I can guess.

Kylie’s out with Paige. The room’s quiet. Corvin’s pretty quiet for a Friday.

My phone buzzes face down on the comforter, and I think it’s Rafe between periods, which he never does but which I check for anyway.

It isn’t.

Woodbury University Office of Student Financial Services: Your Award Package for Next Academic Year is Now Available.

I know what it is before I open it. I’ve known it was coming since August. I thought I’d feel something big when it came. Instead, my hands just go very still on the phone, and I sit there for a second looking at the subject line, and then I open my laptop and log in to the portal because I need to see it bigger.

I read through it quickly.

Okay, so it’s not nothing. They didn’t take everything away. There’s a grant, and a smaller scholarship, a different one, with a donor’s name on it I’ve never heard of. There’s a work-study line. There’s a long table with a lot of rows, and the rows add up, and then they subtract, and at the very bottom, in a box by itself, there’s a number.

It’s what I’d owe for one year after everything.

I look at that number for a long time.

It’s more than I have. It’s more than I’ve made in my whole life put together. It’s less than it could have been, and a lot more than I can do. It’s loans, or it’s working thirty hours a week on top of classes, or it’s draining every dollar I’ve put away since I was fifteen.

I can’t afford this.

And I start doing the math anyway. Where I could cut. How many more orders a week. Whether I could get a second job off campus. What the loan payment would be on the low end. How to make it work. How to stay.

Do I even want to?

I stop because I never had this question before. Before, I knew I had to go. Woodbury was my way out. It was the only door. You don’t ask whether you want to go through the only door in a burning house. You just go, and I sure as hell don’t want to go back.

I take a screenshot of the number and save it to a folder I make, which I name January, which isn’t a very good name but it’s the only thing I can think of. Then I get my notebook out from under my pillow and turn to a clean page and write three words across the top, spaced out.

Stay. Leave. Don’t know yet.

At eleven-forty, my phone buzzes again.

Rafe: Won 4-2

Rafe: Barnes got punched.

Rafe: He deserved it.

I laugh out loud, alone in my room. Then I look at my phone for a long time with my thumb over the keyboard.

I could tell him. I could type it right now. Got my aid package. It’s bad. He’d call from the bus with the guys yelling in the background, and he’d say how bad. I’d tell him, and then he’d have something to say about it. Something good, probably. But it would be in my head.

I want to know what I think first.

It isn’t a secret. I’m not hiding it. I just want to know what I want before I know what anyone else thinks.

Me: What did he do?

Rafe: Just being himself.

Rafe: I plowed the guy.

Me: Did you really?