When I’m done showering in nearly total darkness, I throw on the first things I can find in my clean laundry basket—thrift store PINK sweatpants with holes in the knees and a Wonder Woman T-shirt—and twist my long hair into a bun on top of my head.
Five texts have come in since I got into the shower. Layla, twice. Jett, twice. And Chris.
Before I can open any of them, Mom calls for me.
7
SHE SITS AT THE KITCHEN TABLE, STILL WEARING HER diner uniform. It’s supposed to be an adorable throwback to the 1950s, but coffee and ketchup stains cover the yellow-and-white dress, and it’s stretched across her chest, like it’s about to pop open. Mom’s only forty-five with a strong jawline, dark eyebrows, and a head of reddish brown curls like I have, but the circles under her gray eyes are deep trenches of fatigue.
“Hello, darling,” she says as I walk into the room. She’s lit a bunch of candles and turned on an ancient camping lantern.
I kiss her cheek, get the Castle leftovers from the cooler, and sit down beside her. “Long day?”
She covers her teeth as she laughs her smoky, tired laugh. She’s not had dental insurance in years and her teeth are broken and stained. She sends Chris and me to a dentist rather than go herself.
“It was rough. Got the worst section because I was late after dropping off a money order at the electric company.”
I look around. “Why don’t we have lights if the electric company has your money?”
She shrugs. “They’ll cash it on Monday. Until then, we’ll have to make do.”
It’s only Friday, but that’s okay. We “make do” a lot. Luckily, we’re all pretty crafty and there’s a lot of “making” possible. Mom sews; Chris makes blacksmithing stuff he sells online; and me, well, I don’t do much of any of that. I mostly study and go to work. Because part of my Big Plan is to get a good job to get us all out of this mess.
“It’ll be fine,” I say. “I can stay at Layla’s tomorrow night and get a jump on my homework and charge my phone over there.”
Mom nods. “How was your night? Anything new from the Castle?” As she talks, she takes out a wad of fives and singles from her apron pocket. A few coins also fall onto the table. “Count it, will you?”
In the candlelight, I smooth out all the dollars and fives and divide them into piles. “Eighty-five sixty-eight,” I say.
“From a double shift.” Mom swears, shaking her head. “That place is getting slower and slower every day. How much did you make?”
She picks up the cash and stuffs it into a Mason jar on the table. We all put our tips in the jar to pay for food, groceries, toilet paper, and things like that. Mom’s day job as a custodian at an office pays the mortgage. Barely.
“I haven’t counted it,” I say quickly, hating myself for lying. “I’ll put it in later.”
“How’s school? Still going to graduate?” She grins at me, a forkful of potatoes halfway to her mouth.
It’s one of our oldest jokes. But it’s not funny. Mom dropped out of high school to marry my dad and follow his band around the country until she had Chris. Basically her life was one long music video as she hitchhiked around the US and couch surfed through the Pacific Northwest before it was cool. She’s asked me every day since the start of freshman year if I was going to graduate. The answer is always, of course, yes. But the implication is always that I wouldn’t make her mistakes. Which is really all she wants for me. But it just makes me want to hug her and tell her I know she’s doing her best.
“It was good. AP exam results will come back soon, and the guidance counselor says I should hear about colleges in the next few weeks.”
I haven’t told Mom about all the rejections yet. She doesn’t need the stress.
A worried look crosses Mom’s face. I know she’s thinking of tuition bills, room and board, and all the other things we can’t afford. College is ridiculously expensive. I used a month’s worth of tips from the Castle just to pay for my AP exams. I have no idea where I’m going to come up with thousands of dollars a semester.
“I hope you get those scholarships,” she says. “We can’t ask your father for help.”
We probably could ask my dad. In fact, on nights like this, when we’re eating secondhand poultry in the dark and I’m thinking about which fast-food place I can steal more napkins from to use as TP, I’m really tempted to ask my dad for help. Last I heard he was a musician at a megachurch a few towns over. His weaselly face no longer hangs in photos around our house, but sometimes I see him on giant ads at the bus stop and on the TV late at night, doing infomercials and praying for old ladies to send him money so he can give it to Jesus. Scammer to the core. Like the Pardoner in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, my dad is as oily as a bunch of sardines in a can and has about as much of a moral compass as those dead fish.
He refuses to divorce Mom, because the Lord told him divorce is wrong, but he also refuses to pay any child support or his part of the bills unless we come to church with him. Mom says she’ll be deep in the ground before that happens. So, we “make do.”
Mom offers me a piece of cold garlic bread and I take it. We chew in silence for a moment, when my eyes fall back to the mail. One of the letters has a return address from Marquette University. It’s skinny and in a normal-sized envelope. My heart skips a beat. My other rejection letters looked like that too.
I can’t open it now because I don’t want Mom to ask me about it until I know what it says. And because some part of me doesn’t want to know yet. Plus, disappointment goes down easier for me when I don’t have to share it with anyone. But it’s all I can do to sit there, eyeballing the letter.
Mom’s phone rings, and she puts her turkey leg down. “I’m going to get changed. You can have the rest of the food.” She points to what’s left in the takeout container.
She answers her phone as she walks down the hall. I grab the letter from Marquette but pause when I see another letter beneath it. “FINAL MORTGAGE PAYMENT NOTICE” is stamped on the envelope in bright red letters. My hand trembles as I turn it over. I open it without thinking twice.
Dear Mrs. Sweetly:
Consider this your final notice for payment on the mortgage. You are now three months behind, and we will move into short-sale proceedings if you do not pay the full balance of $3,800 in a month’s time… .
The letter drops from my fingers. With shaking hands, I put it back in the envelope. Mom hasn’t said anything about not paying the mortgage. Why hasn’t she been making payments? Are we really not making enough together to cover it all?
The letter from Marquette stares at me, ready to deliver even more bad news.
I can’t face it yet.
If this isn’t an acceptance, then I’ll have to go to community college. Which is fine, except I really, really, really want to study history at Marquette and then go on to law school there. It’s a great school, close enough to home that I can commute to the Castle on the weekends, and I can still help Mom and Chris around the house. Plus, they have a collection of J. R. R. Tolkien’s original manuscripts (aka nerd heaven) and a chapel Joan of Arc was supposed to have prayed in, and their history professors are famous. I read about one of them who’s traveled all over the world to do things like drink beer out of barrels from the ninth century and study rats in the sewers of Paris. To get to work with someone who—