“I’m afraid not.”
I’m afraid, I’m afraid. He keeps saying that, but he isn’t afraid, is he? Sympathetic, yes. His voice is syrupy with that. But the fear here—it belongs to me. “What does that mean? What happens now?” I ask.
“My hope is that you can put us in touch with your parents,” Oster says. “I’m sure it’s just a misunderstanding.”
“Our policies are quite clear,” Mrs. Clarke adds. “If your tuition is not paid, you are not an enrolled student and you cannot stay in the dorms or attend classes.”
Oster looks at her sharply, but I’m grateful to her for just spelling it out. They’re saying I can’t stay here. I have to go home.
And I can’t go home.
“Miss White—Eden. If your family is experiencing some kind of financial hardship—”
I laugh. It’s a horrible, choked sound, and it makes them both wince. “No, we aren’t experiencing financial hardship,” I say. Though if you asked my parents, they might disagree.
Every few months someone posts a rich guy’s monthly budget to “prove” that they’re barely getting by, and the internet falls on their head. Who the hell spends a thousand dollars a month on wine, has a two-million-dollar house, and considers themselves poor?
My parents, that’s who.
I could break down our budget and set the internet on fire for a day, but I know it would only make my parents feel more victimized by the world. Don’t those people understand that these kinds of expenses are necessary for people like us? they’d squawk.
So no, we aren’t experiencing financial hardship, but I know exactly what’s happened. You’re not rich if you spend all your money, according to my parents, and they find so many ways to spend it. Normally there’s still enough left over to cover Atwood, but this year they’ve had Luke’s legal bills, dealing with his “slipup.”
Mom is in charge of the bills. She would have been the one to realize that the tuition money wasn’t there. And Mom, believing with all her little heart that if you ignore a problem, it will go away, just rearranged her reality so that “pay Eden’s tuition” was no longer a thing she had to think about. She wouldn’t tell Dad—she wouldn’t want to get screamed at. She wouldn’t call the school because that could lead to conflict, too. She’d just wait and hope the money dropped out of the sky or the school forgot to collect.
“What are my options?” I ask. My throat tightens, but my words are steady.
Mr. Oster is silent a beat. “As I said, we can try to contact your parents again. But if they aren’t able to settle the balance, you’ll have to find other arrangements.”
“Tonight?” I say.
Mr. Oster shakes his head. “We’re not going to kick you out on the street. You can stay in the dorms for tonight and attend classes tomorrow while we sort this out. It’s Tuesday; I can give you through the weekend to get this handled.”
The weekend won’t be enough. You have to schedule in the time for Mom and Dad to yell at each other about whether to sell the Jaguar or take a chunk out of the retirement account again. Maybe, God forbid, forgo their third vacation this year. Not that it would help, since the deposits are paid and they’re already halfway across the world.
“If we could call your parents right now—” Mrs. Clarke begins.
“There’s no point,” I say. “They’re in Bali, for one thing. And I guarantee you the money isn’t there.”
I guess it isn’t entirely Mom and Dad’s fault. They might find all kinds of inventive ways to spend their money, but the six figures on defense attorneys to keep their son out of federal prison were at least genuinely unexpected. After all of that, of course they couldn’t cancel the Bali trip. They’ve been so stressed.
I’m rubbing my thumb across my upper arm. I pull my hand away, force it into my lap, hoping no one noticed. The bruises there are long gone, but I swear I can still feel them. “Is there financial aid or something? A scholarship?”
“We have a select number of merit scholarships, as you know, but they’ve been dispersed,” Mrs. Clarke says, not unkindly. “And with your parents’ income, you wouldn’t qualify for need-based aid.”
“Right,” I say numbly.
“There is another option,” Oster says.
Mrs. Clarke makes a noise, almost inaudible. It might be disapproval or merely acknowledgment.
“What other option?” I ask, hope fluttering in my chest.
“There is a parent at Atwood who pays the tuition of another student in full each year,” Oster says.
“Like a scholarship?” I ask.
“Not exactly,” he says delicately. “I’m talking about Madelyn Fournier.”
Madelyn Fournier. As in Delphine Fournier’s mother.
My fingers wrap tightly around the arm of the chair. Delphine was in our year. Still is, I suppose.
Delphine was a prim, delicate thing, dressed like a doll. We were assigned as roommates our first year, and from the start, I resented her presence—resented her intruding on me and Veronica, on our private world. I’d wished, fervently, that she would just go away.
In a sense, she did.
Only a day after becoming my roommate, Delphine got sick. Now she lives in isolation in her carefully climate-controlled suite, the only way she can stay healthy. She has her coursework delivered, and teachers tutor her one-on-one outside of class hours. In return, at least as far as the rumor mill goes, Madelyn Fournier shovels money into the school coffers.
Delphine Fournier might as well be a ghost. She has haunted me for six years—the memory of her face, of her pale white hand slipping from mine.
We have never spoken about what happened that night, Veronica and I, but I have thought of it every day since.
“Ms. Fournier has generously offered to pay the tuition of one student in return for their residence in Abigail House,” Oster says. “You would serve as a sort of companion to Delphine.”
It sounds so Victorian. The Delphine of my imagination is a waiflike girl in stays and a white lace nightgown, carrying a candle. I’ve seen her at her window a few times since she got sick—the pale oval of her face, her coppery red hair spilling over one shoulder.
“I thought that Aubrey Cantwell was already at Abigail House,” I say. My voice breaks.
Oster’s eyes jag left. Mrs. Clarke’s chin twitches toward him, but she focuses on me. “Aubrey will be finishing her senior year at her local school back home,” Oster says.
I don’t know Aubrey well. She started at the Upper School—we weren’t Littles together—and she spends most of her free time at Abigail House, which makes sense, since that’s more or less her job. Was her job. Staying there means everyone knows you’re a scholarship student.