You don’t have the money. Not even close. To date, your family has mustered up $3,500 of savings. Actually, you find yourself wishing you’d saved less, because past a $3,000 threshold, your disability benefits evaporate and, along with them, your health insurance.
Your wife thinks that this must be a mistake—that policy can’t work like this—but it does. Now, without insurance, you somehow need to come up with the difference, $14,500 that the three of you have no way to pay. Your family starts to fight. First, about money; next, about everything, because it becomes impossible to put energy into things that are not money. The stability you built up over the years has evaporated because of one germ that got ambitious.
If, hypothetically, this were to happen, then the hypothetical daughter in the situation would feel, on any given day, angry, helpless, and guilty, in a steady turntable rotation. Angry, because in an apartment where a stalemate is now the best possible option, she eats and breathes tension. Helpless, because she can’t magically erase that hospital bill. Most of all, guilty, because she wants to leave. She wants to run as far as she can, away from her parents to her oasis in New York, and she knows they can tell.
I knew they could tell. Here I was, thousands of miles away, still running.
After a year and two months, with a third of the bill paid off somehow and twice as much to go, we were still clawing our way back to some sort of normal. Maybe the missing element was Mom finding a part-time job that gave her more hours, or maybe the solution was me going back to California and staying there. I didn’t know. All I knew was that home had a lonely feeling stapled to its side. We were just another problem I couldn’t solve.
I looked back at my phone and let myself savor the feeling it gave, that spark of warmth and reassurance. Tomorrow, I would wall myself off from all this. For tonight, for a minute, I could let it linger.
Reese underlined the words on the blackboard: anagnorisis and peripeteia. She wrote so vigorously that her hair, bound in a dark knot at the base of her skull, bobbed with the impact of chalk to board. She finished the final A and clapped her palms. They puffed dust. “Recognition,” she said, “and reversal. Cornerstones of Greek tragedy. A character’s sudden epiphany, imposed by newfound knowledge—and the choice they make as a result. Who can give me the final recognition and reversal in Antigone?”
Most of us raised our hands. Reese aimed her stare around the table, lingering on the kids who avoided her eyes. Eventually, she picked Ash Crawford, whose hand was crooked above his head. Reese’s method for starting a discussion wasn’t harassing the kids who hadn’t done the reading. She expected competence and didn’t fawn over excellence; she wasn’t going to chase us down to get us to do the work. If you slacked, you just knew, somewhere in your marrow, that she knew; she figured it out just by looking at you, and a dark patch of guilt grew like mold as the class churned forward and left you behind.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I squeezed it, shutting it up.
As Ash Crawford barreled into an explanation of why Creon might be the protagonist of Antigone, Reese perched at the oval table and scanned the fifteen of us. The roundtable discussion format was part of the air of collaboration that Kensington wanted to foster, that we weren’t “anonymous faces at desks, but equal-footed members of an ongoing discussion!” Or so all the admissions pamphlets exclaimed.
My dad, who’d gone to a disorganized disaster of a public high school in 1980s Los Angeles, referred to Kensington’s methods as “hippie garbage.” This baffled me. For somebody who ranted enthusiastically and often about the countless problems with his own schooling, Dad was weirdly fast to condemn any method that differed from it in any way. But at least he’d made it out with a diploma. His high school class, he’d told me, had boasted a 45 percent dropout rate. Social pressures aside, Dad’s spinal cord injury had happened his sophomore year. Adjusting to a wheelchair had never made anyone’s life easier.
My phone buzzed again. Reese’s eyes fixed on me and narrowed. The woman had the directional hearing of an owl. I could’ve sworn she grew a foot taller in that instant.
The second the bell rang, I tried for the twentieth time that week—and failed—to disable the vibrate function. I was going to have to start burying my phone deep in my backpack. Every waking second, new messages barraged the Sharps group text. During Greek Monologue, I’d missed this collection of gems:
Isaac (11:48 a.m.): Okay guys, who wants to sing a background part on my EP?
Jon Cox (11:48 a.m.): ooooh I am Isaac, I am so fancy, I am making an album, ladies look at me and my guitar
Isaac (11:48 a.m.): I swear to god, Jon
Jon Cox (11:48 a.m.): Can I borrow your guitar, does it work on girls?
Isaac (11:49 a.m.): Yeah. Like a magic wand basically.
Jon Cox (11:49 a.m.): really?
Isaac (11:49 a.m.): Of course not, you sentient walnut
Nihal (11:49 a.m.): Isaac, have you settled on a title? Because if this is the same EP with that “Smaller Cities” song, I like that as a title.
Jon Cox (11:49 a.m.): ok HEAR ME OUT how about u title it ‘eelectric eel’
Isaac (11:49 a.m.): . . . I’m just saying what we’re all thinking: that seems really Freudian
Nihal (11:50 a.m.): Literally nobody was thinking that.
Mama (11:50 a.m.): I assume none of your background parts are written for basses?
Isaac (11:50 a.m.): Uh, no, you’re right.
Mama (11:50 a.m.): Okay so frankly the anti-bass discrimination in our society has gotten out of control. And as usual, your part of the problem.
Nihal (11:50 a.m.): *you’re
And on, and on.
The freshmen and I didn’t say much. Marcus only popped in to volunteer his services, always punctuated with an exclamation mark: “I have an XLR cable you could borrow, Isaac!” or “I can print the arrangements, Trav!” His eagerness to help was a tiny bit excruciating, but it made sense. What else did he have to contribute yet? The same went for Erik and me, too new to joke around with the others.
Anyway, I didn’t intend to reach the point of joking around. No more easy conversations with Nihal; no more feeling like this could be some sort of family. I was glad that the Sharps were decent guys, and that they were funny, and surprisingly down-to-earth, and that making music with them got more exciting every time, and that I looked forward to eight o’clock all day. All that was fine. But it was not the point. I didn’t need friends—I needed the competition, and so I would stay under the radar. Arm’s-length acquaintanceship only.