When I wasn’t praying for my continued survival, I was meticulously dissecting every second of last night. With Erik in the backseat finishing the Bourne movies, Isaac and I barely spoke. The words we did manage felt hopelessly shallow in the wake of everything we’d let loose a handful of hours before. I couldn’t look at him without a reaction fizzling under my surface, a mixture of heat and panic that might have been fear, paranoia, or something significantly worse.
This morning, I’d slipped into sleep halfway through one of his sentences. I woke up on my side to a dawn that was bright and shocking, so close to him that—for a moment—I couldn’t breathe. In sleep, we’d fallen toward each other. He looked soft and calm. His serious eyebrows shadowed the slope of his nose. Seeing him so still was like seeing a river stop in its bed, the mess of churning water held perfectly motionless for a minute, the constant rush silenced.
The entire ride back to Kensington, I couldn’t stop remembering that image. Staring through the passenger window at the blurring wall of trees along the highway, I saw it. Every time he hummed to a song on the radio or messed compulsively with his hair or drummed his fingers on the wheel, I saw it. It was an indelible film over my eyes.
It was bad news. I set about destroying it at once.
We got back around 8:00 p.m.—intact, miraculously—and the eight of us had dinner at the pizza place in town, at which point Jon Cox attempted to fold a whole pizza slice into a cube to eat in one bite. In penance for being the grossest person alive, he picked up the tab, thank God. I’d agonized the whole time about the best way to ask one of the guys if they could spot me.
Afterward, the other Sharps packed up for the rest of break and got back on the road—one car to Watertown, for the airport, and the other back to New York City, for Isaac, Marcus, and Trav. They’d be driving all night.
Meanwhile, I returned to my dorm, pinned my break residency permit on my door, and shut myself in.
My parents had badgered me all afternoon to Skype them. I donned my wig, rolled on some lipstick, and lined my eyes. If I ever Skyped my parents without makeup, they asked if I was getting enough sleep. Are you sick? You look tired. Maybe they’d just forgotten what I looked like without it on.
Mom’s Skype contact popped up in the list. I clicked it. One big plus of everyone leaving campus: Internet speeds quadrupled overnight. Otherwise, streaming video on this laptop would’ve been like trying to stream video through two tin cans strung together with dental floss.
My parents, in our kitchen, showed up on the screen in glorious 240-pixel resolution. We had a computer back home. It was from 2005.
Mom was craning over Dad’s shoulder. Their blurry smiles settled me. I waved.
“Hi,” Mom said. “How is everything going?”
My smile froze into a rictus. Even with the tinny audio, I heard the undercurrent in her voice. Bad news.
“I’ve just been catching up on reading,” I said. Restful. Calm. I’d made it my business being unreadable, but inside, panic bells started to clang. Idiot, I told myself. Of course this had meant bad news. Otherwise, why wouldn’t they have left the call until Thanksgiving, as usual?
“What’s going on? What did you want to talk about?” I said. They looked at each other, then back at me. Whatever this was, it was big enough to have bridged the divide between them. I felt the acute dread of somebody standing in place, watching a cannonball fly toward them.
Dad’s voice was uncharacteristically calm. It unnerved me. “Jordan,” he said, “the landlord told us today that rent’s hiking.”
My hands curled up beneath my laptop.
“So we made a decision,” Mom said, “and you’re not going to like it, but we don’t have many options.”
A glut of protest built in my chest. Since middle school, they’d talked about moving every time things got tight. If they thought we could dodge the rent escalation by burrowing deeper into Chinatown, then by the time I got to college—assuming I got the scholarship money to afford college—they’d be living in one of those Single-Resident Occupancy rooms, eight-by-ten-foot cubbyholes that whole families sometimes operated from. If we’d been able to afford the relocation costs—if my parents had ever had job prospects somewhere else, if we’d had a car—we would have abandoned San Francisco and its heinous prices, but you couldn’t pay for a move with hypotheticals.
If we moved, that was another blow against my already-destabilizing friendships. During the year, the girls slid along like beads down a thread, all together, on a different track than mine. When we met back up, I had to work to dissolve the buffer Kensington created between us, the distance of perfectionist culture and college-prep focus.
I could imagine it. We would move out of our neighborhood, the one I’d always shared with them, a block down from Jenna, three streets over from Shanice and Maria. Our friendship would turn into something made out of old habits. When that turned irrelevant, we would fall out of touch entirely.
My mother’s voice interrupted the spiral: “We’re pulling you out of Kensington.”
Everything stopped.
As her threat processed, the world began to swing horribly, a trapdoor plummeting on a huge hinge. It dangled. I clung to the edge.
Something had gone wrong in my vision. Keep control. Keep control—
“Um,” I whispered. “What do you mean?”
“We can’t manage those costs anymore.” Mom sighed. The camera image focused for a second, and in that instant, her expression was a diagram that explained exhaustion. Stress filled her every wrinkle. More lines had drawn themselves in since last time I’d seen her, encircling her lower eyelids, linking the corners of her nose to her jaw. “And at home,” she said, “maybe you can work somewhere.”
“But—but isn’t it cheaper for me to be here? You don’t have to pay for my meals, there’s no—”
“Xiao Ming,” Dad said, my childhood nickname sounding more like a stiff rebuke. “It doesn’t come close to breaking even.”
A childish tantrum erupted in my head. I stamped it down, trying to think rationally. I had to be mature. I had to be logical.
Flights, I thought vaguely. Each year was four or five hundred dollars’ worth of flights, what with Winter Break, the only holiday when the Campus Residency Office couldn’t let me stay on campus. Storage, too—it cost seventy-five dollars to hide my things away in some closet here over the summer so I didn’t have to ship them home. And textbooks . . . I had the crumpled receipts somewhere: $335 this semester, $290 last semester, a staggering $415 the semester before that. Not to mention supplies, everything from my stupidly expensive graphing calculator to pens and paper. There had to be other costs, too—costs I was forgetting, or costs I didn’t want to admit.
I didn’t want them to be right, but if they were, I had to find a fix.
“There’s no guarantee I could work at home,” I blurted. “Maria looked for a part-time job all last year and she never—”