by Mary Adkins
Her phone rattled against her thigh.
YOU IN THE CAR???
Lorn’s mother, Audrey—her guardian once her mom died—was far more overprotective than Bea’s mother had been. Bea found the constant check-ins via text—invariably in all caps—irritating, and she was often unsure how to respond.
Yes, she typed back, then turned back to the window. The abundant pines in North Carolina were different from the maples and birches of Connecticut, though she couldn’t quite pinpoint how. Taller? More dense?
“Ma’am, what dorm are you going to?” the driver asked. In the rearview mirror, she caught his twinkling eye. So this was southern charm. “I can get you to Carter, but that’s about as far as I know.”
“Sure,” she said, pulling her orientation folder from her bag and removing the map with her dorm starred on it. She handed it to him. “It’s there.”
“Uh oh, am I gonna need my readers?” He chuckled.
“It’s that star.”
“All right then,” he said.
To reach South Campus where the first-year dorms were located, they had to drive under the prominent Carter bridge—known to students as the Bridge, featured in the school brochure. It was a campus icon, a concrete arch and overpass blanketed in colorful graffiti. On this day it was covered in promotions by student groups targeting the arriving first-years:
Love a cappella? Join The Scarlets!
Black Student Union 1st Meeting: Sept 12
CRU: Bible Study, Ev Tues @7, SocSci Fl 4
Bea’s phone hummed in her hand. She looked down, expecting another text from Audrey but finding one instead from Early, her new roommate, with whom she’d traded numbers and a few logistical messages over the summer.
See u soon roomie!!!!!!!! ☺ ☺ ☺ ☺ ☺
3
Stayja
FRIDAY, AUGUST 18
Stayja ran, then walked, then ran across the quad, cup full of pee in hand. Fucking Nicole. She pushed through the building’s heavy glass doors and made her way up the stairs to the Carter health clinic, where her cousin was holed up in the bathroom.
where r u?! it’s getting obvious!
almost there, Stayja typed back, rounding the corner of the carpeted hallway to pass through another smooth, soundless door. A girl around Stayja’s age, presumably a student, sat behind a white, expansive reception desk, her bone-straight hair gleaming in the fluorescent light.
“Can I help you?” she asked Stayja.
“I was wondering—if I need, like, a pregnancy test, do you guys do that?”
“Are you . . . a student?” the receptionist asked, her voice rising an octave.
“I work at the Rooster Roast,” Stayja said. The girl’s face scrunched in confusion. “The coffee shop in the student center?”
“Oh! Right, I didn’t know it had a name. Um . . .”
The girl drummed her fingers on the desk. This was Stayja’s plan, and it was working. As Stayja shifted her weight, the pee sloshed a bit in the coffee cup she was holding before her like it contained a hot drink, and she noted again how oddly warm it was, like actual coffee. The fucking things she did for her fucking family. Here she’d managed to get Nicole a job at the Carter QuikMart, and then Nicole couldn’t pass the goddamn drug test. Of course. Nicole hadn’t had clean urine since she turned fourteen. Jesus only knew what combination of pot and what the fuck else was in her bladder.
“Do you have a health plan here then?” The girl looked Indian—not the Native American kind but the kind Stayja had never met until she came to work at Carter, the ones her mother called “dot heads” (as opposed to “woo-woos”).
“No,” said Stayja.
The girl pressed her lips together and swiveled slightly in her chair. Yes, go. You have to go ask.
“I’ll have to go check with my supervisor. Give me one second.”
Supervisor. It sounded so much classier than boss. Suddenly Nicole appeared, lurching from the hallway, hand outstretched.
“Give it, give it!” Her younger cousin grabbed the cup and lid from Stayja and darted back behind the door as the student with shampoo-commercial hair returned.
“Are you a member of the health plan?”
Stayja wasn’t a member of the health plan, because with reduced or nonexistent hours over seasonal breaks, coupled with the fact that the coffee shop was closed over the summer, her annual hours, even with overtime, averaged just under the threshold to qualify for benefits.
“Nope,” she said.
“We only serve members of the health plan, unfortunately,” the girl said, easing into her high-backed chair. “But there’s an urgent care a few miles east on”—glancing down at a small piece of paper she wasn’t holding before—“Wythe Avenue?”
“Cool, thanks,” Stayja said, turning to go.
“Do you want this?” The student held up the torn scrap.
“No, thanks!” Stayja said over her shoulder as she pushed through the doors.
Hurrying back across the quad, she checked the time. Three minutes left in her break. Just enough time for a cigarette.
She took a deep breath through her nose until her gut was as full as can be, then exhaled. Repeat. Exhale.
This time, unlike the other times, she would stick with it. It didn’t make sense, she reminded herself as she crossed the green, sunlit lawn, for a nurse to be a smoker. While for two years she’d justified her habit by distinguishing between being a nurse and being in nursing school, telling herself she’d quit before she got an actual job, she knew this was a load of shit. Anyway, now, thanks to Nicole and her uncanny knack for crapping all over Stayja’s life plans, Stayja was once again two years away from her degree. And that was assuming no more crises came up, and Nicole didn’t fucking do anything else stupid, like getting a DUI and having to be bailed out of jail.
Buzz.
Mom: which way on morehead is hospital
Stayja groaned and called her mother.
“Left or right on Morehead?” Donna answered.
“Mom, take the bus.”
“Bus isn’t running. I’m walking. Left or right?”
In addition to her diabetes, Donna had now been diagnosed with COPD. Her once-vibrant mother—the woman who, for their entire childhoods, had been an unstoppable force; who had driven Stayja and Nicole across the North Carolina/South Carolina border every July 3 to smuggle in illegal fireworks, the kind that spin and dash and explode; who had secured no fewer than twenty-seven jobs over the course of her lifetime by inventing elaborate work histories in every field imaginable; who had left her husband while pregnant after deciding he wasn’t worth the space he took up in the bed; and who once socked a lady in the face at Target for calling her white trash—now sat at home all day, every day, wheezing. At fifty-nine, forty-four years of smoking had finally caught up with her. And last week, Donna’s doctor had informed her that she would henceforth require weekly blood transfusions. (To Stayja’s shock, these were actually covered by disability insurance.)
Stayja knew her mother was self-conscious about her health problems. When Donna had taken her and Nicole on a trip to Asheville and they’d had to climb a flight of stairs to their motel room, Donna had claimed to be too tired to join them for dinner. Stayja didn’t know if it was to save money or to keep from having to go back up the stairs again, but since Donna loved going out to eat more than anything, it had to be one or the other. They’d brought her back calamari, and she’d asked questions about the restaurant, the service, the drinks. Was the ice cubed or crushed? Were the rolls warm?
Technically, Donna could still drive—her license was valid—but Stayja needed the car to get to work. So Donna took the bus when she had to go somewhere.
“Wait at the bus stop, I’m coming,” Stayja said.
“I’M WALKING HOME! MEET ME THERE.” Donna hung up.
Stayja entered the student center through the main entrance and hurried down the long corridor. There was still a week before classes started
, but hundreds of students always returned early for reasons Stayja had gleaned over the years—their performance group had to rehearse, or they were in sorority or fraternity rush.
Undergrads decked out in tan leather flip-flops and oversized shades stood in clusters, clutching their pristine, just-purchased textbooks. Peeking out from their pages, white tops of crisp receipts flickered in the breeze. She passed the bank of bronze student mailboxes and the student government meeting rooms. Ahead of her, the Rooster Roast had no door or wall—the corridor simply terminated in six round wooden tables, three geometrically patterned sofas, and an espresso bar. In spite of the laminated BE BACK IN 5 sign Stayja had placed on the counter, a line three customers deep had formed. The student nearest the register, a pale blonde, was pulling at a hangnail. Her ponytail clung to the sticky skin on the back of her neck.
“Can I help you?” Stayja asked as she texted her manager Frank.
just got super sick, have to leave. sorry.
She looked up.
“A small oat milk latte, please.”
Stayja made sure to turn her back before rolling her eyes. She quickly filled their orders and headed home.
WHEN SHE PULLED into their gravel driveway, her mom was waiting outside the house.
“Don’t get out!” Donna yelled, heaving herself up off the rusty metal chair she kept by the door for occasions such as this. Donna liked to keep no one waiting. She’d rather sit outside facing the brick wall of her sister’s adjacent house than make someone summon her with a horn or have to park and ring the doorbell.
Only two years earlier, Donna had been darting about, cigarette in hand, getting jobs and getting fired from them with impressive turnover rates. She’d been hired by a cleaning company but didn’t know how to clean (putting bleach on a wooden dining room table once). Her stint at the 7-Eleven had ended when she’d lent a twenty to a customer. And she’d quit the gig reshelving books at the library because her boss was a “dumb dick.” Donna had explained that she did not “believe in bosses.”
“At least most bosses. All the bosses I’ve ever had,” Donna had clarified. “I don’t believe in working for somebody dumber than me, and every boss I’ve ever had has been dumber than me!”
Donna’s knack for circumventing rules as well as ignoring policies and expectations she categorized as useless or inconvenient had been something she had tried hard but unsuccessfully to instill in her daughter.
“You realize you can just make up that stuff,” she’d responded when Stayja had told her she wanted to go to bartending school. “You don’t need school. Just memorize the drinks. I’ll make you a résumé.” Donna had found a template online and filled it with fictions. It reported that Stayja had tended bar for seven years, which would have meant since she was fourteen. Stayja had been too afraid to show up with the forged document, so she’d skipped the interview and told her mom she didn’t get the job. She hadn’t wanted her mom to think she was a wuss.
This was the woman who now hobbled toward the car, rainbow cane in hand, chest rising and falling under her wrinkled cream blouse. Small movements took visible effort. She’d gained forty-five pounds in half as many months.
“Off we go, daughter of mine,” Donna groaned as she fell into the passenger seat. “Let’s get me some blood.”
They drove through the neighborhood past houses like their own, on crooked frames with peeling sidings and overgrown side yards littered with broken appliances that had cost too much to be thrown away but were too useless to keep indoors. She turned onto the road that led to the hospital. They drove in silence.
“What’s the matter, teacup?” her mom croaked.
“Nothing,” Stayja said. Soon she pulled into the lot for the cardiology building and headed to the building’s front double doors. “I’m going to drop you off and study in the car.”
Her mom muttered something about texting Stayja when she was done and then lugged herself out, wheezing.
Stayja found a spot as far from the entrance as possible, on the edge of the lot, where she was unlikely to be distracted by people coming and going and where the fierce afternoon sun was blocked by the shadow of another medical building. She reached into the backseat to riffle through the pile of novels shrouded in library plastic in search of the advanced anatomy text she’d bought for the semester before she’d had to drop her class. If she wasn’t going to be in class, she might as well learn on her own. She identified the bulky tome by its heft, dug it free, and brought it to rest on the steering wheel as Frank’s name lit up her phone.
when are you going to be unsick? need you tonight. Trudy decided her 2 wks notice was no wks notice.
Stayja squealed.
feeling better (not contagious) so I can do night shift tonight. Also can I switch to nights??? she typed, pausing for an instant before pressing SEND to ponder how exhausting it was going to be to work until 10 p.m. five days a week. But it would give her the daytime to study or pick up other work. Or, now, drive her mother to her doctors’ appointments.
I can cover day & night shifts for now til you find someone 4 day. . . . She knew Frank wasn’t fond of her working overtime—she got time and a half for every hour over forty in a given week—but if he was in a bind, he’d do it.
Dot dot dot. The dots disappeared. He’d started to respond and stopped.
She wrote: feeling better. back by 5.
Dots.
Ok, just till I find someone.
She set her textbook aside and opened her notebook to confirm the calculations she’d done and redone. Six classes completed of the nineteen she needed for her degree meant that she had thirteen left. The program was designed for people to attend full time. Scheduling her twenty-plus hours of work each week around her degree requirements was like high-stakes Tetris: three courses were only offered during summers, and the pre-reqs for those were only offered in the fall and spring. If she missed a spring pre-req, for example, it rippled into the summer and fall, setting her back an entire year.
At the Rooster she made $16,500 a year. Their household bills were mostly covered by Donna’s SSI, thank God. Stayja contributed two hundred dollars or so a month toward other bills and a hundred dollars a week for food for them both in addition to Donna’s food stamps. That left roughly fifteen hundred dollars she could save per semester, which would cover the three spring classes, two in summer, and two in the fall. (Her summer job, catering the city’s Friday Night Movies in the Park, was barely enough to pay her cell phone bill.)
She and Donna would do what they’d always done when things got especially tight—case the “Nearly Expired” bin at Dollar Savings; take advantage of the pasta special on Wednesdays at 50 percent off/sixty-nine cents a box at Walmart; do the forty-five-minute drive out to Sam’s Club to buy the $1.88 frozen chicken breasts in bulk.
In all of her calculations, though, Stayja hadn’t factored in her smoking. A pack cost $5.45, over a third of their combined daily food budget. She had to be realistic: she hadn’t ever quit successfully. At about half a pack a day, she was spending about eighty bucks a month on fucking cigarettes, a habit she couldn’t afford, which made her feel even worse about not having kicked it.
As she gazed into the woodsy distance beyond the hospital lot into the trees that separated it from the highway, a burn rose behind her eyes. She was just tired, she told herself. She only cried when she was tired.
STAYJA AWOKE TO knocking on the window. She reached to turn the latch and shove open the passenger door of her ancient Corolla, which could only be opened from the inside.
“Sorry, Mom. Fell asleep,” she said.
“Just glad you didn’t leave me here,” Donna said, breathing hard from the trek across the lot. Stayja had seven missed texts, three from her mother and four from Nicole. It was 4:29.
“How was it?” Stayja asked, starting the engine.
“Easy,” her mom said. “They said I could do it myself at home if I wanted, but that makes me nervous.”
/> “Really?” Stayja must have sounded too hopeful, because Donna lifted her eyebrows.
“Don’t let me overburden you, Miss Thing.”
Stayja pulled out of the lot. “It would just be good if I didn’t have to leave work so I don’t fucking get fired.”
“Who’s going to fire you? No one has ever fired you. You’re impossible to fire. You’re too good at everything.” Donna turned on the radio. Easy listening came on, some eighties love song, and she hummed along.
“Meet any eligible bachelors today?” Donna asked after a few minutes.
“I’ve hardly seen anyone today, Mom,” Stayja said.
“It’s afternoon!”
“Classes haven’t even started.”
“Not just anyone. Someone on your level,” Donna said as Stayja turned into their neighborhood.
“Well, it’s not that easy to meet people,” Stayja said, a mistake. Donna launched into her well-worn diatribe: Stayja worked at a university, for God’s sake—she must be surrounded by smart, ambitious men.
“Those guys don’t want to date me,” Stayja said. “They date girls who had braces.” As soon as she said it, even though her tone had been playful, she regretted it. She sensed Donna’s body slump. Disappointing Donna or, rather, seeing Donna’s disappointment at Stayja’s disappointment had tormented Stayja since second grade, when she’d come home from school thrilled about an upcoming class field trip to the Charlotte zoo. Giraffes! Dolphins! The trip included a two-hour bus drive complete with bag lunches. They wouldn’t even return until after dinner.
They couldn’t afford it, of course. The day of the trip, Stayja had sat doing enrichment work in the first-grade classroom while the rest of her class had gone to see the giraffes. That part had been hard, but worse had been Donna’s face when Stayja had told her the cost. Even at seven, Stayja had understood that her mom was more crushed than she was. From then on, she had faked sick on field trip days, hiding from her mother that more than anything in life Stayja longed to be different than they were, than Donna was. She loathed all the words for “poor,” the degrading euphemisms: low-income, high-need, underprivileged. But she loathed being poor even more. Ever since first grade, when Stayja would be handed a bright blue ticket each morning by her teacher to exchange for a tray of free food while she was surrounded by kids who brought lunches from home, a single desire had trumped all others: to escape poverty.