Which means I can’t possibly afford to go to college.
I don’t realize I’m crying until I can’t read the email anymore due to the tears filling my eyes and rolling down my cheeks. I drop the phone on the floor and cover my face with my hands. It’s got to be a nightmare. I’m going to wake up in Denver’s bed any minute now. This isn’t happening.
Only it is happening. I’m completely screwed. I must’ve done some seriously terrible stuff in a former life to deserve this now.
I cry until I can’t cry anymore. Until the sobs turn to sniffles, and I’m pretty sure there’s not a drop of excess moisture in my body. Now that the shock has hit me, and I’ve absorbed it, I have to start planning. I have to come up with a way around this.
Naturally, my immediate thought is to ask Mom for the money. I know Richard has it. I know he’d give it to me if she asked him to—I mean, I’m going to be his stepdaughter soon, and it’s not like I don’t have proof of the college screwing me over. His money wouldn’t go toward a shopping habit or drugs or anything like that.
Of all times for Chelsey’s voice to ring out in my memory, it’s now, gold digger. Right, and that’s exactly how it would look if I asked for money now. I might as well announce to the world she was right. I’ll be damned if I do that. So that’s out.
What else is there? I could still drive home and get a job in Florida, save up some money working over the summer. Would that be enough, though? I have no way of knowing what sort of work I’d be able to find and how much it would pay.
What if I got a job up here, instead? If I toughed it out over the summer, saved up every penny I could, then maybe asked for the difference once the summer’s over? By then, Richard would see how hard I’d worked, so it wouldn’t seem so much like I was getting something for nothing. I could live with that. I could live with having to deal with this house and the people in it if I had to.
One thing’s for sure, I can’t tell anybody about this. Not yet. As far as I’m concerned, nobody has to know about this but Mom and Richard, and that’s only when the time comes for me to make the first tuition payment in August.
Until then, I guess I’m stuck here.