Each one was exactly what it said it was.
The more complicated part was that going through them, I kept encountering the texture of that time in a way that the documents themselves didn’t contain. A tuition statement from my second year at Meadowfield is just a tuition statement. It doesn’t say anything about the November I had to drop statistics. It doesn’t say anything about the nineteen-hundred-dollar transmission repair. It doesn’t say anything about the particular quality of the Meadowfield cafeteria on Tuesday evenings when I was between shifts and had forty minutes and couldn’t afford to go elsewhere.
Documents are useful. They contain dates and amounts and evidence. What they don’t contain is the weight of the thing.
I looked at the grant award letters. First year: fifteen hundred dollars from a state need-based grant. Second year: eighteen hundred from the same source, plus four hundred from a smaller fund Ms. Delgado had found. Third year: two thousand even. The amounts were consistent and real and Ms. Delgado had worked for them.
The total, across all six years, was ninety-two hundred dollars. I’d been rounding to nine thousand, which understates it by two hundred. I’m not rounding down because I want to look better. I’m rounding to nine thousand because that’s what I’ve said.
Nine thousand, two hundred dollars, not a scholarship, distributed across six years.
The loan documents were more detailed and less pleasant to read. I borrowed from two sources: the federal program, which has interest rates I understood going in, and a private loan in my second year when I needed a bridge amount and the federal limit for the year didn’t cover it. The private loan had a higher rate. I paid that one off first.