This is not a statement of defeat. I want to say that clearly, because the version of this story I’ve told myself has shifted over the years, and in some versions Meadowfield is a tragedy and in others it’s a plot point and in the most recent version it’s just where I went. It had real professors and real coursework and a financial aid office where a woman named Ms. Delgado helped me file for every grant I qualified for with the focused attention of someone who understood that each one mattered.
Ms. Delgado got me three thousand dollars my first year. She told me to come back the following fall and she’d do it again.
I also got a job.
The job was at a medical billing office fifteen minutes from campus by bus. I worked twenty-two hours a week during the school year and thirty-five in the summers. The work was not exciting — I entered patient information, processed claims, answered phones, and spent a lot of time on hold with insurance companies — but it was organized work, and I was good at organized work, and after eight months my supervisor told me I was the most reliable person on her team, which was either a compliment or a comment on the team.
The bus schedule was not designed around my class schedule. I learned this in September and spent most of October solving for it. My Tuesday and Thursday classes ended at 4:15. The last bus to the billing office left at 4:22. The stop was eight minutes from the building on foot. I missed it twice before I started leaving class at 4:10, which meant I missed the last five minutes of lecture twice a week, which meant I borrowed the notes of a woman named Sophie Grant, who sat two seats to my left and had handwriting like a court reporter.