Sophie asked why I kept leaving early. I explained the bus situation. She said that was annoying. I said it really was. She offered to text me a photo of the last part of her notes after each class.
That was how we became friends.
Sophie was working too — a different job, a coffee shop closer to campus, morning shifts before class. We compared schedules the way soldiers compare rations: with a certain grim humor and a shared understanding that this was what we had and we were making it work.
My second year, I had to drop a class mid-semester. This is the thing I’ve told the fewest people about.
I’d been managing fine — not comfortably, but fine — until my car, a 2001 Civic I’d bought with three months of summer savings for four thousand dollars, needed a transmission repair that cost nineteen hundred dollars. Nineteen hundred dollars was almost exactly what I had. I paid it, because not having a car in that particular suburb meant losing the job, and losing the job meant losing the funding that made school possible.
But the repair wiped out my buffer. And that semester I was taking a full course load — fifteen credits — and the billing office offered extra hours because someone quit in October and my supervisor asked if I could cover. I said yes because I needed the money and because I didn’t know how to say no to income when I had no financial cushion.
By November I was sleeping five hours a night on a good night and I was failing Introduction to Statistics.