Desperate for Approval novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Reversed

The allowance is pulled back overnight and Britta has fourteen dollars; her roommate lends her sixty, the library hires her on the spot, and when she tells her father she won't withdraw the aid form he announces he is driving out Saturday to inspect her room.

At six in the morning my banking app showed fourteen dollars and twelve cents.

The eight hundred was gone.

There was no message and no reason, only a line that said Transfer reversed by sender.

I sat on the edge of my bed with the phone in both hands.

Across the room my roommate rolled over and squinted at me.

"Did you sleep at all?"

"A little."

"What happened to your face?"

"My dad took my allowance back."

She sat up and pushed her hair off her forehead.

"For what? Did you do something?"

"I applied for financial aid."

She looked at me for a moment.

Then she reached under her bed, pulled out a coffee can and counted bills onto her blanket.

"Sixty," she said. "It's tip money from the diner. Pay me back when you can."

"I can't take that."

"You can, and you will. I'm not eating off the meal plan alone."

I took it.

My hands were not steady, and I did not know if it was relief or shame.

At nine I stood in the financial aid office with my backpack on both shoulders.

The woman behind the desk found my file and read through it.

"You're listed as a dependent student," she said. "Your father's information is required before we can finish the package."

"He knows about the form. He emailed you."

"He did. He asked us to cancel it."

My stomach dropped.

"Can he?"

"Not on his own. A student can ask for a review when a parent won't cooperate." She slid a form across the counter. "You'd need to say in your own words why. It takes a few weeks."

"A few weeks."

"Is there anything you can do for money in the meantime?"

I thought of the sixty dollars in my pocket.

"I can work," I said.

The library was across the quad.

There was a sign taped to the circulation desk: Night Shelvers Wanted, Tuesday to Saturday.

The librarian was a tall man with a lanyard of keys, and he looked me over while he scanned a stack of returns.

"Can you read a call number?"

"Yes."

"Can you do it from eight until midnight without your phone in your hand?"

"Yes."

"Fourteen an hour. Start tonight."

I had not even filled in the form.

"That's it?"

"That's it," he said. "Half my shelvers quit the first week. Don't be one of them."

I said I wouldn't, and I meant it more than I'd meant anything in months.

Outside, on the library steps, I took out my phone.

Dad had sent four messages overnight.

[You are being childish.]

[Withdraw the form.]

[Rewrite the breakdown by tonight and the whole eight hundred will come back.]

[Reply.]

I read them standing in the cold with students going past me.

Then I typed.

[I'm not withdrawing the form. I got a job at the library. I won't send you another spreadsheet.]

My thumb hovered above the screen.

I added: [Thank you for the money you did send.]

I deleted that last line, because it sounded like begging.

I sent the first part.

The phone rang before I had put it back in my pocket.

I answered it on the steps, because I knew if I waited I would lose my nerve.

"Do you think a job at a library pays for anything?" Dad said.

He didn't say hello.

"It pays fourteen dollars an hour."

"And you think that is enough to live on? You'll be calling me by Christmas."

"I don't think I will."

"Britta Holm. You're making a fool of yourself in front of people who don't matter."

A girl on the steps beside me looked up from her phone and quickly looked away.

I lowered my voice.

"Dad, I have to go. I have class."

"You can be as proud as you like," he said. "But you're my daughter, and I'm going to see for myself how you're living."

"There's nothing to see."

"Saturday," he said. "I'm driving out there. Marla's coming. Have the room ready."

He hung up.

I stood there with the phone against my ear and the line dead.

Then I walked into class, and for ninety minutes I wrote down everything the professor said and did not hear a word of it.

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