“I know the rules. And you’re breaking them. The fact that you’ve already received funds means you’re inmoretrouble, not less. You could be charged with fraud.”
“Fraud?” he hissed. He didn’t know why he was bothering to keep his voice down when the woman behind the counter was speaking at full volume, but he supposed he was still hoping for some measure of privacy. “Okay, I need to see your supervisor! This is crazy.”
He was sent to sit in the chairs along the wall and wait for a supervisor to be available, and he checked his watch worriedly. He’d thought this was going to be a quick visit to sign some paperwork, and instead it was dragging out into a nightmare. He had multivariate calculus in fifteen minutes, and after that his chemical engineering seminar. He didn’t want to miss either class. The thought actually made him a little nauseous, but he couldn’t see a way around it. The word “fraud” was echoing around in his brain. He needed to get this all straightened out.
So he sat in the plastic chairs for a couple hours until a frazzled-looking woman finally called him back into one of the small privateoffices behind the windows. The supervisor was more pleasant than the woman at the counter, but not much more use.
“You could think about the abuse exemption,” she said seriously. “Is there any documentation of abuse? Police reports, letters from social workers or guidance counselors?”
“No. My parents aren’t abusive. They’re just not supportive.”
“This isn’t a problem for most of your funding,” the woman said, clicking her mouse as she scanned the computer screen in front of her. “Your two big scholarships are based on academic achievement—congratulations, by the way—and the faculty scholarship you earned after first year is fine too. The grant is just enough to fill in a few gaps. Forty-two hundred for the year, right?”
“Yeah,” Cade said. That was what he needed to remember. This wasn’t a tragedy, it was a setback. “Could I switch that into a loan instead?”
She shook her head. “That’d still be federal.” She sighed. “And your work-study position is dependent on the federal application, as well. So we won’t be able to approve that without getting the application resubmitted. This isn’t your fault, Cade. I approved your application with the exemption, as I have for other students. But I guess the feds think I’ve been approving too many of them, so they’re reviewing a lot of them from this school. And in your case, I’m afraid we don’t have the evidence we need. If you’d like, I could try calling your parents. Maybe I could help convince them to sign the forms.”
Cade snorted. His parents rarely had a working phone, and when they did, they didn’t generally answer calls. Unless this overworked, overgenerous bureaucrat took a trip to suburban Chicago, she wasn’t going to be talking to his parents. “No. That wouldn’t help.”
“Don’t suppose you’re thinking about getting married? Or joining the military?” She saw his expression and nodded. “Yeah. Okay. Well, that’s where we are, Cade. If you can get your parents to fill out the form, I think we can get you the forty-two hundred. You’ve already received twenty-one hundred of that. If they won’t sign, you’ll need to repay the twenty-one hundred you’ve already received, and you won’t get that amount next term either. I can’t see any way around it.”
He nodded. At least this woman wasn’t talking about fraud. “Okay,” he said. “I’m going to lose my job,andI’m going to have to pay back twenty-one hundred dollars.” He waited in case she had some more bad news to share, but she just nodded sympathetically. “How long? To repay it, to keep working, to get the form resubmitted… what kind of timelines?”
“A week?” she suggested. “Not for the repayment. If it turns out you need to repay that, we can drag things out a bit longer on that. But in terms of keeping the job? I can lose the paperwork for a little while. Yeah, probably a week. After that, I’ll need to let the campus employment people know that you’re out.”
A week. It was Thursday. He had a weekend. He could get to Chicago, find his parents, and…. He frowned. It had been a long time since he’d seen them. When he’d left home more than a year earlier, he’d still been unsure of what he was doing. He’d been runningaway, not runningto. But he’d made a life for himself at Purdue, found somewhere that he belonged, and he wasn’t going to give that up simply because his parents thought he’d be better off working at a gas station. He had a weekend. He’d go to Chicago, find his parents, and they would damn well sign the form. He had no idea how to make that happen, but he’d have to figure something out. The alternative was unthinkable.
“Okay. Can you print me out another copy of the forms? I’ll get them signed this weekend.” He tried to look confident, and maybe it worked because she printed the forms out and handed them to him, then wished him good luck and saw him to the door.
There was no time to get to his last class and he was too worked up to study, so he headed for home. He’d go for a run, clean up, and go to the library to download the lecture notes and try to get caught up. Everything would be fine.
He stuck to his routine that night and the next day until after classes, trying to forget about the obstacles and focus on the opportunities. But it wasn’t easy, not when he could still hear that crazy woman at the counter calling him a fraud. He wasn’t! He deserved to be there! He just had to figure out a way to pay for it all.
His original plan had been to sleep at home and head up to Chicago early Saturday, but he changed his mind as soon as he stepped inside his apartment on Friday afternoon. He’d waited long enough and now heneeded to get things sorted out. So he crammed a change of clothes into his knapsack, grabbed his toothbrush, and headed out.
Hitchhiking was discouraged too close to campus so he walked a few blocks toward the highway before he stuck his thumb out. He could have taken the bus, but he’d always used to get around by hitching, and he figured it might be a good idea to get himself back into that mindset. Hitchhiking was inconvenient and dangerous, but it was free, and that was important. His parents had never reacted well to people who acted like something they weren’t; Cade was a hitcher, not a bus rider, and he knew it as well as his parents did.
That was one good thing he’d learned from his parents—the appreciation of honesty and simplicity. The Martins were not a family that put on airs.
He was kind of enjoying the familiarity of hitching as the cars zipped past him. It was as if he was time traveling, shedding the thin veneer of education and civilization he’d picked up over the past year. He was going back to being old Cade, the headlights shining through the dusk like stars as he zipped through whatever time portal he’d discovered. He thought about the classic paradox of time travel and wondered whether he’d want to change anything in the past, if he could. He’d made his decisions, and he’d live with the consequences. But had there been another way?
The question got a little more immediate when the car pulled over in front of him. A classic Mustang, engine rumbling like a lion about to roar. Cade had been expecting to get a ride from some student in a beat-up Toyota, or maybe a soccer dad in a minivan. The Mustang was too much, and Cade knew exactly what it would feel like to rest his hand on the door handle, to climb inside and feel the driver’s appraising stare….
Then the driver’s door ofthisMustang opened and a familiar face appeared. “Cade?” Aiden grinned. “Hey, bro, you need a ride? Where you headed?”
Cade stared at him. “Chicago,” he said, too disoriented to decide whether he should lie.
“Cool, me too! Come on.”
Cade did as he was told. It would have been too strange not to. He jogged up to the side of the car and relaxed when he saw Aiden’sfriendly face. This was a ride. Nothing more. Cade hadn’tactuallytraveled back in time.
“There’s room behind the seat for your stuff,” Aiden said, and then he squinted at Cade’s pack. “Damn, you travel light. Lots of room!”
Cade obediently slid his backpack in, then sank into the leather seat and found his seat belt. “Nice car,” he said.
“Yeah. It was supposed to be my dad’s midlife crisis car. But my mom gave him about five minutes of that and then told him his crisis was over. So, excellent! New car for me!”
“So what’s your dad driving now?”
