Sam
Eight thousand dollars a month.
It’s remarkable to witness how abruptly money can change a life.
Sam tells her mother that she has lucked out big-time and landed a job at the local law school, assisting the professors by running errands and managing their paperwork. “The hours are good,” she tells her mother, “and I can still get my homework done.” She’s careful not to reveal to her mother exactly how much she’s getting paid, so she buys money orders with half of her weekly earnings and hands them to her mother, pretending the job pays $4,000 a month. It’s still a tidal wave of fortune, and her mother can hardly believe it. Sam opens a bank account with Grand Central’s help and deposits the other $4,000, then watches in amazement as it accumulates.
People love to talk about the wickedness of money even as they covet it, because the truth is that it can save you too, can set you free. The first change is that her mother stops scrubbing their neighbor’s toilets. She can stick to a single job for a grocery store, managing the stock in the back, and has weekends off. Secondly, the bills stamped with red words cease to appear in their mailbox, and one day, Sam sees a letter from their new health insurance provider. Health insurance! Her mother still cooks every night, storing away food in the freezer as if perpetually preparing for an apocalypse. Except, one night, she decides to take Sam out to a restaurant. This is the third change. Sam has only ever observed the inside of a restaurant as the daughter of a waitress, taking home leftovers at the end of the day. She hasn’t even eaten at a McDonald’s before. But to go to a real restaurant as a customer, to be served food by someone who isn’t her mother—god, it makes her head swim. They choose a diner with a vintage soda fountain and servers dressed in red-and-white stripes, and they order burgers dripping with melted cheese, fries sprinkled generously with salt, a plate of mozzarella sticks, slices of apple and key lime pie, and vanilla and Oreomilkshakes so thick that they have to use spoons. Her mother laughs, tells her funny anecdotes from the grocery store. It is the happiest day of Sam’s life. They eat until they feel slightly sick, then pack up their leftovers and head out, sharing a pair of earbuds on the bus ride home.
The changes go on and on. By the start of the new year, they’ve moved out of the apartment and into a newer complex, with a communal pool and even a little gym. Sam gets her own bedroom. Her mother buys a car, and suddenly she is free to go about the city as she pleases.
And even then, it’s not everything. With her own growing bank account, Sam starts to buy herself little luxuries. A new sweater, not on sale, full sticker price. A haircut from a real salon. A hardcover book from a bookstore. She stores some of these things at the estate, out of her mother’s sight, to minimize any questions that might arise. Grand Central gives her an apartment of her own at the Red City, a beautiful little one-bedroom in the Observatory’s student wing, with arched Spanish windows that look out across the canopy of trees in the courtyard. Some nights, when Sam tells her mother that she’s going to a friend’s sleepover or a study session, she’ll stay at the estate and lounge by the window in the darkness, savoring the night breeze against her skin.
“Have you always had this shirt?” Ari asks her one day at school. He’s the only person who notices her changing appearance, her dark blue blouse crisp and sharp under a creamy sweater vest.
“Got it a little while ago,” she replies.
He looks curious, like he senses that something big has happened in her life. But he seems to decide against pressing her about it, because he just smiles and says, “It’s nice.”
She beams, pleased by his attention.
The burden in her mother’s voice eases. But replacing it, mixed in with the relief on her face and the lifting of the weight of financial insecurity, is something else. A question that she never openly asks.
At first, it’s nothing. Sam is so busy adjusting to the changes in their lives that she doesn’t even notice at first. But months pass, and the questions are a thin but steady stream. A casual inquiry about Sam’s hours. Whether or not she’s sleeping well. Is she working on college applications. When did she cut her hair and where did she go last night.
One evening, as Sam helps her mother chop scallions and garlic in the kitchen, her mother says, “You’ve been studying a lot lately.”
Sam nods idly and dumps a handful of scallions into a mixing bowl. “Finals coming up,” she replies.
Her mother casts her a sidelong look. “Are you struggling with any of them?”
She shakes her head.
“Do you know what your top colleges are?”
“Yes,” Sam says. She doesn’t mean for there to be an edge in her words, but the edge is there, all the same, because look at this incredible new life they have thanks to her hard-earned money, and isn’t it enough? Why can’t they just leave it at that?
Her mother is silent for a beat as she throws garlic into a heated saucepan. The sizzle is the only sound in the kitchen. Sam feels a hollow widening in her chest, the absence of her mother’s approval.
“You can go anywhere, you know,” she says as she stirs.
“I know.” Sam says it with half-hearted obedience.
“Your applications must be due soon.”
“They are.”
Her mother turns quiet again, giving up on her daughter’s single-phrase answers. When they sit down for dinner, Sam wolfs her food down so quickly that, ten minutes later, she has left the table to go study in her room. Some time afterward, she hears her mother get up from the table and go back to the kitchen to continue cooking.
At the Observatory, she quickly learns that she’s on her own.
There are other students, of course. She learns some of their names—Esmedean, Nicolas, Philip—and makes a point to ask them how they’re doing, pays attention to their answers, follows up on details they’d previously mentioned. Every morning, she stands before the bathroom mirror and practices her small talk, frets over how to word things. But every afternoon, when Sam arrives at the Observatory and takes her seat, she can feel everyone’s attention averting from her, as if she is so uninteresting that she isn’t even worth bullying. They don’t ask her questions, don’t invite her into conversations, don’t remember what she tells them about herself. Only Nicolas casts her occasional glances, sometimes a sneer of envy when she aces her exams. But even that fades. By the end of the week, no one notices her at all, and any hope she has for making new friends fades away as surelyas a ghost in morning light. The students scatter when classes finish, leaving Sam in the breezy stillness of the courtyard, where she sits alone under the oaks with her hands tucked under her new skirts, still unused to her fancy new uniforms, studying her textbooks on her own.
And there are so many books. A dozen, just in the first week. She gapes in awe at the Observatory’s massive library, the Bibliotheca Aeternus—the Eternal Library—a building the size of a small cathedral, its walls lined with shelves of books and towering gold ladders, curving staircases and leather couches. There are tomes dating back to the twelfth century, copies of scrolls from alchemy’s earliest days in Greece, journal entries detailing the persecution of alchemists during the Dark Ages, beautiful frames of diagrams showcasing formulas and circles. The heady scent of aged paper fills the space.
She checks out as many books as she can carry and pores over them obsessively. In some ways, she’s never been happier in her life than now. She can’t get enough. For the first time in a long time, her academic hunger awakens, the challenge of unfamiliar knowledge stirring her mind to life. The more she learns, the less she feels like she knows. Every discovery opens a new section of the board, like a lantern on a dark path that illuminates five new paths. Each oftheirlanterns illuminates five new paths. On and on and on.
She yearns to tell Ari all the new things she’s learned, and once, after class, she finds him and almost lets the words free.
