Crazy, Sweet

Chapter Six

I glanced at my watch for the fourteenth time in the last twenty minutes and assured myself that I was just being paranoid. There was still a good ten minutes before the meeting with Dr. Han was supposed to start. Neither Seth nor the professor were here yet at the lecture room—just me and the relentless patter of the rain against the window. 

I opened my old, trusty, green leather Filofax and reviewed my schedule. It was right there on my Monday afternoon: meeting with Dr. Han & Seth for outline presentation at two-thirty. It was right under another event—Shawn’s birthday party at two-thirty as well.

I breathed in deeply and shut the organizer close, turning my attention to the windows. 

The small university town of Ballard has two seasons most of the year. It either rained or was very dry and hot. It rarely snowed during winter but the freezing rain is usually enough to keep everyone inside. The other three seasons usually seemed a little insane as it could rain in buckets during summer or could be very hot during the fall. It happens with very little explanation that most people stuck to just two seasons—sunny and rainy. 

Today’s apparently rainy. 

The rich crowd of Ballard, which made up majority of the town’s population, would be filing into the many posh Italian cafes in Hatter Boulevard which is what you call the long stretch of boardwalk along the beach that housed the swanky restaurants, boutiques and other commercial establishments frequented by the yacht-racing, Dior-toting, champagne-sipping elite. When the sun is high and bright, only very few can be spotted at the Boulevard as they’d be all aboard their yachts, sunbathing or partying with friends. When it rained, they got into their tinted SUVs and met up with their crowd in cafés that put Starbucks at the bottom of the list of outrageously priced-coffee.

How does a poor, hand-me-down-satchel-toting girl like me know all this? 

Because that’s what Ballard’s all about. 

Never mind the highly sought-after Cox University or the turquoise waters of Sylvan beach. It was the high life of some of the country’s richest families that put Ballard on the map. I grew up doing odd jobs at some of these highly-exclusive shops and restaurants along the boulevard. It wasn’t hard for me to notice. It was reconciling that life to the slums that lay behind the town’s high-rises and mansions—Dock Garren, where the working class make ends meet every day of their lives through jobs supplied by the rich’s lifestyle—that was difficult to understand. How could two, completely different worlds exist in a small, coastal city boggled me. The separation was clear and defined and no one ever bothered to stand up and challenge its existence. The rich had staked their claim on all things pleasant and abundant and the poor were content to live on scraps. It was a reality that caused me constant inner turmoil and often kept my gap to the rich unbridged.

But I needed to attend their schools. I needed to seize the same opportunities laid out in front of them for their picking. I had no advantage other than my brains and hard work and most of the time they were not enough to keep me ahead of the race. That must explain why every waking hour of my life is dedicated to success—dedicated to prove a point that whatever line there was that separated these two worlds can either be crossed by the poor if they willed themselves to or can be pushed out of the way by the rich if they ever paid attention to something else other than themselves.