so, do we like each other or not? // JENLISA

Chapter 6

Lisa arrived home to find a fresh pile of letters waiting for her. Her bank had suddenly switched from brown envelopes to white ones, like they thought the muted colour scheme was the reason why she wasn’t responding to their irate messages, and the sight of them sent terror shooting through her like spiders crawling up her limbs. She scooped the papers up and ran upstairs, not stopping to say hi to Mary because she wasn’t sure she would be able to open her mouth without a strangled scream coming out.

Slamming her bedroom door shut behind her, she fell to her knees and tugged the box of bills out from under her bed. Before she could talk herself out of it, she grabbed the top envelope and tore it open.

$12,865 was the first number she saw. She didn’t even register what it was for. Just below that was a helpful addition: please note, a $20-a-day late payment fee is in place.

Her stomach churned as she opened another one. All she saw was the double-digit interest rate she was being charged on that particular card before she groaned and pushed the papers away from her.

After a few minutes of heavy breathing, Lisa found herself lying down on the wood floor, her intestines knotting around themselves. She could taste bile rising up in her throat.

She was fucked. She’d always known that. She’d been fucked ever since her parents abandoned her outside a diner in north Florida and she’d landed in the foster system like she was being tossed down a waterslide.

She’d been 16 when she’d gotten tired of it all and decided to hop the fence at her last foster home, burning along on rage and resentment and not much else. She’d been 19 when she’d stolen a bunch of watches from a street vendor and, when she’d been caught, had also been carrying a sizeable amount of pot.

She’d been bad with money from day one, starting on nothing and finishing up with much less, but it was the 13 months she spent in prison that broke her. The fines and the court fees and the bail charges were the very first step on a painfully slippery slope. Without realising it, drinking and smoking became the only things that helped her feel like she could regain her footing again – or they did, until she woke up the next morning with a hangover and a stranger in her bed and another $100 missing from her wallet.

When Lisa had been released from prison, she’d been determined to start again. She was done with getting into fights and stealing and crashing on strangers’ couches – there was debt to her name, sure, but she would fix that. She would take evening classes until she’d finished her high school education, and then she would go to college.

Classes were expensive though, and they drained the rest of her money. College was even more so, once she’d finally managed to get accepted.

Westwood College wasn’t a good school – it wasn’t even close to a good school. But it was also on the other side of the country, which was perfect for a girl wanting a fresh start, and it was the only place willing to take a 21-year-old with a shiny new criminal record. When Lisa had been accepted, she’d been so scared that they would realise their mistake and reject her again that she’d taken out a dubious credit card and an even more dubious loan to pay the tuition fees upfront. She didn’t know anyone who she could ask about it, and so she didn’t know she’d fucked herself over until it was far too late.

And now here she was, swimming in papers and too scared to look through them. The debt built every day, and so did her self-loathing.