Keeping Score

1: The Bad News Blues

@hackerman: I will pay someone--ANYONE--to kill me before graduation. pls and thank you.

@hackerman: this is a first come first serve offer ppl. dont waste ur chance

@dylpickle: @hackerman i'll do it for free tbh

@hackerman: @dylpickle: BLOCKED

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Kinda crazy how much I wanna die right now, Tally Ackerman thought as she flopped face-first onto her bed. Not even her long distance best friend, Dylan Hayworth, could cheer her up. To think, she had been so distraught when Dylan had moved a whole state away last year, leaving Tally all alone at St. Agatha's School for Girls, their small Catholic school. She had cried for a whole three days straight, before managing to shine some levity on the situation: bible thumping rich girl Dylan was gonna have to go to public school. Public. School. 

Tally had never laughed so hard in her life.

But, now all she could do was scream into her pillow, all thoughts of past joy completely foreign to her preoccupied mind. 

It had been a mere twenty minutes since her parents had sat her down and told her that her life was basically over. That her future, the future that she had worked so hard for, was now uncertain. That she should basically give up, fake her own death, and move to Turkmenistan. Or somewhere equally obscure, like Wyoming.

They had told her that she had no money to go to her dream school.

Emphasis on "dream school". She had enough money and scholarship offers to go to other, less expensive colleges. But, there was something about settling for less (even though most of the other schools on her list were still pretty damn good) that set something in Tally on fire. She had wanted to go to Westmount University in upstate New York since she was in the womb, she was sure of it. Her first word had been "Westmount", although if you asked her parents they would say that she had actually uttered a gibberish version of "where's ma?", but that was neither here nor there. Westmount called to her like a harried mother searching for her lost child in a Walmart. Her favorite author had gone to Westmount, world-renowned journalists were on the list of alumnae, and they had the best writing program in the country. It had Tally's name written all over it in pretentious, nearly illegible cursive. 

So, when her parents informed her that they had been dipping into her college fund for the past four years to pay for her private school tuition, she was more than a little upset. The reveal had sent the seventeen year old into a cold sweat.

Such a reveal had been so devastatingly unfortunate that it could only be properly described through the words of the Bard himself. 

THE MOST FOUL AND MOST LAMENTABLE TRAGEDY OF TALIA ACKERSON by Shakespeare, probably:

ACT I: We Done Goofed

Enter HAROLD, father, husband, Jeopardy fan, contractor extraordinaire, into the KITCHEN where his beauteous wife ABBEY, brilliant dentist who was on Jeopardy back in the 80s, sits.

HAROLD: Gracious woman, hast thou bid thine eyes t'wards the tuition for youthful Talia's higher education?

ABBEY: What of it, mine husband? We hath forewarned dearest Talia to chooseth wisely based not only on merit, but on price.

HAROLD: It seems to be that she did not heed our warning. It is over 60,000 shillings!

ABBEY: What the fuck?