The Urban Daily

Chapter 25

Tristan and his nieces in the multimedia.

Chasity

Walking into the library, I sat at a table with a computer and pulled out my binder to start my Economics and Personal Finances project. My teacher had assigned us each of us a mock living assessment to have completed by the end of the month. Also given a certain occupation and a certain amount of money, we had to create a budget and manage our money for a month.

For my specific living scenario, I was newly divorced, a mother of four kids living in a house, which was honestly the complete opposite of how I wanted to be in the future. Marriage was something I was on the fence about, but having kids was definitely out of the picture.

"Hey." A male voice said as they pulled up a chair beside me. Looking away from my assignment, I saw it was Tristan.

"Hey." I replied back, smiling. "What are you doing in here? I never seen you in here."

He chuckled. "I'm not much of a reader, you're right, but I was walking past and seen you in here. Working on that finance project, huh?" He noticed, leaning over a bit to look at my paper.

"Yeah, unfortunately." I replied. Almost everybody in our grade or that has taken this class, has had to do this project. It was worth almost 25% of my final grade and if it wasn't for that, I would've had invested so much time in it.

"Unfortunately? This project was entertaining to me, at least. You sound like it's dragging you to the end of the earth or something." He laughed.

"It kinda is." I giggled. My paper was nearly blank, except for my name, amount of money given and pretend occupation which were all written at the top of the paper. I had been sitting in this library for almost 30 minutes and I had gotten absolutely nothing done.

"Chasity, this is easy. Just look up some names for your four kids, make a quick rough draft of your budget plan and plan your monthly expenses and bills accordingly." He explained, shrugging. He made it all sound so easy.

"If you were to have children in the future, what would you name them? Boy and girl names." He asked, taking my binder. Ripping out a piece of paper, he began writing some things down.

"That's the thing, I don't want any children. I've seen this childbirth video in health class the other day and I just couldn't deal. It looks hella painful and I don't think I could ever handle it. I'm good on all of that."

"Really?" Tristan sounded surprised. "You're the first girl I've met who said they didn't want kids."

"Shhh!" The librarian, Ms. Cobb, hissed from the front desk. Rolling my eyes, I turned back to Tristan.

"It's not only that, but just the thought of taking care of a human being for 18 years is tiring itself." I whispered to him, shrugging. "Not to mention they're expensive as fuck."

With the numerous amounts of girls that lived around my way and with over half of them being pregnant or already had children, I just knew for sure that being a mother just wasn't in my future plans. I witnessed all of the deadbeat daddy problems some of the girls were going through and the amount of stress that they were dealing with; I just didn't want that for myself.