Grandma Bev looked at it and then turned it around and showed it to Maeve.
The last line said: 2,433.40.
Maeve stared at it. She had known the number, more or less. She had done the math every Sunday. But there was something about seeing it printed in the passbook, in a bank's typeface, with a stamp beside it, that made it real in a way it had not been before. Two thousand, four hundred and thirty-three dollars and forty cents. More than the whole program cost. Enough for the deposit and the January balance and thirty-three dollars and forty cents left over, which was, Maeve realized, almost exactly what she'd need for a bus ticket to the lake campus, if nobody drove her.
"Wait," she said. "Today's match. You did today's match already? It was supposed to be Monday."
"I came in Wednesday and put in an advance," her grandmother said. "I had a feeling."
"What kind of feeling?"
Grandma Bev took the passbook back and put it in her purse and snapped the purse shut.
"The kind you get after seventy-one years," she said.
They paid the deposit from the bank's lobby, on a computer Shonda let them use, because Maeve's laptop didn't trust the credit union's website and Grandma Bev didn't trust Maeve's laptop. Maeve typed in her name and her student ID and the routing number off the custodial account. Her hands were shaking so badly she had to type the routing number three times. Grandma Bev, standing behind her, signed the authorization on a little screen with a plastic pen.
The confirmation page loaded. It said: Your place in the Lakeshore Young Researchers Program is confirmed. Below that, smaller: We look forward to welcoming you to campus on June 21.
It was 8:23 in the morning. She had eight hours and thirty-seven minutes to spare.
Maeve sat there looking at the screen. She expected to cry. She had imagined this moment all summer, and in her imagination she always cried. But she didn't. She just felt very quiet inside, the way the kitchen felt in the late afternoon, gray and still, the refrigerator humming.
"Print it," her grandmother said. "Print two. One for your wall and one for your father's refrigerator."
"He won't look at it."
"Then he won't look at it. That's his business. It's your job to put it there."