Aid only goes up when your family has less money than they said they did.
I called Mr. Hale from my car at lunch, in the student lot, in Grandma Ida's old silver Buick LaCrosse, which had come to me when she died and still smelled faintly of her Jergens lotion and the peppermints she kept in the cupholder. He picked up on the third ring. He had a voice like a late-night radio host, slow and kind and a little tired.
"Josephine Calder," he said. "I've got your file open. What can I do for you?"
"I got the revised award," I said. "I don't understand why it changed."
There was a pause. I could hear him clicking. "Your parents submitted a correction on Friday," he said. "It looks like a qualified education account that was reported on the original Profile, a 529 plan, the balance has been updated to zero. When a parent-owned asset goes down, the expected contribution goes down slightly, and the grant goes up to cover part of that. Not dollar for dollar. It's a formula."
"Zero," I said.
"That's what's reported. Is that not accurate?"
The windows of the Buick were fogging. It was eighty degrees out and I had the engine off and I was breathing like I'd run there.
"I don't know," I said. "It was ninety-one thousand dollars."
Mr. Hale didn't say anything for a moment. I would learn later that Desmond Hale had worked in financial aid for twenty-six years, at three universities, and that he had heard every version of every family story there was, and that what he did when he heard a new one was let the silence be long enough that you could hear yourself in it.
"Josephine," he said finally, "I'm going to tell you two things, and I want you to hear both of them. The first is that I can only see what your family reports. I can't see the account. I don't know where that money went, and it's possible there's an explanation that I'm not privy to. The second is that a correction like this, in April, after an admission, is not something I see very often. And when I do see it, it is usually not good news for the student." He paused. "Is everything all right at home?"
"Everything's fine," I said, which is what you say.
"If it stops being fine," he said, "you call me. This number. I mean that."