"The first one was certified," she said. "You have to sign for certified." She looked at my mother. "Rosetta brought it. She knocked on the door at like one o'clock. She said, 'Got one for the Doctor.' She was smiling. She thought it was something good."
My mother closed her eyes. Rosetta had Route 31. Our street. She's been our carrier for six years. She and my mother sit together at the union Christmas party.
"And I signed for it," Krista said, "and I opened it on the porch and I read it, and then I folded it up and I put it in my back pocket, and Rosetta was still standing there, and she said, 'Everything okay?' And I said, 'Oh, it's just about my scholarship renewal, it's a formality.' And she said, 'Well, tell your mom I said hi.'"
So it began like that. It began with a lie on the porch to a mailwoman. And then a lie to my mother, that night, about why she was quiet. And then a summer of lies, because she'd always worked at the Waldameer snack bar in summers anyway, and nobody asks a person about college in July. And then August came, and the first day of the fall semester, and she got up at six-thirty and showered and put on her Northlake sweatshirt and made her thermos of coffee and took the Number 1 bus to campus, because she didn't know what else to do. She said that a lot, that night. I didn't know what else to do.
"I sit in on Gen Chem," she said. "The same class. Same room. It's a different professor, but it's the same room, three hundred people, nobody takes attendance. I sit in the back row. I take notes. I do the homework. I've done every problem set this semester. I'm getting them all right, I check them against the answers at the back. And then on exam days I go to the library instead, the fourth floor, there's a carrel by the window that looks out at the lake, and I sit there for the length of the exam, and I do the exam in my head." She swallowed. "I think I'd be getting an A."
"Oh, honey," my mother said, from the floor. It came out of her like air out of a tire. It was the first soft thing she'd said.
"Don't," Krista said. "Please don't. I can't—if you're nice to me I can't."
And she told the rest. The balance, the $1,846, which was the money the scholarship had already paid for the spring before they took it back, and which the university wanted from her, and which she had been paying fifty dollars a month to out of what was left from her snack bar money, by money order, which she bought at the post office on Peach Street from a clerk who knew my mother and asked how she was. The letters she tore up and buried under the Cheerios boxes in the recycling, because she couldn't stand to keep them in the house and couldn't stand to throw them in an outside trash can where they might blow away and land on somebody's lawn with her name on them. The appeal letter, in September, which she read standing in the garage, about the October fifteenth deadline. The personal statement it asked for. Supporting documentation. Which she had tried to write, she said, twenty or thirty times. She had a folder on her laptop with twenty-six drafts in it. They all started the same way and none of them got past the second paragraph.
"And then I came downstairs," she said, "on a Saturday, and there it was."