summer work
1551 Words
The Loans We Take for Love
Chapter 9: The Summer I Worked Myself to the Bone and Learned That Hunger Is Not Just for Food
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Summer arrived like a mercy and a curse.
The campus emptied slowly, students trickling home to parents who would feed them, laundry them, hold them. Naomi watched them go from the window of the campus café, her hands deep in soapy water, scrubbing the same espresso machine she had scrubbed a hundred times before. She had nowhere to go. Her mother's door was locked. Her father's couch was three states away, and he had already told her he couldn't take her—not because he didn't want to, but because his new girlfriend had made it clear that visitors were not welcome.
Liana had offered her couch. "It's small," she had said. "And the neighborhood isn't great. But you'd have a roof."
Naomi had thanked her and declined. Liana was barely surviving herself. She didn't need a little sister sleeping on her floor, eating her food, adding to her bills.
So Naomi stayed.
She took summer classes—calculus II and physics II, the two courses that had nearly broken her in the spring. She told herself she was getting ahead. The truth was that summer classes gave her something to do. Something to focus on. Something that wasn't the silence of her empty dorm, the weight of her loans, the memory of her mother's voice.
She worked double shifts at the café. She worked weekends at the bakery. She tutored a high school student in algebra for twenty dollars an hour, cash, under the table. She took every shift anyone offered. She said yes to everything.
Her body began to show the strain.
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The hunger was constant.
Not the hunger of skipping lunch—she had mastered that. This was deeper. A bone-deep exhaustion that coffee could not cure, that naps could not fix. She woke tired. She went to bed tired. She moved through her days like a ghost haunting her own life.
She had stopped tracking her meals. There was nothing to track. A bagel in the morning, if the café had leftovers. A sandwich at night, if Eli—who had gone home for the summer but still texted her every day—sent her money for groceries. She had stopped being embarrassed about accepting his help. Embarrassment was a luxury she could not afford.
Her clothes hung looser. Her collarbones stood out like promises. She looked in the mirror one morning and did not recognize the girl staring back. She was thinner, harder, older. Her eyes had shadows beneath them that no amount of sleep could erase.
You're surviving, she told herself. Surviving doesn't require looking pretty.
She pulled on her uniform and went to work.
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The loans grew.
She sat in her dorm room on a humid July night, the window open, the sound of crickets filling the silence. Her spiral notebook was spread across her desk. She had added another loan—three thousand dollars, interest at nine percent—to cover summer tuition. She had added her summer earnings, which were less than she had hoped.
The math was still brutal. She would finish the summer with less money than she had started. She would start her sophomore year deeper in debt.
She closed the notebook and put it back under her mattress.
Then she opened her laptop and applied for another loan.
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Eli texted her every day.
"Did you eat?"
"Yes."
"What did you eat?"
"Food."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only answer I have."
He called her on Sundays. His voice was familiar, warm, a reminder that there was a world outside the café and the bakery and the library. He told her about his summer job—landscaping, which meant he was tan and sore and tired. He told her about his mother, who kept asking if he was dating anyone. He told her about the novel he was reading, the one she had recommended, the one he was pretending to like.
"You're not fooling anyone," she said. "You hate it."
"It's not that I hate it. It's that the protagonist is insufferable."
"Then stop reading it."
"I can't. You said it was your favorite."
Naomi smiled. It was the first real smile she had smiled in weeks. "You're ridiculous, Eli."
"I know. But you're smiling. I can hear it."
She didn't deny it.
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Caleb texted too.
"I miss you."
"I'm sorry for pushing. I just want to be near you."
"Can I come visit this summer? I can take the bus."
Naomi read each message and felt nothing. Not anger. Not longing. Not the flutter of possibility she had felt in high school. Just a quiet, steady certainty that Caleb was not the answer to any question she was asking.
She replied: "I'm busy this summer. Maybe in the fall."
She wasn't busy. She was exhausted. But she didn't want to see him. She didn't want to explain. She didn't want to pretend that his remorse could undo the past.
The past was done. The past was a door she had closed.
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Damon moved on.
She heard about it through a mutual friend—a senior who had stayed for summer research. "Damon got engaged," the friend said, scrolling through her phone. "To that girl from the biology department. They're planning a wedding for next spring."
Naomi nodded. "Good for him."
"You okay? I know he used to like you."
"That was a long time ago. I'm fine."
She was fine. She had rejected Damon. She had chosen Darian. Those choices had been mistakes. But mistakes were lessons, and lessons were survival, and survival was the only thing that mattered.
Damon would have a family. He would have children. He would have the life he had once offered her.
She felt a small, quiet pang—not regret, exactly. Just the awareness of a path not taken. A door she had closed with her own hand.
She closed her phone and went back to work.
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The bakery became her sanctuary.
Gloria, the owner, was a woman in her sixties with flour-dusted hands and a laugh that sounded like gravel. She had noticed Naomi's weight loss. She had noticed the shadows under her eyes. She had not said anything—not directly—but she had started leaving food out for Naomi. A muffin here. A piece of quiche there. "Leftovers," she called them. "Can't sell them tomorrow. You'd be doing me a favor."
Naomi knew they weren't leftovers. She ate them anyway.
"You're too skinny," Gloria said one morning, watching Naomi knead dough. "You need to eat more."
"I eat."
"You eat like a bird. Birds don't survive winter. You want to survive winter, you need to eat like a bear."
Naomi almost laughed. "I'll try."
"Trying isn't doing. Here." Gloria pushed a plate of cinnamon rolls toward her. "Eat. That's an order."
Naomi ate. The cinnamon rolls were warm, soft, sweet. She hadn't tasted anything sweet in weeks. She ate three of them, then drank a glass of milk, then sat back and felt something she had almost forgotten.
Full.
"Thank you," she said.
Gloria waved a floury hand. "Don't thank me. Just don't collapse in my kitchen. The paperwork would kill me."
Naomi smiled. A real smile. The second one in one day.
She was learning, slowly, that survival did not have to be solitary. That there were people—Eli, Liana, Gloria—who would feed her if she let them. That accepting help was not weakness.
She was learning.
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August arrived, hot and heavy.
Naomi had survived the summer. She had passed both summer classes—A in calculus, B-plus in physics. She had saved almost nothing. She had lost twelve pounds. She had added another loan to her notebook.
But she had also learned something. Something she could not write down, could not calculate, could not track in a spiral notebook.
She had learned that she could be alone without being lonely.
She sat on the steps of the engineering building, the sun setting behind her, the first students of the fall semester beginning to trickle back to campus. In a week, the halls would be crowded. In a week, she would see Darian again. In a week, she would have to face the whispers, the glances, the weight of his name.
But tonight, the campus was quiet. The air was warm. And she was still standing.
Her phone buzzed. A text from Eli: "Coming back tomorrow. Save me a seat in the front row."
She typed back: "Front row is reserved for weirdos only. You qualify."
"Good. Bring coffee."
"You bring coffee."
"Fine. I'll bring coffee. You bring yourself."
Naomi looked at the screen. The words blurred slightly—not from tears, but from something else. Something that felt like hope.
She was still here. She was still breathing. She was still studying, still working, still surviving.
And in a week, she would start her sophomore year.
The loans were still there. The shame was still there. The mother's door was still locked.
But Naomi Cruz was still standing.
And that was enough.
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End of Chapter 9
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- Writer
