Three Hundred Dollars and a Camera Crew

The first thing I learned about being poor at eighteen is that hunger has a sound. It is not a growl. It is a quiet, constant hum beneath everything, like a refrigerator running in an empty house. I heard it during lectures. I heard it at night. I heard it when my roommate, Derek, opened a bag of chips and the smell hit me so hard I had to leave the room. My name is Caleb. I am a sophomore at Ardenne University, a small liberal arts school in a coastal town called Marrow Bay that smells like salt and money. Everyone here has a car. Everyone here has a meal plan. Everyone here has parents who call on Sundays and ask if they need anything. My parents call on the fifteenth of every month. That is the day they transfer three hundred dollars into my account. "Three hundred is plenty for a young man," my father says every time. His name is Richard. He manages a regional office for an insurance company. My mother, Diane, stays home and runs the household, which mostly means she runs me. They live forty minutes inland in a town called Redfield, where the houses are beige and the lawns are perfect and nothing bad is ever supposed to happen. I stopped arguing about the money in October. There is no point. The last time I brought it up, my mother said, "You have a spending problem, Caleb. You always have. You need to learn discipline." I have a spending problem. I spend one hundred and ninety dollars on rent for my half of a two-bedroom apartment off campus. That leaves one hundred and ten for everything else. Food. Laundry. Soap. The bus pass is covered by the university. That is the only reason I can leave the apartment at all. I stopped eating lunch in September. I told myself it was a schedule thing. I had a twelve o'clock class and a two o'clock class and there was no time. That worked for about two weeks. Then my hands started shaking in the middle of a history lecture and I had to grip the edge of the desk to keep them still. I started keeping a list in my phone. Not a shopping list. A survival list. Rice. Beans. Eggs. Whatever was on sale. I learned the discount schedule at the grocery store on Fifth Street. I learned that the bakery section marks down bread after eight in the evening. I learned how to stretch a bag of dried lentils across four days. Derek never said anything. That was the worst part. He was a good guy, a finance major from a family that owned a car dealership, and he would leave half a pizza on the counter and say, "I'm not gonna finish this, man, help yourself." He never made me ask. He never made me admit it. He just left food where I could find it, and I ate it, and I hated myself a little more each time. The hunger is not the worst part. The worst part is the fog. It sits behind your eyes and makes everything slow. You can't think. You can't focus. You read the same page four times and still don't know what it says. I almost failed a midterm in October. I walked into the exam room and stared at the first question for ten minutes before I remembered I was supposed to write something. I got a C-minus. My mother asked why. I said I was tired. She said I needed to manage my time better. By November I had lost twelve pounds. I know because I weighed myself at the gym, which I only went to because it was free and warm and sometimes there were free granola bars at the front desk. I looked at the number on the scale and thought: this is not normal. This is not discipline. This is something else. But every time I tried to talk to my parents about it, the conversation turned into a character assessment. My mother would list my flaws. My father would agree with her. They would remind me that they paid for my tuition, which they did, which I was grateful for, which I said out loud every single time because I knew that if I did not say it, they would take it away. Tuition at Ardenne is thirty-two thousand dollars a year. They pay it. They pay it because it makes them look good at church. They pay it because their friends' kids go there. They pay it because it is the one thing they can hold over me forever. But they will not pay for food. Three hundred dollars a month. That is the number. That is the rule. That is the line between being their son and being their problem. On November sixteenth, I opened the refrigerator and found half an onion, a jar of mustard, and a quart of milk that expired three days ago. I had four dollars in my checking account. Payday, which meant the transfer, was twenty-nine days away. I sat on the kitchen floor because I was too tired to stand. Derek was at his girlfriend's place. The apartment was empty and quiet and the hunger hummed in my chest like a second heartbeat. My phone buzzed. A text from my mother. Diane: We've signed you up for something. A television opportunity. It's called The Exchange. They want to feature you. It's a second chance, Caleb. Maybe this will finally help you see how good you have it. I read it three times. Then I read it again. I did not know what The Exchange was. I would find out. Everyone would find out. I typed back one word. Caleb: Okay. Then I put my phone face down on the floor and stared at the ceiling until the room got dark.