Twisted Vows

CHAPTER 8

Leah

The special-circumstances appeal from the financial aid office had been open on my laptop since eleven, judging me.

It was now past two in the morning.

Olivia and Maggie’s apartment was quiet. Olivia was asleep behind her closed door. Maggie’s TV was finally off. Outside, traffic hummed low and steady, like Dallas didn’t care that my life had cracked open three weeks ago and still expected me to fill out financial aid paperwork.

I sat at the narrow kitchen table with a granola bar I had only half eaten and a cold mug of tea I’d forgotten about, staring at the box where I was supposed to explain, in a few clean sentences, that my parents would contribute nothing.

That was funny.

Not funny enough to laugh, but close.

I’d been at Olivia and Maggie’s apartment for three weeks.

I’d slept on the pullout sofa for the first four days. Then Maggie noticed the dark circles under my eyes and quietly moved things around so Olivia and I could share her room. I hadn’t asked. She hadn’t made a speech about it.

That was Maggie.

She moved things around, made soup, put clean sheets on a bed, and acted like it was obvious.

Which was good, because I was running low on everything, including the words thank you.

The appeal wanted proof.

My parents’ income. My account balance. A written explanation of why the people who had signed the original aid forms were no longer giving me anything.

The same financial records I’d been gathering all summer, before my father called the bank and had my access revoked.

One phone call, and the money was gone.

I checked the account three days after I left.

Zero.

That was how I found out I was really on my own.

The scholarships would cover tuition. Barely. There was still the gap for books, housing deposits, food, and the hundred tiny expenses nobody put in the acceptance letter because they assumed you had parents who would handle them.

I’d been telling myself I would figure out the gap later.

Apparently later was two in the morning with an appeal form and half a granola bar.

I attached my parents’ tax records from the files I could still access, along with a screenshot of my emptied account and the few sentences I had managed to write about being removed from my home. They hadn’t thought to lock me out of the family cloud storage yet, which felt like something they would fix once someone remembered I still existed.

I tried not to think about how ridiculous it was that I still needed their numbers to prove they weren’t helping me.

I submitted the appeal at 2:17 a.m.

Then I sat in the dark kitchen for a while, not moving, because moving meant deciding what came next, and I didn’t have another decision left in me.

Olivia had been my best friend since we were fifteen.

She sat next to me in biology and announced, without warning, “You look like you need someone to eat lunch with.”

She wasn’t wrong.

Olivia had been raised by her mom until she was ten. After her mom died, she moved in with Maggie, her maternal grandmother, in a small two-bedroom apartment where every surface seemed to hold something thrifted, repaired, or made beautiful by sheer force of Olivia’s will.

She didn’t talk about her father because she didn’t know him.

She had learned early how to make things work without waiting for someone else to show up.

She brought that same energy to being my friend.

She showed up.

She stayed.

She didn’t make me explain myself before she helped.

The spare room was tiny, but Olivia had filled it with things she swore were temporary, which in Olivia language meant thrifted curtains she had hemmed herself, a chipped blue lamp she had rewired after watching one video, and a rolling rack of clothes she insisted were “not clothes, Lee, they’re future design references.”

Maggie was short, sharp, and warm in a way that made warmth feel practical instead of sticky. She had opinions about everything and expressed them like the world had asked. She made tea the way other people made arguments, with both hands and total confidence.

The first night Olivia brought me home, Maggie looked me over and said, “You look like someone who’s been carrying something heavy in bad shoes.”

“I’m fine,” I said.

Maggie hummed.

That hmm said plenty.

Mostly that she didn’t believe me and wasn’t going to waste time pretending she did.

Then she put a plate in front of me.

“You’re eating dinner,” Maggie said.

It wasn’t a question.

I ate dinner.

I ate it again the next night and the night after that, because it turned out that when someone sat across from you with their own plate and talked about whatever was on TV and didn’t make your presence feel like a problem, eating was easier.

Not easy.

Easier.

Maggie never asked what happened.

Not directly.

She watched. She fed people. She knew more than she said.

“Trouble comes whether you invite it or not,” Maggie said a few days later, stirring something on the stove. “What matters is whether you eat dinner when it shows up.”

I ate dinner that night too.