At Eight, I Paid Off My Birth Debt

Chapter 2 Pay For Being Sick

After my mother made that i********: post, something changed at school.

During recess, a boy named Kevin Hail turned around from the row in front of me. "Hey, Natalie, I heard you owe your mom, like, two hundred thousand dollars. Is it true? Two hundred thousand dollars?"

A few kids around us looked over right away.

My face went hot.

"It's none of your business! My mom is teaching me how to be responsible!"

Kevin gave a short, mean laugh. "Teaching you how to be poor?"

The boy next to him laughed too.

I said a bad word I'd heard older kids use, and before I could even think, a few boys shoved me to the ground. My knees scraped hard against the floor.

By the time our teacher, Maria Whitney, came running over, a patch of skin had been scraped raw. "What happened?" she asked.

I looked at Kevin's panicked face. Then I pictured my mother getting called to school, the look she would have on her face, and the way she would open that ledger.

"I tripped. It was my fault."

Maria cleaned the wound and wrapped it while I bit my lip hard enough to hurt.

She sighed. "Let your mom take a look at it when you get home, and don't get it wet."

But I could not let my mother know.

That night, I tried my best to keep the bandage dry while I showered, but water still splashed onto it.

The next morning, my knee was swollen and red. By then, my head had started to feel hot and heavy too.

It was already the middle of the night by the time my mother realized I had a fever.

She pressed the back of her hand against my forehead.

"You're burning up. You'll have to miss school tomorrow, which means I'll miss work, which means I'll lose money... And then there's the doctor, the medicine..."

She even picked up her phone and started typing numbers into the calculator.

Just then, my grandmother appeared in the doorway, still carrying the cold dampness of the early morning air on her coat.

"I had a bad feeling all day! I had to come check on Natalie!"

The second she saw how flushed I was, she rushed to the bed.

"What are you waiting for? She's sick, and you're standing there doing math?"

My mother's temper snapped instantly.

"Mom, do you have any idea how hard it is to raise a kid alone? Every little thing costs time and money!"

My grandmother was shaking with anger now. "Chloe, that is your daughter! She's sick, and all you can think about is your ledger?"

"How else am I supposed to keep track of things? Do you know how hard it is to do this by myself? Every extra expense in this house comes from her!"

They started arguing again.

This had to be my fault.

If I had enough money to give my mother, they would not be fighting.

But my piggy bank was gone.

My mother still took me to the doctor in the end.

I stared at the fresh gauze wrapped around my knee.

Now I had cost her another two hundred sixty-seven dollars. And I was still two hundred thousand dollars in debt.

My grandmother stayed to take care of me.

The soup she made was easy to swallow. She hummed lullabies under her breath. Her hands were dry and warm when she touched my forehead.

But warmth had a price too.

After dinner, I heard my mother talking to her in the living room.

"Mom, I'm adding the utilities and groceries from the last few days to Natalie's tab... We only spent extra because we had to take care of her."

My grandmother stopped wringing out the dish towel in her hands.

"Chloe, are you seriously going to charge your eight-year-old daughter for the meals I ate while I was helping take care of her?"

My mother opened the thick ledger and turned to a fresh page.

"Rules are rules."

I looked at my grandmother's slightly bent back and felt something tight and painful rising in my chest.

I wanted money. I wanted to put it all in my mother's hands and make her stop writing. I wanted my grandmother to stop looking like that.

But my piggy bank was already broken.

That night, I lay half-awake in bed while my grandmother patted me gently.

Then I remembered something I had once overheard from some adults. They said Dylan Castro sometimes picked up shifts at a warehouse and got paid.

My grandmother said raising a child was a parent's responsibility. But my mother was never happy, and it was because I owed her too much.

What if I could find a way to make money the way Dylan did?

What if I could earn enough to make the number in the ledger go all the way down to zero?

If I could do that, maybe my mother would stop being angry all the time.

Maybe she would stop fighting with Grandma... Maybe she would dance again...

As sleep pulled me under, I imagined myself in a huge warehouse, counting endless piles of cans and bottles while coins stacked into mountains.

My mother stood on top of one of those mountains, wearing a beautiful dress and dancing in the sunlight. And she was smiling.