Chapter 7

"She can't even afford sanitary pads. Every month all she can buy are the cheap expired ones sold loose at some little store."

"It's winter now. Everyone's wearing heavy coats and parkas, and she's still in that same thin fall outfit, shivering so hard she can barely walk. It's heartbreaking to look at."

"It's because she lives such a hard, exhausting life that she's been sick lately. Everyone in the girls' dorm knows. She coughs in the middle of the night so badly she ends up coughing up blood."

"If she really had money, how would working all those part-time jobs have left her hands so badly frostbitten? And why would she come to the dining hall to eat other people's leftovers?"

"Exactly. I just saw her at the campus clinic. The doctor said she's seriously ill, that she needs to get IV treatment for several days straight, but she doesn't have a single cent on her. Even today's medical bill was paid for with borrowed money."

"I've never seen anyone have it this hard at school."

More and more people crowded around.

Everyone was talking.

Talking about my lunch, my part-time jobs, my illness, about how I'd been living like a stray dog.

My mother listened to the voices around her, and the color drained from her face little by little.

Her lips began to tremble.

Her gaze slowly moved over me, taking me in with painstaking attention.

From the moment she'd stormed in, her eyes had been full of fury. She'd never once really looked at my face.

Now she saw it clearly.

Saw my high cheekbones, my jaw sharp enough to look carved from stone, the baby fat completely gone, my entire face gaunt and almost unrecognizable.

Saw those ruined hands of mine, mottled red and purple, the knuckles swollen thick like old tree roots.

Saw the thin jacket on me, so faded from washing that the cuffs were frayed, with the zipper pull missing and the zipper held together by a paper clip.

Saw the canvas shoes on my feet that I'd worn from summer into winter, the toes split open at the seams, black socks showing through.

My mother's lips parted and closed several times.

Her eyes went red all at once.

"What they said... is it true?"

Her voice came out rough and strained.

Her eyes brimmed with tears of pain.

I looked at her in confusion.

"Of course it's true."

"With only two hundred dollars a month for living expenses, this was the only kind of life I could afford."

"And you, my own mother, told me every time you called to watch my spending and not waste money."

"When I said I had no money for a doctor, your first reaction was to scold me, to blame me for spending it too quickly."

My mother's tears spilled over.

"That's because I sent you fifty thousand dollars in monthly allowance, right on time!"

The moment I heard her words, I froze where I stood.

Earlier, when she'd said she gave me fifty thousand dollars a month, I'd assumed she was lying to save face, making excuses for herself.

But now, watching her face, full of tears and raw sincerity, I couldn't help wondering if she was telling the truth.

And yet I couldn't believe it either.

Fifty thousand dollars a month?

How was that possible?

I wasn't the only one who didn't believe it.

A wave of doubt swept through the dining hall too.

"No way. If Theresa really had fifty thousand dollars a month, how could she let herself get this poor, this desperate?"

"Right? Everyone on campus knows how broke she is.

No way does she look like someone with fifty thousand a month."

"But look at her mom. She doesn't look like she's lying."

"So which of the two of them is the problem?"

I looked at my mother, my whole mind reeling.

"This entire semester, I got two hundred dollars a month."

"I never once heard anything about fifty thousand dollars."