Page 122 of Swallow Your Sorries

“You can’t work at Smash Burgers!” Stassi says, tapping my pin so it unsaves. “It’ll be social suicide. Everyone at school goes there on the weekends.”

“She’s already dead socially anyway,” Aria says, clicking away on the keyboard.

I can’t even get offended because she isn’t wrong. Even the other scholarship kids avoid me like the plague. Enaj Zaveri, my bench partner, still wouldn’t spare me a glance in calculus as if mere eye contact could tip off Rin and infect her with my loserness.

As if she isn’t already a loser too, independent of what the other students thought. I’m still irritated with that stunt she pulled for Rin’s sake.

What the hell had she meant when she said Rin had already helped her? Rin never even acknowledged Enaj in public, so when had she‘helped’?

Whatever.

I save the Smash Burgers post again. “I don’t care. I have to find a way to pay Gant back.”

Aria stops typing and whips around to look at me. “The hourly rate at a fast-food restaurant around here is like thirteen max. If you work doubles on Saturdays and Sundays, so say ten hours each day if you’re lucky, and a five-hour shift after school on Fridays, you’re looking at—”

Stassi grabs my phone and does the maths. “Three hundred and twenty-five for twenty-five hours of work per week! That should be illegal. That’s only…” She multiplies it by four. “Thirteen hundred for the entire month.”

“Maybe a few hundred extra if those doubles are closer to twelve or fifteen hours, depending,” Aria says.

From their faces, I know I’m supposed to be crestfallen, but that’s way more per hour than I made in the next town over with Mum at the deli. In fact, I’d worked more than twenty-five hours a week and still got roughly the same amount before taxes, of course. I missed my meagre paycheck too.

Despite Mum’s refusal, I’d go behind her back to the power and water company and put something on the bill weekly. Power cuts and irregular baths and laundry throughout my childhood had traumatised me enough that I wanted to make sure it didn’t happen again. Even if it was only twenty here and there, it eased my mind that at least we wouldn’t get too far behind.

The only thing I didn’t have to worry about was food because the deli allowed us to take whatever scraps or newly expired food they were about to toss out home. It wasn’t always nutritious, but it was free and it was available.

“And you still need enough time for schoolwork. Namely dance. Forget a demotion to the intermediate ballet class, Beaulieu can kick you out midyear if you’re failing. They take their stats at graduation seriously.”

“Plus thirteen hundred a month can’t even get you a good weekly deep treatment, tone, and blowout,” Stassi says, unsaving the pin again.

I eye Stassi’s perfectly toned blonde locks and run my hands through my greasy ponytail subconsciously. Once again, I’m hyper-aware that we live on two entirely different plants. I’d never even gotten a professional blowout before. I’d been eyeing one of those round brush blow dryers for ages, but even on sale, I couldn’t justify it. Not even the knockoff version.

“Besides,” Aria goes on. “Shouldn’t you be filling your weekends with private dance lessons?”

I’m surprised she gives enough of a damn to even ask.

Surprised, but happy.

This is progress.

Or maybe she’s just tired of secondhand embarrassment as Mistress Errard singles me out constantly.

“Seriously,” she says. “Forget about paying Gant back. He’s the one that brought you here of his own free will. And with less than twenty grand a year in earnings, what’s the point of even trying?”

Despite my stubborn determination, I’m not a complete idiot. I know she’s right, even if I have delusional daydreams of handing that asshole a massive check at graduation next June.

That would be the ultimate,I don’t fucking need anything from you.

But I do. Including those private lessons Aria prompted me to focus on.

And I will, but I still need money regardless of Gant’s tuition.

I still need birth control pills to control my period. And tampons because pads showed up through my leotards. Still, I needed those too when I slept. I could try a menstrual cup, but damn did I hate the thought of fishing it out for five days and risking some horrible bout of yeast of BV even though I’d seemingly scrubbed my fingers raw with antibacterial soap beforehand.

I still needed deodorant, the good kind that could last through hours and hours of dance and stop the embarrassing pit stains. Stassi had suggested Botox injections, oblivious to the fact that I could barely afford the medical-grade deodorant.

Then there were the foot deodorants. The blue jelly skin pads that I needed to cover my toes with before stuffing them into my pointe shoes otherwise the pain would be so unbearable I could barely make it through another session, much less the six other mandatory classes of the week. Privates not included. And that isn’t the extent of the foot stuff. There are toe pads and bandages and nightly ointments, and the pointe shoes themselves that are already so broken I shouldn’t be dancing in them. But I can’t bear to put on the new ones I’d bought over the summer to wear them in the new term just yet. My old pointe shoes at my old school lasted nearly three months. Here, one month seemed to be the limit. With my private lessons with Gant about to start, maybe that’d drop to three weeks.

I already used all of my deli savings to buy two pairs of the cheapest pointe shoes on Beaulieu’s list of acceptable brands. My online dupes were only okay for solo practices in the dorm room or an empty studio I managed to sneak a twenty-minute session into before or after class. If Mistress Errard even saw them on my feet, I swear she’dknowbased on the colour alone. A colour she’d identify as being too cheap to be of quality, even though I couldn’t spot the difference myself for the death of me. But I guess that came with the experience of being around said quality for decades on end.

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