ANNIE
Dear Luke,
Lexie found us a rental a few blocks from her campus. It was a one-bedroom apartment—marginally larger than her dorm room but somehow much less comfortable. The taps leaked, the heat rarely worked and it was on the top floor of a four-floor walk-up, but it was all we could afford since I had cost Lexie both her dorm job and the subsidized room that came with it.
We moved into the new place a week before I started at community college. Lexie thought I might learn better in a more adult learning environment, so I was going to try to get a GED.
Community college was my first foray into the adult world, and it was not at all like I expected. No one seemed to care if I wasn’t doing the work, it was all up to me—but I found this motivating. My first semester’s results were better than I expected, but at the same time, Lexie’s ordinarily sky-high grades dipped a little. One night she came home from her second shift of the day at the nursing home, sat down at the dining room table where we both studied, and cleared her throat a few times.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her hesitantly. I could see that Lexie needed to give me bad news, which I dreaded—but worse still was the way that she looked at me.
She was scared of my reaction, and that made me scared, too. I was sure she was going to throw me out. I pictured her whispering miserably to me that she could no longer put up with me and my problems. Where would I go? Lexie was my whole world, but I could hardly blame her. I was the poison that tainted every good thing in her life.
“I’m so sorry,” she said eventually, “but you just have to get a job.”
I stared at her blankly.
“A job?”
“Just part-time, around school. I can’t keep working like this, but if you can bring in just a little income...”
It had never even occurred to me that I should be trying to help Lexie financially. I was almost sixteen, though, definitely old enough to take on a part-time job between my classes, and I was happy to pull my weight. I managed to find a job serving fast food at the mall.
I wasn’t quite happy or settled during those years at community college—but I was no longer sad and lost. I was somewhere in the middle, in a state of perpetual okay-ness. What separated me from crossing over to a place where I actually felt content was the sense that it was all superficial—like the structure of my life was built on an empty foundation, and it would all crumble to dust at any second.
Something was still missing, and when I started to think about my future and what I might like to do if I ever managed to get myself into a university, I’d feel a rush of fear from the thought that I might try and fail. Lexie was constantly encouraging me to make a plan—charging toward a goal had always been her approach.
I suppose that’s why I was so shocked when she casually mentioned one evening that she’d been offered a spot at Johns Hopkins medical school the following year, but she’d decided to defer.
“I just need some downtime before I jump into it,” she told me. “I’ll take a gap year—work as much as I can, and try to save up some money.”
“Is this because I’m not done with my GED yet?” I asked her, and she smiled at me.
“Don’t be silly, Annie. It just makes sense for me to get some money saved first. Plus, I can help you study a bit now, and we can hang out some more. That’ll be good, right?”
And it was good. We hung out all the time during the rest of that school year—mixing fun with sheer hard work. In between movie nights and chatting until the small hours about boys we knew or clothes or books, Lexie helped me study and pushed me to think about trying to get an undergrad degree after I finished my GED. We’d spend hours brainstorming the possibilities, and then later in the year, Lexie drove me all over the place to check out campuses and go for admissions interviews. The idea of moving away from her was actually quite terrifying, but her optimism was addictive.
Lexie screamed when I got the acceptance letter from Chicago State, and then she caught my wrists in hers, and she danced me around the tiny living area of our apartment, shrieking and laughing. She spun me around the room, and I felt that lightness that she’d drawn out of me that day on the lawn the day of Dad’s funeral. I started to laugh, and then I started to cry, and then I pulled away from her and reread the letter in case we’d both misread it somehow.
“You did it, Annie!” Lexie was ready for another round of jubilant dancing, but I was rapidly unraveling from a confused sense of fear and relief. My leaky tears turned to sobs, and I pulled away from her and curled up in the corner of the couch. It was too much—I didn’t deserve any of it, I was just taking the place of someone who did deserve to be at that school. I’d just mess it up. I’d fooled Lexie and I’d fooled the admissions staff and I’d somehow even fooled the graders on the GED—didn’t they realize I wasn’t good enough for any of these opportunities?
Lexie wrapped her arms around me, and she whispered into my ear, “I’m so proud of you, Annie. I’m so excited for you—the world is your oyster.”
She seemed to assume that my tears were caused by relief, and I didn’t have the words to explain how wrong she was, so I played along. I let her splurge on sparkling wine and pizza to celebrate, and all the while, the sense of dread grew inside me. Even at eighteen years old, I had already figured out that the more you win at life, the more you have to lose.