My name is Kendall Scott. I am twenty-six years old, and I live in Savannah, a city that smells of salt and gardenias. The air here is thick and sweet, the exact opposite of the dry, dusty attic of my childhood home in Des Moines.
The air in Iowa was thin.
It carried the scent of cut grass and, in winter, the sterile bite of snow.
Here, the air is heavy.
It sticks to you.
It reminds you that you are breathing.
For the first three years in Savannah, I lived in a single room over a garage that perpetually smelled of engine oil and mildew.
My only real piece of furniture was an army surplus cot, olive drab canvas stretched over a frame of thin, hollow aluminum.
When I unfolded it at night, the joints snapped into place with a sharp metallic clack.
That sound became the soundtrack to my life.
Clack, you are temporary.
Clack, you are replaceable.
Clack, you have nowhere else to go.
Five years ago, when I was twenty-one, my parents made that fact explicitly clear.
It wasn’t a dramatic fight. There was no shouting, no slammed doors.
That would have required passion, and passion was something my mother, Valerie, and my father, Gregory, reserved exclusively for my older sister, Tessa.
It was a Tuesday in October.
Tessa had just received an early acceptance to a graduate program she hadn’t even paid the application fee for.
Gregory had handled it. I, meanwhile, had just admitted I couldn’t balance my final semester’s tuition and my part-time job.
I suggested quietly that perhaps I could use the college fund I knew existed.
Valerie set her coffee cup down.
The ceramic made a tiny, decisive click on the granite countertop.
“Kendall,” she said, her voice perfectly smooth, “your father and I feel you’ve been drifting.
You lack Tessa’s focus.”
Gregory cleared his throat, his signal that the decision had been made.
“Tessa’s path is an investment.
Yours”—he looked at my worn sneakers—“is a cost.
We aren’t going to subsidize a lack of direction.”
I remember the silence, how it filled the kitchen, thick and choking. I waited for one of them to blink, to offer an alternative, a loan, anything.
Instead, my father reached for his wallet.
He didn’t pull out a credit card or a checkbook.
He extracted two twenty-dollar bills and one ten, fifty dollars total. He laid them on the counter next to a crumb from breakfast.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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