Page 14 of Kept By the Loan Shark

Hagen:Text me if you need help. Call me when you get home.

Seeing the professor walk in the side door, I quickly sent Hagen a thumbs-up emoji and stowed my phone in my backpack. I pulled out my notebook covered in planet stickers and found the last page I had written notes on and drew a line underneath. I printed Radii and Temperatures and turned my attention toward the front of the class where the professor was already scribbling hasty equations on the blackboard. He wasn’t the easiest teacher to follow, but his lecture notes were all provided online. I’d had him in a previous course and knew he liked to sneak in little interesting facts and tidbits during class that would end up on his final exams. Those were things I tried to catch in my notes.

“Hey, Cass,” Kunal, one of my classmates leaned forward as the lecture ended, “I hate to ask, but can I get your notes from the stat course you took last spring?”

“408?”

“Yeah.” He made a face and admitted, “My course load is heavy as shit this semester, and after dad got sick—”

“Kunal,” I reached out and touched his hand, “don’t worry about it. You can have them. I’ll bring the notebook to class on Wednesday.”

“Thank you, Cass. It’s just…it’s been hard, you know?”

I nodded, understanding only too well how difficult it could be to adjust to the loss of a parent. His father had been their family’s breadwinner, and after he died of a sudden stroke, Kunal was shouldering his late father’s responsibilities to his mother and younger sisters. “If you need anything, ask. I mean it. I’ve been there. When my parents died, it sucked. Whatever I can do to help, I will.”

“If I can think of anything else, I will.” He smiled. “I’ll bring you some of Mom’s pav bhaji in exchange for the notes.”

“Yes!” I grinned excitedly. His mother’s food was so damn good, and the first time I’d gone to his house for dinner, I had gone home with plastic containers crammed full. “You throw in some of your mom’s samosas, and I’ll take your tests for you.”

He laughed. “If it comes to that, I just might.”

We left the classroom together, and he asked me about my GRE and my plans for grad school. “I was talking to Dr. Symonds earlier about my options. I’ve got a shortlist of schools. I feel pretty good about my chances. You?”

“329,” he said with a pleased smile. After a moment, he added, “I took the MCAT.”

“What?” I glanced at him in surprise. “I didn’t know you were interested in medical school.”

“I wasn’t,” he admitted, “but I had some time to think over the summer. My family is going to need me, and I love astronomy and astrophysics but…”

“The money,” I said, understanding exactly what he meant. “We’re definitely not going to get rich in this field.”

“No, and I owe it to my mother and my sisters and my wife and kids someday to be able to support them well.”

“Well, how did the MCAT go?”

He grinned and said, “521.”

“Are you fucking serious?” I busted out in shock, stopping to gawk up at him. “521! Holy shit. Good for you, Kunal!”

“Thanks.” Bashfully, he confessed, “I’m shooting for the stars on my apps. Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, Penn…,” he listed off the top schools. “If I’m going to do this, I want to do it right.”

“What kind of specialty do you think you’ll end up in?”

“Radiology,” he said with an air of certainty. “I think I’ll enjoy that the most.”

“I can see that. Radiation is a part of astrophysics and astronomy. The sun and all that,” I reasoned.

“Exactly.”

Giving him a hip bump, I drew a smile from him. “Keep me updated. I’ll make you a cake when you get your acceptance letter to Harvard.”

“Deal.”

We split up as we reached the main entrance of the building. I hefted my backpack a little higher on my shoulders and started walking toward my car. My stomach growled, and I stopped at the Chick-fil-A closest to my apartment complex for a ginormous sweet tea and a box of their cracktastic nuggets. I munched and listened to music until I parked at my complex.

After I stopped at the office to sign the paperwork ending my lease on the upcoming first of the month, I made my way back to my apartment. I embraced my inner Marie Kondo and started in my bedroom, picking through hangers and my dresser drawers to find the clothing that brought me joy. As the donation pile grew, I realized how long I had been holding onto things I no longer needed or wanted. There was a reason for that, something deeper I wasn’t ready to acknowledge yet. Probably a side effect of losing my parents as a teenager or having to deal with Ronnie’s irresponsible and dangerous behavior.

I sorted the clothing into garbage bags and wrote donation on the outside of each bag along with what it contained—tops, bottoms, dresses and skirts or miscellaneous accessories like belts and scarves. When that was done, I moved to the kitchen and started filling my canvas grocery bags with perishables from the refrigerator and freezer to take back to Hagen’s place. I grabbed a few things from my pantry—oatmeal, a half-full box of cereal, some cans of soup and an unopened jar of peanut butter—and put them in another bag.

---