Chapter 4 - MEGAN’S AUDACITY
I stared at Megan's name flashing on the digital dashboard screen. For three seconds, I considered letting it go straight to voicemail. But the raw adrenaline still surging through my veins demanded an ending. I pressed the answer button.
"What do you want, Megan?" I asked, my voice flat and cold.
"Chloe! Where are you?" Megan's voice came through the car speakers, sharp and hurried. "Dad just called me from the campus parking lot. He sounded like he was having a heart attack! He said you screamed at him and drove off!"
"I didn't scream," I said, putting the car back in drive and pulling slowly onto the highway. "I spoke at a normal volume. He just didn't like what I had to say."
"Chloe, you're being totally unreasonable!" Megan barked. "Do you have any idea how much stress Mom and Dad have been under lately? Todd’s firm laid off three senior associates last month, and Dad's insurance agency is losing clients to online brokers. They don't need you pulling some dramatic revenge stunt!"
I pulled into the right lane behind a semi-truck. "A revenge stunt? Is that what earning a college degree is called in our family?"
"You kept it a secret for nine years!" Megan practically shrieked through the line. "You let us sit around the dinner table every Sunday acting like you were just... struggling along! You made us look like idiots!"
"You didn't need my help to look like idiots, Megan," I replied smoothly. "You did that all on your own when you spent twenty minutes laughing at my work shirt three weeks ago."
There was a sudden, sharp silence on the line. I could hear Megan inhaling sharply through her nose.
"Look," Megan said, her tone suddenly shifting into a sickly-sweet, persuasive register that she usually reserved for negotiating with her home decor clients. "We need to fix this before commencement next week. Mom is practically in tears because she doesn't know what to wear, and Dad wants to throw a huge family dinner at the country club after the ceremony."
I let out a single, loud laugh that surprised even myself. "A country club dinner? For the janitor?"
"Chloe, stop it!" Megan snapped, dropping the sweet act instantly. "Dad wants to invite his business partners! He wants to introduce Dr. Hail as a family friend! Do you know how good that would look for Todd's firm? Dr. Hail sits on the board of three regional development banks!"
The puzzle pieces snapped together so fast the picture burned my eyes.
It wasn't just Dad trying to use my achievement to boost his ego. The whole family was already scheming how to harvest nine years of my exhaustion to feed their own social status.
"Listen to me very carefully, Megan," I said, stopping at a red light. "I have two guest tickets for commencement next week. One is going to Donna, the woman who covered my morning cleaning shifts so I could take my statistics midterms. The other is going to Curtis, my supervisor."
"You can't be serious!" Megan yelled. "You're giving our family's tickets to... to cleaning staff?!"
"They are my family," I said. "They were the ones standing in the front row when nobody else showed up."
"If you do this, Chloe," Megan threatened, her voice shaking with rage, "Dad will cut you off completely! You won't be welcome at Sunday dinners ever again!"
"Megan," I said softly, looking at the bright blue sky ahead of me. "I stopped wanting an invitation to that table ten years ago. Goodbye."
I hung up the phone, tapped the screen to block Megan's number, blocked my mother's number, and blocked my father's number.
For the first time in sixteen years, my phone was completely, blissfully quiet.
I drove home to my small, sunlit one-bedroom apartment near the railroad tracks. I made myself a pot of tea, sat down at my desk, and opened my lap top to review the final draft of my commencement address.
The speech was titled The Hands You Don't See.
It was dedicated to the graveyard shift workers, the cafeteria ladies, the maintenance crews, and the kids who grew up sitting at the far end of the family table, passing the gravy while everyone else talked about their grand futures.
At 7:00 PM, a heavy knock rattled my apartment door.
I froze at my desk. I hadn't given my parents my new address when I moved two years ago, but Megan worked with a real estate agency—it wouldn't have been hard for her to look up my lease records.
I walked to the door, looked through the peephole, and gasped.
May you like
Standing in the hallway was Megan. But she wasn't carrying a purse, and she wasn't wearing her usual polished work clothes. She was wearing sweatpants, her hair pulled back in a sloppy bun, her face completely free of makeup.
In her shaking hands, she was clutching a thick, yellowed, dusty paper envelope with a red official seal.
