The Rules That Starved Me

My mother sent me my food money one day at a time. Twelve dollars. To get it, I had to check in at the library three times a day. Miss one and I didn't eat the next day.

Five foot five, ninetyone pounds by then. Pads were outside my budget. A job was out of the question too, because a job meant missing checkins.

So I ran out of road, and I decided to sell my body and my soul. I went and knocked on a rich stranger's hotel door. Chapter 1 "Didn't I tell you?

Three checkins a day at the library. You did two. So there's no money tomorrow.

And there goes your perfect attendance for the month." My mother's voice came through the phone calm and level, the way a judge reads out a sentence. I did the math fast.

Twelve dollars still owed to my roommate. Nothing in my account. When you live under someone's roof, you keep your head down.

There was no version of this where I got to fight, so I explained. "Mom, I went to the library with my roommate. You saw the picture.

I did it exactly the way you wanted, the two of us, the library doors behind us. I sent it to you. But she passed out that afternoon. She's anemic.

I took her to the ER, so there's no evening photo—" She made a sound through her nose. "How do I know you're not lying?

Maybe you just didn't feel like studying and went out to have fun." My voice stayed flat. "Mom, I have her ER intake sheet. Her chart. The bill.

I'll take pictures of all of it—" "Shut up." Her volume climbed. "Even if it's true, does that mean you get to skip studying?

Skip the library?" "Your roommate fainting has what to do with you? You take her to the hospital and you're not worried she'll stick you with the bill?

Why did it have to be you?" "And who gives you back the hours? The material you didn't learn? You should be glad I'm not asking her family to cover it.

Look at you, just look at—" I cut in before the lecture could get rolling. "Okay, Mom. Got it. No money tomorrow, no attendance bonus this month. Okay. I have Spanish vocab to do.

Bye." The line went dead. A text came in. [You will memorize vocabulary exactly the way I told you. Blank paper.

Write the English meaning first, then write the Spanish word from memory beside it. Record a video of yourself doing it so I know you aren't copying. Thirty words minimum.

No checkin and you lose the day after tomorrow too.] Food money. Food money. Food money. Two words. By then, seeing them made me physically sick.

Another one came through. [I know where you left off in the list. Keep going down from there.

Try to pad it out with words you already learned and you lose the entire month.] I typed for a long time. Reasonable arguments. Unreasonable ones.

Every curse word I had, in both languages. Then I deleted all of it and sent this instead: [Okay.] Back down the hall, back in my dorm room, all I wanted was to lie down.

A whole day at a library desk, then a whole afternoon of running. The tired had gotten into my bones. But no vocabulary meant no food. I stood there for a while.

Then I got out the notebook and started. I was a donkey with somebody's whip on my back, and forward was the only direction that existed.

My mother had two words, food money, and she kept them wrapped around my throat. Whatever she told me to do, I did. No idea when the whip would stop coming down.

Before I started college, my mother handed me a printed sheet. Front and back, packed edge to edge. At the top: The Rules for Your College Allowance. I'll just call it the Rules.

I was eighteen. I thought it was a piece of paper. Chapter 2 Most college students get their money once a month. Mine came one day at a time.

Every night, if I hadn't broken the Rules, she sent the next day's twelve dollars. If I had broken them, the day went the way today went. She docked me.

What I broke today was rule one. [On any day you do not have class, you will study at the library and check in three times to prove you are not slacking.] [Checkin procedure: on arrival, a selfie with the library doors behind you.

Midsession, a photo of your desk plus a selfie with the desk behind you, along with a detailed report of what you studied.

On leaving, photograph the library doors from inside, then screenrecord the following: the photo you just took, open a browser, search world clock.

This proves you are not playing games with the timestamps.] [On days without class you will check in once an hour. I will give you a word of the day.

You will write it on paper, hold it up, and photograph it.] [If you go a full month without missing a single checkin, you earn that month's perfect attendance bonus.] The Rules had plenty more where that came from.

For terms that strict, you'd think the money would be two or three thousand a month. My allowance was twelve dollars a day. She had worked it out to the penny.

Her plan: breakfast was one packet of instant oatmeal and half a banana. Two dollars. Filling and nutritious.

Lunch and dinner came from the discount grocery behind campus, where two fifty bought a boxed pasta meal off the refrigerated shelf, close to its sellby date.

Ninety seconds in a microwave and you were fed. Beautiful on paper. In practice there were problems. All three dining halls on campus were closed to me.

A meal plan was a separate purchase, three thousand and change a semester, and my mother called it straightup robbery, so there was no meal plan.

Without a meal card I was a tourist at my own school. Walkins paid sixteen dollars at the door. The markeddown shelf at the discount grocery got picked over fast.

Show up late and what was left was canned lunch meat, the kind that's seven parts fat to three parts meat. Fat made me gag. One bite and it came back up.

So I bought the cheapest canned corn and a bag of frozen spinach. The microwave sat at the end of the hall. There was always a line.

The only free thing in my life was the water fountain. "I researched this carefully. My plan is perfect. Seven dollars a day and you eat well and you eat enough.

The other five is for water, shampoo, fruit. More than enough. You can even put some aside for textbooks. You'd be living very comfortably!" Direct quote.

Our campus sat out past the edge of town.

The nearest real supermarket was a twentyminute bus ride, so fruit meant the campus convenience store, where apples were sold by the piece. Two seventyfive each.

Take it or leave it. I never did figure out how a person was supposed to live very comfortably on three hundred and sixty dollars a month.

And that was assuming I broke nothing and lost nothing. Say I checked in like clockwork for a solid month. What did perfect attendance pay? Two dollars a day. Sixty dollars.

A fortune. I was hungry every day, and what I ate was bad. Either three filling meals that tasted like nothing, or one good meal and then two skipped ones.

Fruit and snacks belonged to other people's lives. Two months into the semester, five foot five, I was down to ninetyone pounds. It wasn't that I never fought back.

I laid it out for her. Campus prices. Photos of the markeddown boxed meals I'd been living on. Photos of the scale.

All of it came back as one sentence. "I'm not paying for you to enjoy yourself, but I would never let you go hungry! Everyone else manages. Why can't you?

Follow my plan exactly and it is impossible to suffer." I ran the numbers on that. Twelve dollars a day. Three hundred and sixty a month. My family isn't poor. My mother has money.

She just doesn't give it to me. Chapter 3 Everyone else manages? Who? Name one.

Let somebody stand up where I can see them so I know I'm not the only person on this campus going hungry. I was so hungry.

And it hit me that even a job pays better than three hundred and sixty a month. So I got a job. Jobs, plural. Anything that paid. Package pickups for people who didn't want to walk.

Any box, any weight. A fortypound bag of cat litter up five flights, and I petted the customer's cat on my way out. Weekends, a mascot suit outside the mall.

Ninetyfive degrees and I'd dance all afternoon. Evenings, the back kitchen at the ricenoodle place by the campus gate, and after my shift there was a bowl for staff.

God, it was good. It paid more than three sixty. It really did. I had a mango smoothie for the first time in my life. My favorite was the threedollar lemonade.

Cheap, huge, perfect. McDonald's breakfast, also a first. An Egg McMuffin beats a packet of instant oatmeal by a mile. Bakeries still scared me.

Eight or nine dollars for one slice of cake was astronomical.

But after eight at night the grocery store slapped halfprice stickers on the cupcakes, and those I finally let myself try. Checkins? Checkins could go to hell.

I dropped all of it and thought about nothing but money. That month wore me out. That month I was full. Looking back on it now, it was warm. It smelled like food.

My stomach was round and there was nothing sad in my head. Good things don't last.

I kept refusing to check in, so my mother came to campus without telling me and walked straight into the Dean of Students office. She cried at them.

Asked whether I'd run off with a man. Asked whether I'd quietly dropped out.

The woman at the desk pulled up the system, then told her, very politely, that her daughter was a legal adult and that without my written authorization they could not discuss any of my records with a parent.

That sentence lit her up like a match. She worked the front desk for over an hour.

Then she found my dorm building and cornered my roommates, grilling them like a lunatic, and when they had nothing to give her she screamed at them.

In the end it was my RA who called and told me to get back fast. At that moment I was in the mascot suit outside a phone store, handing out flyers.

I ran the whole way, soaked through. My mother saw me and slapped me before I got a word out. I don't want to remember how that day ended.

What matters is that after it I went back to being a donkey with a whip on my back and a rope around my neck called food money, and for twelve dollars a day I was neither a person nor a ghost.

All I wanted was to eat until I was full. The next morning the pain woke me up. Cramps like a fist closing. My head swimming. I reached down and my hand came back red.

My period had started. I got myself off the top bunk to dig for pads and there weren't any. Priya, my roommate, gave me one.

I changed, then went to wash my pants and my sheets, holding the wall the whole way. I texted my mother. [Mom, my period started and I'm out of pads. Can I have my money?

Even just tomorrow's, early. I can't leave the room like this.] She wrote back: [Your period isn't due for another four days. So now you've learned to lie.

Using a cheap excuse like that to squeeze money out of me.] I have never wanted to kill anyone more. She's a woman. She doesn't know periods come early, come late?

Hers runs on an app's prediction, year after year, to the day? None of it made sense. It still doesn't.

My family isn't poor, and there I was, bowing and scraping and begging her for pad money. Why. For what.

I photographed the bloody sheets and my underwear and sent them, proof that I wasn't lying.

She answered fast. [How do I know that isn't your roommate's and you took a picture to scam me?] I sent my own mother a photo of my blood to get one pad, and she filed me under con artist.

There was one question I wanted to ask her. Then what exactly do you want me to do? I typed it out, then deleted it one character at a time. I was out of hope. Chapter 4 Not a cent.

Couldn't afford food, couldn't afford pads.

Three roommates: Cassia was still in the hospital, one had already left for the day, and Priya, the only one left, was on her way out the door.

I caught her. "Can I borrow a pack of pads? Thank you. I'll pay you back tomorrow." She dug through her cabinet and couldn't find a full pack.

One thin daytime liner was all she had. "That's the last one. Don't worry about paying it back. I'm late, I have to go." My mother was texting me to get to the library and check in.

No class today, which under the Rules meant once an hour. Day one is heavy for me. One thin liner is nothing.

Eight hours in a library chair and I'd bleed through my pants, and the chair would go with them. Also it hurt. It really hurt. I explained the situation.

Here is what came back: [Can't scam money out of me, so now you want to stall on studying. You are so disobedient.] I set the phone down. Say whatever you want.

I never made it to the library. Afraid of leaking, I didn't dare lie down and I didn't dare sit. So I stood. The pain didn't care. I took something for it and it kept going anyway.

My head swam. Sleep was the only thing I wanted. Two hours of standing later, Priya came back.

She pulled two packs of overnight pads and a pack of overnight period underwear out of her bag and dropped them on my desk. "Take them. Don't pay me back.

I know you can't." When my mother made her scene on campus, she'd gone after Priya. Said she had the look of a bad kid. Said she was obviously the one leading me astray.

Screamed at her over nothing. Priya had barely spoken to me since. And here she was, saving me. Before I could get a thankyou out, she had her headphones in and a show going.

I said it anyway, loud. Her eyelids lifted a little. To this day I don't know whether she heard me. I put on the period underwear and finally slept.

Dead, black, dreamless sleep, all the way to two in the afternoon. Then I picked up my phone. My mother had videocalled me over and over. The ringer was off.

I hadn't heard a single one. Her last message said: [No checkin today, so there's no money for you tomorrow either.] A full day without food, and tomorrow was gone too. Ha.

Too numb to argue. There wasn't anything left in me to argue with. Maybe starving to death is its own kind of release. But hunger is unbearable.

My belly was empty, my stomach was empty, all of me was empty, empty enough that my chest went tight.

Even my head was empty, too empty to think, and there was nothing in it but food. In that condition, how was I supposed to study at the library?

How was I supposed to memorize vocabulary? I worked hard every single day and my grades fell off a cliff, and nobody could figure out why. I knew why. I wasn't eating.

My head was so full of food there was no room left for school. The gears wouldn't turn. Check in, sure.

Starve to death and you get reincarnated, and next time around I'm coming back as one of the campus cats. Everybody who walks past feeds them.

They never once wonder where dinner is. I drifted into something like a daydream, and not long after that I was asleep again. That one lasted until three thirty the next morning.

Waking up, the hunger was right there waiting for me. They say man does not live by bread alone. I didn't have bread. Eating enough, eating well, that was the whole of my ambition.

My mind went wandering after ways to get money. For one second I considered a highinterest cash advance. The application was filled out.

My finger was sitting over the button that said Confirm Loan. Chapter 5 One tap. One twitch of a finger and I'd have money for food.

Before I could do it, I remembered a creator I'd watched, running through case after case. People who took payday loans. Loans to cover loans. Four hundred percent APR.

Tens of thousands of dollars later, a life is over. He shoved the food out of my head and took up the space himself, and his voice went around and around in there.

Don't touch payday loans. Don't touch them. How many times do I have to say it. That thing would end me.

So was there anything that could get me out of this for a while without ending me later?

I deleted the app and sent a text to a number in my phone. [A while ago you told me there are rich guys who'll keep a college girl, and that I could get picked.

Was that real?] The second it sent, my thinking was very simple. That kind of loan compounds until you can't pay it.

Being some rich man's girlfriend, on the other hand, ends whenever I can afford to feed myself. I can break up with a person. You can't break up with interest.

Which one is more honorable, a highinterest loan or a kept girl, I honestly couldn't tell you. Probably neither. My life was already a puddle of mud.

A little more mud wouldn't change the material. As long as there was food in it, it could be mud that smelled good. I did the accounting in my head.

Being kept means living at someone's mercy. Begging my mother for food money also means living at someone's mercy.

Same mercy either way, and a rich man is at least not going to cap me at three hundred and sixty a month. Asking a rich man for money costs me my dignity.

Asking my mother for money costs me my dignity. Same dignity either way, and a rich man probably needs a few evenings a month. I'd only be degraded a few days out of thirty.

My mother degrades me three hundred and sixtyfive days a year. There I was, running a whichisworse comparison between my own mother and a sugar daddy. Funny, in a way.

The number belonged to a senior two years ahead of me. During my one month of working, I'd picked up twentysix packages for her, and never just one at a time.

That fortypound bag of cat litter was hers. Rich, I'd thought, and left it there. Then she asked if I'd ever thought about finding a sugar daddy.

The way she told it, a lot of rich men love college girls. They didn't get much school themselves and their lives are a mess, so they want the educated ones, the clean ones.

Complementary, she said. She said I was pretty, and better than pretty, I didn't try. Long hair, no styling, parted down the middle and tucked behind my ears.

A dowdy kind of innocent. The old factory guys eat that up, she said. You'd move. I turned her down. Back then I still believed a job could keep me fed.

Different month, different girl. She got back to me fast, picked me up at my dorm, and took me out to eat. Hot pot. I had never had hot pot in a restaurant.

Hot pot was something I only got to have in dreams. After we ate, she did my makeup, took a few photos, and told me to go home and wait.

Because of all that, I didn't check in today either.

That night my mother informed me there'd still be no money tomorrow, but that tomorrow I could have an advance, on the condition that tomorrow I checked in on schedule.

She also said she knew my period had probably been real. She just wanted to teach me a lesson. Chapter 6 "Let me tell you something.

You're not a child anymore, and today you're going to understand what it means when one wrong step leads to another.

If you hadn't stuck your nose in and taken that girl to the hospital, you wouldn't have missed your checkin. If you hadn't missed your checkin, you'd have had money the next day.

If you'd had money, you'd have had pads, and you wouldn't have missed another day, and you wouldn't be sitting there today with no money and no food.

All of it, every bit of it, traces back to one bad decision you made. Do you understand? From now on you think before you speak and before you act.

You learn what you're allowed to do and what you're not. One wrong move and you set off consequences you cannot control. Do you understand?" I did not understand.

I did not understand. I did not understand.

But to keep her from coming to campus again, I went back to checking in every day, living on twelve dollars and whatever was left on the discount shelf, waiting for the senior to call.

I could not stand another week of that food. A week later she called. She gave me a hotel room number and told me to dress up and go knock. It was already arranged on their end.

I got nervous. "I'm not going to get picked up for solicitation, am I?" She laughed out loud on the other end. "It's called dating. Two consenting adults.

Nobody's arresting anybody as long as you don't discuss a price. Go on. Don't keep him waiting." Then she hung up. She'd said dress up, but there was nothing to dress up.

I didn't own a single piece of makeup. My mother says only loose women wear makeup. I don't agree with her. I also couldn't afford it. I didn't own nice clothes either.

My clothes were the ones she'd picked out, plus her castoffs, and every one of them was as frumpy as it's possible for fabric to be. I went anyway. If I got sent back, so be it.

Maybe I just wasn't built for making money lying down. The closer I got to the hotel, the tighter I wound. My palms would not stop sweating.

Standing outside the room, I found out I wasn't nearly as willing to throw myself away as I'd assumed. Everything in me wanted to run. I couldn't do this. I really couldn't.

The second I turned to leave, my stomach growled. I was hungry. I was so, so hungry. That one sound was what made my hand come up and press the bell. I understood what I was doing.

Spending my future to patch my present. Burning the furniture to stay warm. Drinking salt water to kill the thirst.

Step through that door and my life bends off its track, and where it ends up after that is something I can't predict and can't control.

But if the rest of my life was going to be a swamp anyway, I wanted to go down full. I wasn't asking for lemonade every day. Just let me afford pads.

Let me keep a little dignity while I get through school. Let me eat enough to think about school at all. The door opened. Inside stood a mildlooking man in his forties.

He looked like somebody who taught at a college, not the goldchain type I'd been braced for. He looked at me strangely. "Who are you here for?

Are you at the wrong room?" I checked the number again, then checked the senior's text again. "No, this is it. Sixteen oh three. Aren't you Mr.

Ashby?" His brows drew in slightly. "My name is Ashby, but I don't know you.

You should doublecheck with your friend." Two sentences of doubt and every bit of courage I'd built up drained out through my shoes. Maybe I wasn't ready.

Right now would be an excellent moment to flee. I was turning to go when his phone rang.

Chapter 7 Like most men his age, he kept his volume cranked, loud enough that I caught every word from the other end. A man was asking him, "She showed up, right?

I set it up for you. You've been alone way too long. This is your type, isn't it? College girl. Enjoy yourself." Mr. Ashby did not look like a man enjoying anything.

He told the guy he was out of line and hung up. Off to a great start. Returned to sender. Relief or disappointment, I couldn't have told you which. Mostly it was humiliation.

My face went hot and I put my head down and turned to go. He stopped me. "Miss. Wait a second." I stopped and looked back.

He waved me over. "Pull up your Venmo code." I pulled up the QR code and he scanned it. Then there were two thousand dollars in my phone. Rich people.

He handed me two thousand dollars the way I'd hand a quarter to the guy holding a sign at the intersection. That's as far as the comparison goes, though. A quarter I can do.

Given my finances, handing over five would take some thinking. "You're young. Don't go down that road. Call this travel money. It should last you a while.

It isn't too late for you, so go back to school." Oh my God