Taking a Turn

samReads2 · 2026-09-05T17:16:02.173537Z

The counting three times in the elevator, doing the same math again because somehow it will be different. That exhaustion of impossible arithmetic.

Chapter 3: Thirty Dollars

By the end of her first month she understood the ninety days for what they actually were: not a gift, but a countdown. A student pass would buy her more time, and a student pass required a school, and a school required money she did not yet have. Six weeks, she told herself, doing the math on the ceiling one night before sleep, the fan overhead ticking its way around and around while she worked the numbers over. She had maybe six weeks to become, on paper, someone worth letting stay.

International calls cost more than she could justify most weeks, and even when she could, she found herself editing the conversation before it started, trimming out the walking, the counting, the exact shape of how tight things actually were, leaving in only the parts that sounded like progress. Her mother always asked if she was eating enough. She always said yes, which was true most days, and not quite true on the others. She still thought, more than she wanted to, about her father’s face the night she’d shown him the passport, the stillness that came over him right before the sigh. She wasn’t going to be the reason that face happened twice. She was too proud, besides, to call home sounding like she needed rescuing. I asked for this, she reminded herself. I meant to make it work.

She enrolled in a private college two bus transfers from the room, a squat building above a row of shops that smelled permanently of the laundromat beneath it, offering a full-time diploma in computer science to a student body that was almost entirely foreign and almost entirely there, it turned out, for the same reason she was. The pass came bundled with the tuition, and the tuition was the actual point. Classes ran nine to four, five days a week, mostly theory: logic, basic programming, the kind of material delivered by instructors who had clearly given the same lecture enough times to say it without looking at their own slides. The chalk squeaked. The ceiling fans in that building barely moved the air at all, and by noon most of the room had given up fighting it and just sat there damp and quiet, taking notes. She didn’t care. She sat in the front row and wrote down everything, because writing it down was the only proof she had that this stretch of her life had been worth something.

The curriculum covered how a computer thought. It said almost nothing about how to make one show something a stranger might actually want to look at, and that gap pulled at her more than anything on the syllabus. She found a secondhand book on HTML in a shop that sold used textbooks by the kilo, its cover already soft and its corners already turned, and taught herself in the computer lab after the last class let out, staying until a cleaner came through rattling a cart of supplies and asked, not unkindly, if she didn’t have somewhere to be. She learned tags, then how a style sheet could dress a page’s bare bones: colors, spacing, a border that would sit exactly where she told it to. The evening she finally got a table of text to line up entirely on her own, she felt a small, fierce happiness that had nothing to do with anyone else’s approval. A classmate, older, two terms ahead, looked over her shoulder one evening and told her there were people who’d pay for that, shopkeepers who wanted a page with their hours and a photo of their storefront, nothing fancy. He gave her a name and a number, written on the back of a bus ticket because neither of them had paper handy. She built her first site for thirty dollars, and thought, doing the math on the bus home, of how many bowls of rice that was, how many bus rides. The pages she’d taught herself to build had a price on them after all.

The websites paid little and the tutoring paid slightly more, and both required something the diploma classes hadn’t: being found, being trusted enough by strangers to hand over their children or their family’s small business for an hour at a time. She posted flyers, printed cheap at a copy shop, her own handwriting on the tear-off tabs because she couldn’t afford to have it typeset. She answered classified ads in a Chinese-language newspaper handed out free outside the MRT station, the pages already soft with other people’s hands by the time she got to them. On weekends, to save the bus fare both ways, she walked to the families who couldn’t be reached by a single bus line, an hour out, an hour back, through neighborhoods that got steadily wealthier the further she walked, the shophouses giving way to gated compounds, condominiums with security guards at the gates who looked at her clipboard and her flyer and decided whether she was worth stopping.

One of those families lived on the eleventh floor of a tower with a swimming pool she could see from the elevator, blue and empty in the afternoon heat, not one person in it the whole time she stood waiting for the doors to close. The mother who opened the door wore a robe at four in the afternoon and didn’t apologize for it. The apartment was cold the way rooms get when no one has ever had to think about the electric bill, and she was glad, for once, of the long sleeves she wore to every job to look presentable rather than for the weather. The boy she was there to tutor was nine, bright and bored the way children are when they’ve never once had to worry about anything, sprawled sideways in his chair like sitting up straight cost him something he didn’t feel like spending. For the hour she was good at her job, patient, clear, warmer with him than she felt toward his mother, who sat in the next room on a call in Cantonese she didn’t try to follow.

At the door, gathering her things, she said, as gently as she’d rehearsed it on the long walk over, that this made four sessions now, and the family still owed for the first two.

The mother’s face did something small, not quite annoyance, not quite surprise. “Oh, right, of course, Rebecca,” she said, already turning back toward the kitchen counter, where her purse sat beside a bowl of fruit no one seemed to be eating. She counted out bills the way you’d count out change for a vending machine, without looking, and held them out. “Sorry about that. Same time next week?”

“Yes. Thank you.” She said it evenly, the way she’d trained herself to say most things now, and didn’t let her hand shake taking the money. In the mirrored elevator, alone, she counted the bills again, the same amount they’d been a floor up, and then counted them a second time on the ground floor out of the mother’s sight, a habit she’d started somewhere around the third late payment and never once caught herself doing, only noticed, afterward, that she’d done it. Four hours of walking, both ways, twice, to save a bus fare that wouldn’t have covered what that woman’s fruit bowl cost to keep full for a week.

She counted the bills a third time at the bus stop, waiting under a shelter that didn’t quite block the sun, the way she counted everything now, rent against tutoring against the website money against what the diploma still owed by term’s end. She would make it. Barely. This month.

Walking back through the heat, the towers giving way slowly to shophouses and then to the block with the laundromat smell, she thought, just for the length of one street, about the crooked table of text she’d made line up in the computer lab. That small, clean satisfaction. She held onto it instead of the elevator, the fruit bowl, the oh, right, of course, all the way to her own front step, where she stopped to scratch, absently, at a small red bump on her forearm that hadn’t been there that morning, and thought nothing of it at all.

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