RE: Trailer Trash, 53 pt 1 (Patreon)

/// Trigger warning, this section gets a little ugly towards the very end.

1999 arrived with little fanfare for Tabitha, having elected to simply spend the evening reading with Hannah and then retire to bed at her usual time. Waiting until midnight to watch the celebrations on television and count down to the ball drop had never interested her much—and as fourteen-year-olds, none of her friends were doing much of anything for New Years Eve besides spending time with their families. The Williams family threw another lakehouse party, but invitation was only for drinking-age folk, and even Mrs. Macintire declined to attend this year.

An empty bottle and a pair of champagne glasses in the sink on the morning of January first was Tabitha’s only real reminder that they were entering into a new year. She wasn’t put out about it, as she’d seen it all before and the kind of New Years excitement one shared with friends and family had never had much to do with her. Perhaps that would change in the next few years to come, and maybe she had some romantic notions of having someone special to kiss when the clock strikes twelve in this lifetime… but not just yet, not while she was still so young.

“Did you stay up until midnight?” Tabitha asked.

“Just about,” Mrs. Macintire chuckled, smiling over her cup of coffee. “Might’ve dozed off a bit—hubby woke me up just before the countdown, though. I think I’m gettin’ old.”

“What’s that say about me, then?!” Tabitha teased. “I think I went to bed before nine.”

“Eh, you’re not missing too much,” Mrs. Macintire shrugged. “We usually go to the Williams’ for their big thing, but wasn’t really feeling it this year. Too much excitement for Darren, don’t want him goofing around at a party and popping out his cork.”

“Right,” Tabitha grimaced. “Gross.”

She wasn’t sure who had started the joke, but one of the topics the Macintires kidded Hannah about over dinners was that Officer Macintire simply had a wine cork plugged into the bullet hole in his sternum. He still wore a small bandage covering up the area, and of course refused to let the little girl peek under them to check to see if he actually had a cork there or not. Hannah was extremely skeptical, but that just seemed to make the whole thing even more amusing for the pair of parents. Tabitha put on polite smiles for their more macabre humor but offered no comment.

“You ready for your big day today?” Mrs. Macintire asked.

“Today’s not the day I’m worried about,” Tabitha quirked a smile at the woman in return to show her confidence. “I can even just fail each of the make-up finals miserably and still be fine. Springton final tests for a semester only count for twenty percent of the final grade.”

“Well, it’s not just the finals, right?” Mrs. Macintire gave her a look. “Weren’t you out for, what, two full months? Two and a half? October, November, December?”

“I was told it wouldn’t be held against me,” Tabitha tapped the scuffed fiberglass of her cast. “Given the circumstances. If I do fine on the make-up finals, I think they’ll sweep everything under the rug and just have me start second semester like nothing happened.”

“Hmm,” Mrs. Macintire nodded. “And, you think you’ll do okay on the tests?”

“I know I won’t fail them,” Tabitha assured her. “Even if I do poorly, I don’t see doing worse than a B minus. I’m not worried at all.”

“Well,” Mrs. Macintire paused. “That makes this awkward, but… to encourage you, I was going to say we’ll do something special if you do well.”

“Something special?”

“Yeah. It’s—I know it’s kind of sudden to bring up now, right before you do your make-up tests, but it’s something we should have talked about. When Hannah gets all E’s on her report cards—E’s are exceeding or exceptional or something, it’s an elementary school thing apparently—we reward her. The Williams have always done the same thing for Matthew. A lot of parents do. I, uh, well I hesitate to even ask, but did your parents…?”

“I don’t think so,” Tabitha shook her head. “I feel like they would get cross if my grades were bad, but they were never really bad. They were happy for me when I started to do well recently, but… that was it, really. How I do in school never really affected them.”

“Hmm,” Mrs. Macintire frowned. “Well. I’m not gonna judge them, because it’s not my place to—but if I were to judge, this is the face I’d be making. Hah. Oh, Tabitha lighten up, I’m kidding. It’s fine if they don’t care, I guess, but we care. Alright? What I mean to say is, I know this is sudden, but if you ace all of your exams, we’ll do something special. Spoil you a bit—whatever you want. You doing great in school is something that should be a big deal.”

“Um,” Tabitha gave her a nervous smile. “Just. The problem with that, is—you already spoil me. Tons. You’ve given me a place to stay, you, you handed me all of that money—”

“Uhp uhp uhp,” Mrs. Macintire held up a finger to stop her. “That was your money, it was just a little advance from your settlements. All of that’s getting transferred into that account thing, and your medical expenses will draw right from that. Remind me later this week, and we can go down and get you some checks and a balance book so you can start learning that stuff yourself.”

“Checks?” Tabitha repeated, going pale. “...A balance book?!”

“Of course,” Mrs. Macintire took another sip of her coffee. “You’re old enough to learn how to start managing your money and totalling your balance. Right?”

“Right,” Tabitha hid a wince. “I just—it’s a lot to wrap my head around?”

Writing out personal checks just wasn’t something people did much after the early two thousands. Nor was physically penning out numbers to calculate your own account balance like some sort of neanderthal scratching tally marks into the wall of their cave—digital banking tracked all of that with perfect accuracy and absolute convenience.

I only ever HAD one checkbook, way back when I opened my first account with Commonwealth Kentucky Bank, Tabitha remembered. Don’t think I wrote a single check from it. I think I scribbled in like, two whole pages of my little personal balance book, and then just ignored it? Even back then it must have been 2002, and I could just click to the website and see my current balance, or grab one of the bajillion bank statements I kept getting in the mail. After that, everyone was just using debit cards for everything, and setting up automatic payments for bills online. They… they don’t like, actually write out and snail-mail checks to pay their bills here in the late nineties… do they?! PLEASE tell me they don’t.

“Don’t be overwhelmed,” Mrs. Macintire seemed to misread her expression. “When we sit down with the bank people they’ll walk you through everything.”

“I can handle it,” Tabitha promised with a sheepish smile.

Okay, so maybe my parents never spoiled me… but future conveniences ABSOLUTELY have. It’s no big deal. Write down the numbers, subtract what I spend, keep track of it. Simple stuff. Just a necessary hassle for a few more years.

“Well, let’s get this show on the road,” Mrs. Macintire said, finishing her coffee with one last swig. “You’ve got your backpack? Number two pencil, eraser?”

“I’m all set!”

*     *     *

School wasn’t back in session from winter break until the third, so Springton High was once again still, eerie, and quiet when they arrived. The bus loop was empty, but the adjacent parking lot was half-full, and Mrs. Macintire cruised on in and found a spot close to the offices, right where the spaces reserved for staff gave way to the ones for parents and students. The Student Parking sign had a laminated sheet next to it detailing how those with permits or driver’s licenses could apply for a student parking tag, and Tabitha nearly gave herself whiplash attempting to quickly scan through the large print as they pulled past it.

I could… actually have a vehicle in high school this time through, Tabitha realized. Not sure why that never really occurred to me. Casey drives already, Matthew’s just starting to. In my first life dad taught me to drive when I was seventeen, but buying a car was just absolutely out of the question, no one even considered it.

“Here we are,” Mrs. Macintire said. “I’m comin’ in with you, but I might not stay.”

“Oh—you can just drop me off, if you want,” Tabitha said. “You don’t have to—”

“Not just gonna dump you here and say ‘yeah good luck, figure it all out,’ and have you call me when you’re done” Mrs. Macintire snorted. “Again, Tabitha. It’s a parent thing. Humor me.”

“Sorry,” Tabitha winced.

“Sorry?” Sandra arched an eyebrow as she switched off the engine.

“I mean—I shouldn’t be your problem in the first place. If—”

“Oh, stop,” Mrs. Macintire blew a raspberry at her. “C’mon. What happened to calling me ‘mom,’ huh?”

The pair left the Acura behind and walked on into the main office. To Tabitha’s surprise, she wasn’t the only teen there, a boy off to the side was waiting with his mother as well.

“Make-up exams?” The woman behind the counter asked.

“Yes… I think,” Tabitha said. “I need to re-enroll first, though, probably. And um, and also put in a change of residence, if I need to register or anything to be put on the list for a bus stop.”

“Hoo-boy, alrighty,” The woman said. “Name?”

“Tabitha Moore.”

*     *     *

Enrollment turned out to be such a tedious process that they had to interrupt it so that Tabitha could be led down the hall into a room to take the make-up exams. The boy from earlier was there, as well as two girls—one of the girls recognized her and clearly kept eyeballing her, the others paid no attention to her. None of the students there spoke with one another or otherwise seemed familiar with each other, and Tabitha wasn’t even sure what grades they were all in. In the end, it didn’t matter; their testing proctor passed out different packets for each of them, and in no time at all Tabitha was immersing herself in the whimsical world of high school algebra.

Write each expression in a different way using the commutative law of addition.

1 + 4 =

Tabitha actually cringed, embarrassed on their behalf to have such an easy question on their semester final. She scanned quickly through the list of multiple choice answers, found 4 + 1, and penciled in the bubble. Commutative law of addition wasn’t real high school level math, and proving that numbers added up the same no matter which order you added them in felt like something that had been exhaustively taught already in both elementary and middle school.

I DEFINITELY remember more difficult questions on the middle school finals—this is a joke.

The next three questions all followed suit, and then after that, Springton High delved into what must have been the real meat and jumped all the way forward to address the commutative law of multiplication.

10.1 x 2.8 =

The answer was—shockingly—2.8 x 10.1, and with an internal groan Tabitha took in the next three similar problems at a glance and penciled in the bubbles for the correct answers. Commutative law wound up being as simple as just writing the exact same numbers in the question, but backwards. Actually multiplying 10.1 x 2.8 would have been more of a challenge, although Tabitha did notice one of the multiple choice options was 28.28, which would have snared any freshman who failed to read what the problem was actually asking them to do.

Maybe that’s the real trick, Tabitha pondered. To get all these kids thinking that there’s no way it’s this simple, that they must be wanting you to solve. Nope, I’m reading it right. Says ‘write each expression in a different way,’ and 2.8 x 10.1 is right there in the answers.

The next section was covering associative law, and rather than the difficulty ramping up it was just increasingly annoying to double check the number sequences that began to spread the whole way across the page in parentheses and then nesting in several parentheses. It felt like busy work, and although it was frustrating, Tabitha knew that this was the way they were always going to evaluate their student’s comprehension of what felt like the basics of the basics. After associative law came what Tabitha considered to be the quintessential algebra problems, with missing numbers and variables, which was unerringly just using simple arithmetic to complete equations.

So, Tabitha solved for X, then she solved for A, and moving down through the questions on the page at speed she solved for B as well. Algebraic expressions were a joke to most everyone who had been through higher level math, Tabitha didn’t fail to remember what exponents were and how they worked, simplifying linear expressions was easy, and there was nothing much at freshman level to give her pause until she reached quadratic equations.

Ughhh, they’re not even HARD, they’re just SO ANNOYING, Tabitha couldn’t help but make a face. Fuck. Just even looking at them pisses me off.

Simplify each expression by combining like terms.

-3v² + 9 +5v² - 9v² +8.

She’d scrubbed a good deal of these nuisances out of her memory from her past life, and only the few months of school relearning them for homework refreshed her memory enough for her to reach -7v² + 17. It was humbling in a way, because while plenty of ninth grade math she could breeze through effortlessly, there were still definitely some areas where staring at complex sequences of numbers felt like it was turning her brain into mush. How were these problems just a page or two after busywork like commutative law?! In Tabitha’s opinion, the difficulty curve went right into the stratosphere, and she was forced to take her time working things out with a sour expression.

I’m more of an arts and literature girl, that’s all, Tabitha told herself. I swear I’m not stupid. It’s just that I used all of this stuff EXACTLY ONCE in my last life, and it was only whenever I was in school like this.

She had never had any love for math, so she found herself looking down on most of it for being too simple, and then infuriated when she couldn’t see past the numbers to what she was supposed to do. Because, after arriving at the answer, Tabitha was always forced to accept that she had been overthinking things, and once she got the knack of it again the multiple choice bubbles filled up with answers one after another. Even more galling, right after the hateful quadratic equations, test moved right back on to figurative smooth-brain stuff like simplifying basic polynomials.

Simplify each expression.

Z - 1 + 4

It’s Z + 3, right? Tabitha glared daggers at the page. Right?! Why weren’t these shoved back into the kiddie section with the other stupidly simple ones?! I feel like I’m taking crazy pills! Are we going to—oh. Oh, I see. THAT’S how it is, huh?

/// Hah, everyone fantasizes about going back in time to do things over, but everyone just glosses over the fact that it would mean you're dealing with all of this infuriating bullshit all over again. ;p

Comment all you like on the quadratics bit being super easy, my hatred remains undiminished and will not be checked! All equations are simple once you remember how to do them, that's how it works. Wanted to combine a bit of "this is effortless haha I know all of this already" with "wait wtf even is this, this is horrible and I hate it," because that's usually how testing always felt for me. One or the other, with zero in between.

Anyways I needed to come up with an annoying example of high school math Tabitha would momentarily stumble on, and the obnoxious fractions ones are hard to type out.

Will fix links and update guide pages later tonight, tearing down the pet pen and cleaning house so I can keep packing. Hopefully, the couple that wanted to adopt the little guy will be swinging by in a few hours.

In the week between the two vet visits he went from 2.7 pounds to 4.2 pounds. He was great getting his shots, no complaints or fussing. He has not been great staying in the pet pen, now that he's in better health he's been insisting on a lot of play and running around. Can't really begrudge him that though. I mean, look how cute he is.