“She hears Madison going on about two-hundred-dollar salon deposits every day at the lunch table.”

He turned around and leaned his shoulder on the painted cinder block wall, arms folded tight across his chest.

He looked over my head toward the gym doors and laid down his terms without giving me one second to answer.

“If you’d handled your paychecks better, you wouldn’t be begging me in a hallway,” he said.

The words hung in the cold hallway air like frost on a window.

Two high school track coaches walked by carrying red plastic cones and stepped around us without breaking off their conversation.