The sun had barely risen over Los Angeles when Amy Whittaker woke to the familiar rattle of the dorm pipes. The building always sounded tired, as though it had seen too many anxious freshmen and instant-noodle dinners to keep pretending it was a home. She rolled out of bed, stepped over a pile of economics textbooks, and found Hannah by the window, already awake, coffee steaming in one hand.
“Big exam today,” Hannah said.
“I had a dream you forgot your calculator.”
Amy laughed.
“I had a dream I graduated and never looked at a calculator again.”
They were opposites in every way. Amy—the accountant-in-training, practical, cautious, the kind of person who color-coded her receipts.
Hannah—the dreamer from Oregon’s coast, loud, funny, beautiful in that accidental way that made everyone turn twice. They met during freshman orientation, two homesick girls who couldn’t afford campus coffee and shared an umbrella that broke in the first Santa Ana wind.
By week’s end, they were inseparable.
They lived through ramen nights and secondhand furniture, through breakups and late-night rooftop confessions about what they’d do if they ever made it out of debt.
“I’ll open a little store,” Hannah would say.
“Sell something real. Handmade soaps, maybe.”
“I’ll save everyone else’s money,” Amy would reply, grinning. “Someone has to be responsible for your chaos.”
Years passed in a blur of deadlines and cheap takeout.
Graduation came with caps, gowns, and promises shouted over campus bells.
Amy headed to San Francisco with a job offer from a mid-tier accounting firm; Hannah stayed in Portland, claiming she wanted to be closer to her parents. They texted every day at first.
Then every week. Then once a month.
The first call for help came on a gray Tuesday.
Amy was reconciling invoices when her phone buzzed.
Hannah’s name lit the screen.
“Amy,” Hannah said, voice trembling.
“My dad’s sick. Heart trouble. The roof caved in during the storm—Mom’s house is soaked.
I—I don’t know what to do.”
Amy pictured the small clapboard house Hannah had once shown her in photos—peeling paint, wildflowers by the porch.
“How much do you need?” she asked.
“I hate asking.” Hannah’s voice cracked.
“Eight thousand. I swear I’ll pay you back in a year.”
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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