It Will All Work Out (Intersex gxg)

Chapter 63

               The first week without Shay was about as hard as I expected it to be. Keeping busy at work helped a lot, and I would stay late taking kickboxing and yoga classes too. Lynn had been at the gym a lot ever since she'd moved in with Amy, so the two of us did extra workouts when Amy was busy. Otherwise, the three of us would take classes or just work out together. They were also my dinner companions every night. Sometimes I joined them at their apartment, and sometimes they came to the house. It was a hell of a lot better than cooking for myself, but I still missed looking across the table and seeing Shay's blue eyes gazing back at me.

But it didn't help when it was time for sleep. As much as I would have liked to sleep on the couch over at the girls' place, or have them crash in my guest room, I couldn't ask that. They were young and in love, and they deserved to have time alone. I didn't sleep well, even with some sleep medication and white noise playing on my phone, but I was able to subsist on a few hours per night.

It was just the nightmares that had me waking up screaming during those hours, so they were never continuous. Seeing Otis come out of the shadows or feeling him jump on me as my clothes were torn away made me wake up in cold sweats every night. I called my therapist for an emergency appointment on Wednesday, but it didn't help. Nothing could stop my brain when the darkness fell.

Of course, none of that mattered any more when Friday arrived.

I was working all morning, helping out Amy with the assistant manager job and still setting up the classes or manning the phones. I still chipped in with the cleaning, though most of the members were very good at wiping things down when they were done. But there were always people looking for a spotter, or with help adjusting the weights to where they needed them, and I liked to get there quickly to make sure things were easy for them. If they had a good time, they'd keep coming back, right?

In any case, I was taking a well-deserved lunch break in the employee lounge and checking my phone, when I realized I had a notification on my URI Student App. Assuming it had something to do with my upcoming classes, like a required reading or syllabus, I opened it up. But I was puzzled when it said that my payment for the semester was rejected, which made no sense to me whatsoever. I checked the account numbers in my profile, and they were still entered from the last two semesters, so I didn't understand that at all.

But it became very clear when I logged onto the BankRI App and noticed that my college fund amount was now zero. I hadn't checked it in a while, but I was pretty sure that I'd used under $5k during each of the two previous semesters thanks to my academic scholarship. Had I been hacked? That was my initial panicked thought as I looked blankly at the zeroes that mocked me. But then I checked the account details, and noticed that the money was transferred to another account. More specifically, one with my mother's name on it.

She'd cleaned out my college fund!

I quickly dialed her number, not expecting to answer, since she hadn't replied even once since she'd been out of rehab. To my surprise though, she answered on the third ring.

"Amber, darling! How are you?" She sounded lucid, sober, and annoyingly chipper for someone who just wiped out over $85k of my money. Money that I'd planned on being able to use the remainder of once I was done with college.

"Mom, what happened to my college fund? I need that money back to go to school!" I growled into the phone, not caring about niceties.

"That is no way to speak to your mother! We haven't talked in a long time. Are you doing well?"

"Seriously? Okay, fine. I'm at work, and trying to go to school, but the school won't let me go if all my money to pay for it is gone. You know, the money dad put away for me when I was still in diapers? The money that was meant for me to get an education? Well, it seems that you must have accidentally moved it, because it was transferred into one of your other accounts, and I need it back."