After so many years spent loathing it, Lily Motes felt the unquenchable urge to go back to her childhood home. Only she couldn’t anymore. Other people lived there now. And they had even added a pool in the backyard, complete with waterfall features. Just like she had always wanted. But her parents, in all their middle-class glory, couldn’t go the full “extra mile” on that front. It was already a huge leap for them, “upwardly mobile-wise,” to have managed to finagle the down payment on a house in a neighborhood this posh. So posh, in fact, that it was placed behind a gate that only residents and their sanctioned guests could enter. Lily didn’t think much of it at the time…not before high school anyway. That’s when the class-oriented vitriol really started to get intense, with people mocking her for being “rich” because she lived in a gated community. She knew it would be best not to correct them with the “retort” that, if she were really rich, she’d at least have a fucking pool. Thereby giving her the chance to re-create the Paris Hilton meme where she’s shown lying poolside with her “Y2K” sunglasses on and the glittery pink caption, “Stop being jealous.”

Lily hardly felt as affluent and “the world is my oyster” as Hilton, but those at her school certainly made her out to be that way. This is how she started to despise going home every day after school, doing whatever she could to put it off. This meant joining in school activities she otherwise never would have (e.g., student council) and going to quote unquote friends’ houses that were far less comfortable than hers. Jori’s house on Walnut Street came to mind. It was a one-story with orange (turned beige-ish) carpeting, “old lady” wallpaper and five cats. And it always smelled like all five cats had taken a fresh shit at the same time.

Jori’s parents were usually gone, which meant she and Lily had free rein over the living room, spending hours watching MTV while feigning they were going to do their homework at some point. They never did. Though that was the excuse Lily would consistently give for being over at other people’s houses. Insisted to her parents, Abby and Ray, that having a social element to “studying” and “doing homework” made the material more engaging for her.

Of course, it only took until the end of the first semester of her freshman year for her parents to grasp that they had been conned. Abby, the more “tough love”-giving of the two, was swift in grounding Lily for a month, while Ray, trying to take a more understanding approach, would let Lily out of the house whenever her mother wasn’t around. Eventually, Abby caught on to what was happening and it caused a huge fight between them. One of many fights that had been cropping up ever since they moved into this palatial abode. With a palatialness that was all surface. For, beyond what one saw on the exterior, Abby and Ray couldn’t afford to outfit the place the way that it ought to be. So instead of achieving the desired effect that they hoped moving into this “palace” would have, it only served to highlight how many rungs down the ladder they still were from being able to call themselves “rich” the way everyone at Lily’s school assumed them to be.

As for Lily’s younger brother, Matthew, he was still too young to have to deal with what she was enduring. And, of course, being a boy, his friends found his so-called wealth something to “worship” rather than make fun of. That was seemingly reserved only for Lily, who started to do her best to dress as shittily as possible. Except that only made it worse. The others could sniff her ploy out from a mile away. But if she dressed well, she was fucked too. Caught in a classic scenario of damned if you do and damned if you don’t. She chose “do.” After all, if they were going to bill her as a “rich bitch” anyway, she figured she should at least play into the role. She started shoplifting from all the preppy stores—American Eagle, Abercrombie, Gap, Old Navy. Everyone assumed her parents lavished her with these clothes, but they had no idea how strict and tight-fisted Abby and Ray actually were.

Moving into that house had made them become even more so. This, Lily realized, was another part of the reason she hated living there so much. Even though, only later of course, she understood that her parents had moved into that place for her benefit. For their children’s benefit. Wanting to keep them safe, wanting them to have the things that they never had—it was all part of the well-intentioned motivation for doing what they did. But the end result was an utter failure, had totally backfired. And it made Lily (and, eventually, Matthew) completely recoil from their home, preferring to spend their time at other people’s just to remove the stench of guilt they were imbued with for living in a house and neighborhood like that.

Lily also knew that part of her resentment about it stemmed from the fact that her parents couldn’t just go “all the way” with their endeavor. Because they were middle class, they were half-in and half-out of the “upper class” echelon. Mostly out though—and living beyond their means in order to delude themselves and everyone else around them into thinking otherwise.

There is often little sympathy for middle-class people. Indeed, they’re usually more vilified than the rich. Not for “hoarding resources,” so much as for wanting so badly to be like the truly affluent…not to mention their perceived complacency and cud-chewing, combined with their ceaseless and ultimately inane pursuit to somehow “ascend” the ladder toward a class above. One that they can never quite reach and one that only becomes further and further away the more unaffordable the cost of living becomes. As it did when the subprime mortgage loan Abby and Ray had taken out for the house reached such a high interest rate that they had to default on their payment…multiple times. So if Lily had been made fun of for being “rich” before 2008, she was now made fun of for being poor during the two years she had left of high school. And naturally, going to a decent college was out of the question. She’d have to get some thankless minimum wage job just to be able to pay to go to community college about thirty minutes away from where her parents had now moved. It was a two-bedroom apartment. One room for her parents, one for her brother and the pull-out couch in the living room for Lily.

Every night, when she tried to fall asleep on that couch, she would dream of escaping to another city, of having a place of her own. One that she could afford, not one that made her perennially broke in order to pay for it. She wanted this genuine affordability even if it was but a “modest shack.” To do that, she knew she needed to get her associate’s degree in something practical, so she went for nursing. When she was finished, she had already lined up a job at a hospital in Los Angeles. Was it pursuing her “once upon a time” fantasy of becoming “a star”? Hardly. But maybe, as someone who had reconciled with her “middle classness” after being so humbled by the circumstances that led her to live in these undersized conditions with her parents past the age of eighteen, she could settle for being “average.” Even though being able to survive on one’s salary was, these days, nothing short of extraordinary. Technically “above average.”

Being able to acknowledge that to herself about five years into the job, Lily could pause to appreciate what she had accomplished—and what her parents had unintentionally taught her about the “best” way to live (at least within the unavoidable system that most U.S. citizens were forced to participate in). Yet it was only after commencing a career she wasn’t exactly passionate about that she had a newfound appreciation for what her parents had managed to do. Even if it was extremely misguided. For they had dared to fly too close to the sun. And oh, how all of them got burned for that. Without even so much as a pool to cool themselves off in.