July, One Unpaid Family, and a Seagull With Excellent Timing

Somewhere off the coast of a town with a lighthouse on its welcome sign, a woman in a beach chair opens an app. Not the tide chart. Not the weather radar. Venmo. This is the story of my Tuesday in July, which I was told, by multiple credible sources including myself, was a vacation.

It is week three of summer break. The class group chat has been asleep since the last day of school, the way a bear is asleep in January, which is to say not actually asleep, just waiting.

The one straggler, and the interest I'm accruing on it emotionally

Everyone paid the year-end trip fund in May. Everyone except one family, who owe $17.50 and have owed it since May 29th, a number I know without checking because I have checked it fourteen times, most recently forty minutes ago, sitting on a towel, sunscreen still wet on my hands.

I sent a friendly nudge on June 2nd.

• Hey, no rush at all, whenever's easy!

I did not mean "whenever's easy." I meant "please, I beg you, close this out so I can stop thinking about it while on a beach in a different state." But you can't type that to a nice family who probably just forgot, so I typed the nice version and let the number sit there like a splinter I've decided to be at peace with.

They liked my message. A thumbs up. No payment. The thumbs up is somehow worse than silence.

September, calling collect from three weeks away

Meanwhile, because apparently my brain does not do "off," I have started the fall supply list. On my phone. Between reapplying sunscreen and yelling at my kid to come back from where the waves are, I am drafting a note titled supplies_fall_DRAFT2 with forty-one line items, a due date I have not set because setting it feels like admitting summer is optional, and a growing dread about the class insurance form that always arrives the same week as the PTO dues, like they coordinate.

Here's the thing nobody warns you about room-parent duty. It doesn't clock out. Other parents get to leave the school year in the school year. I get a school year with an epilogue, and the epilogue is longer than the book.

Anyway.

A brief, flagged tangent about monarch butterflies

Did you know monarch butterflies that hatch in late summer are a totally different generation from the ones earlier in the year, built specifically to fly thousands of miles to Mexico and never having made the trip before? Nobody teaches them the route. They just go, on schedule, generation after generation, no group chat required.

I read that while waiting for that Venmo request to land. It felt a little too on the nose. A butterfly that has never done this before just knows when to migrate. I have done this three years running and I still don't know when September actually starts.

Okay. Back to the beach chair.

The part where I mention the app, briefly, then stop

We eventually built ClassKasa for exactly this kind of thing, one link where a family can see what they owe and pay it without me sending a follow-up text from a beach towel, and the treasurer's the only one who ever pays for the upgrade, never the parents. It would not have gotten me the $17.50 any faster, honestly. Some things aren't a software problem. They're a "life is busy in June" problem, and I've been that family myself, more than once.

Anyway. Where was I.

A seagull landed four feet from my chair, evaluated my bag of chips with the confidence of a creature that has never once been told no, and took one directly out of my hand while I was mid-sentence to my husband about the insurance form. Everyone on the beach applauded. The seagull did not look back.

That $17.50 still hasn't landed. The supply list has forty-one items and counting. But the chips are gone, the tide's coming in either way, and for the next fifteen minutes I'm putting the phone face down in the sand.