This short story has a lot of different things going on. It starts with the narrator taking an exam in college. She wants to get better than a C on her exam as all of her other courses are C work. She struggles with one of the questions and gets frustrated when the assistant professor said time was up. On her way home, she talks about how she once decorated an apartment she loved. But then came to reality talking about her apartment looking like poverty now. She keeps having this ringing in her ear that won’t go away, she thinks it’s lack of sleep, or too many pills or teas. We find out that her parents died in a bad car accident and that she is living alone with just a picture of them on her wall.
Robison is trying to make the narrator a depressed and alone college student, wishing that she could have more and do better than she is. She wants to have an apartment she can decorate with fancy things. She wants to get better grades than C work. But I think the thing holding her back is that she doesn’t have her parents to push her nor help her anymore. She is simply depressed and is trying to keep moving forward without her parents.