Cost of Living
priorities
The quad smells like dryer sheets and weed, and Drew has been on five campuses this week, so he recognizes the smell of a setup before he recognizes the kids.
They are arranged on the low brick wall outside the student union in a way that looks accidental and isn’t. Five of them. Three on the wall, two on the grass. A laptop is open but angled away. Someone’s tote bag says BREAD NOT BOMBS in iron-on letters that have started to peel.
“Thanks for doing this,” Drew says, and clicks his pen. “It’s quick. I’ll read a prompt, you answer one at a time, no wrong answers.”
“Cool,” says the one in the middle. Hayden, per the sign-in sheet. Hayden has a haircut that costs money and the kind of posture you only get from a private high school. “Fire away.”
Drew reads from the card. “When you think about the country right now, what is the single biggest issue facing your generation?”
“Cost of living,” Hayden says.
A beat.
“Cost of living,” says the girl to his left.
“Cost of living,” says the kid on the grass with the dyed-black hair.
“Cost of living,” says the girl with the nose ring.
“Yeah,” says the last one. Owen, per the sheet. He is looking at his shoes. “That.”
Drew writes nothing for a moment. He has done six hundred and twelve of these interviews this cycle. He knows what coordinated answers sound like. He keeps his face exactly the way the training video told him to keep it.
“Great,” he says. “Let’s go around. Hayden, when you say cost of living, what specifically do you mean?”
Hayden does not pause. “Rent has outpaced wages in every major metro since 2019. Grocery prices are still up something like twenty-five percent from pre-pandemic baselines. My generation is the first in modern American history that will be materially worse off than our parents, and we’re being asked to absorb the inflation of decisions we had no role in making.” He smiles like a man who has practiced smiling. “So. That.”
“Got it,” Drew says. He writes it down. “Priya?”
The girl on Hayden’s left blinks twice. “Same. Like. Rent and stuff. And groceries are, you know, the grocery thing he said. Eggs. The eggs are a whole, um.” She looks at Hayden. Hayden is looking at the middle distance. “It’s like. The whole basket. Of stuff. Got more expensive.”
“Sure,” Drew says. “Marcus?”
The kid on the grass sits up. “Cost of living. Yeah. Like. Things cost money. And there isn’t. As much money. As there should be. For the things.” He nods, hard, like he’s agreeing with himself.
Drew lets the silence sit. He has learned that the silence is the instrument.
“Tessa,” he says.
The girl with the nose ring laughs. It is not a real laugh. “I mean, do you really need me to explain inflation to you? Like, you work for a polling firm. You know what inflation is. Why are we doing this part.”
“I just want to hear it in your words.”
“My words are inflation,” Tessa says. “Inflation is my word.”
Drew writes inflation on his clipboard and circles it once, lightly.
“Owen.”
Owen is still looking at his shoes. Drew can see his hands shaking against the brick.
“I don’t…” Owen says.
“Take your time.”
“I don’t actually have one.” Owen’s voice does something at the back of his throat. “Like, we all have a meal plan. Our parents pay our rent. I bought a four-dollar coffee an hour ago. I don’t, um.” He swallows. “I’m sorry. I don’t have an answer that’s, like, real. We said we’d all say the same thing.”
Hayden’s head turns very slowly.
“Owen.”
“What, Hayden.”
“We literally talked about this twenty minutes ago.”
“I know we talked about it.”
Priya has stopped looking at her phone. Marcus is sitting up all the way now. Tessa is staring at Owen with an expression Drew cannot quite read.
“I’m sorry,” Owen says. He is talking to Drew now, which is somehow worse. “They said if we all said cost of living then they’d have to do the checks again. Like during COVID. They said if the polling was unanimous enough they couldn’t ignore it.”
Hayden exhales through his nose. When he speaks again, his voice has come back from wherever it briefly went. It is the voice he used for the rent-and-wages answer. The spokesman voice.
“It’s our money,” he says. He is looking at Drew now, not Owen. The laptop on the wall is open to a Google Doc with bullet points in twelve-point Arial. “They printed nine trillion dollars during COVID and gave most of it to people who already owned houses. Stimulus, PPP, the asset bubble, all of it. The boomers got their checks and then they cashed out. We’re asking for our share. That’s what cost of living means. It means we figured out that the only language the government speaks is unanimous polling, and we were going to speak it.”
He shrugs, small.
“Write that down.”