Giving to Gain

There was comfort in boxed cake mix, in the sweet flavor that was more yellow than vanilla. Julia shoved the grocery brand mix and a bottle of wine into her backpack. She threw it on her shoulder and rode her bike out onto the sidewalk.

Normally, she would have gone straight home, but today was her birthday. Maybe it was ok to have a treat..

Julia stopped at the little bookstore she always passed heading to the apartment.It was small, and it took no time to wander through the shelves and back to the front of the store. It was nice just to look at the book covers and imagine the stories inside.

A pile of notebooks were sitting on a table at the front of the store. They were piled high, wrapped in plastic and came in all sorts of colors, like rainbow candy. Julia dug through the pile until she found just the right one. Small, black, and lined. Perfect.

At her apartment, Julia put together her birthday dinner. She cooked herself some pasta and baked the cake.

“Happy birthday to me...” she sang.

Her voice was quiet in the empty apartment. With one puff, she blew out the quivering candle. After the cake, it was time for her present. Julia unwrapped the notebook and ran her fingers over the smooth cover. It was definitely better than those dollar store notebooks she had been using.

As soon as Julia opened the book, trumpets blared and glitter shot out of the pages. Julia searched for an off button, scrambling until the sound finally stopped. She found a credit card in the pages and it started to glow when she touched it .

"Congratulations," a voice said, "you have won $20,000."

"What?"

The voice boomed out of the pages of the notebook.“You will receive the $20,000 under the following conditions. You distribute an initial $20,000 to persons unknown to you within one week. This is done in cash, in person, to a private individual, and at no more than $4000 at a time. Further details can be found in the notebook.”

Julia checked the notebook. Everything the voice said was true, written down there on the pages. But was this real? Julia couldn’t believe it.

“Twenty thousand,” Julia whispered.

There was no way it could be real. It was a prank. Julia shook the dreams out of her head and went to bed. In the morning it would be easy to see the truth.

As soon as she opened her eyes in the morning, Julia checked the account. The money was there, and so was a timer, counting down the minutes and seconds. It was synchronized with a timer that had appeared on the credit card.

Seven days.

Okay, so if this was real, she could get $20,000. If it wasn't, what was the worst that could happen? What did she have to lose?

The closest ATM was one hour away by bike. Julia's heart raced the entire way there. Once she put in the card and pin, the account details flickered on to the screen. The money was there. It wasn't fake.

Julia withdrew all the money at once. Once she had shoved the bills in her backpack, Julia felt like she had just pulled off the bank heist. Somehow that seemed impossible that everyone around her didn't know that he had so much money in her backpack.

Back at the apartment, Julia just stared at the piles of cash for a long while, but there was only so long she could stare. Once the rush of holding the money was over, there was a new question. How to get rid of it? Give it away, of course. One thousand dollars at a time to homeless people she saw on the street. Easy. She started her plan, and it only took 10 minutes of biking around town for Julia to come across a homeless man asking for change.

“No job. No family,” his sign read.

Julia stopped her bike and pulled ten hundred dollar bills from her wallet.

At the sight of the money, the man looked up at Julia.

“No. No ma'am, I can’t, it’s-” tears started to form in the man's eyes as he grabbed the money and pushed it back into Julia's palm. “It's too much.”

“Please,” Julia said, “I'm sure it would be nicer to sleep in a bed than on these streets.”

The tears fell from the man's eyes and dampened the money they were holding. He shook his head before he finally let go of Julia's hand.

"Thank you, thank you," he said, almost like a prayer.

With that, her first donation was done.

It didn't take long for Julia to realize that this wasn't the best plan for distributing $20,000. She was a lone young woman giving out $1000 to the people who normally got coins. Even when she decided to decrease the number to500 and eventually $100, there was a problem. Word got around fast.

Soon people were coming up to her demanding payment. That's when Julia decided it was time to go home. She still had $1000 in her wallet. This was going to be harder than she thought.

Six days left. The new plan was just to have a normal day. There was always someone around who needed help, so Julia planned to just give the money away that way.She decided the grocery was a good place to start.

As she shopped, her eyes were wide open. That man shopping alone could be a single father with two little girls. That older woman who needed help with soup could be a widower living on one can a week. Julia’s mind filled with these stories until she finally made her way to the register. That's when something fell on her foot.

“Sorry!”

Julia turned around to see a woman picking up the can with one hand and holding a wide-eyed baby with the other. Two more children clung to her pants.

"It's okay," Julia said. She noticed her nearly empty basket. “Do you need some help?"

“No,” the woman smiled and shook her head,” I don't like to take them out, but the little one said she was hungry and-“

The woman stopped herself,"We're okay, thank you”.

That was the moment Julia knew what she wanted to do. She paid for her groceries and waited by the entrance for the mother.

"Excuse me,” Julia said.

"Oh, I’m sorry, does your foot still hurt? It really wasn't on purpose and –"

No, no, I wanted to give you something," Julia said.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out one of her envelopes, placing it in the woman’s palm. Quickly, the mother peeked inside. Then she looked at Julia, her eyes wide.

"No –" the woman stammered, "you can't –"

Julia smiled and waved. Before the woman could say anything else, she hopped on her bike.

6000 down.

Day three didn’t go as expected. Julia thought she would pay for everyone in line behind her, but she only ended up with two thousand leaving her pockets that way. Turns out it's not as grand of a gesture as she thought it would be. Coffee and fast food, even for a whole family, didn’t add up to much. Day four would be better.

Julia decided to go down to the local food pantry. It took some explaining, and they wanted a copy of her derives license, but she managed to convince the manager to let her give $4000 to four people. The money would be hidden in the pamphlets they distributed.

Julia worked, helping feed people for four hours. At the end of the shift, the $4000 was gone. Julia had seen the faces of over 100 people filter in and out of the food pantry. Old people, young people, but all of them hungry.

She only saw one person open the envelope. A small, quiet man. He ate his food alone, carefully cutting each bite and chewing it as if he might never eat again.

Once he was finished eating and wiped his hands with a napkin, he opened the pamphlet, reading everything the word on each page. The envelope was on the third page, and Julia could see his eyes widen.

He looked around the room, confused . Eventually, he looked for the manager. Had someone forgotten their money?The manager explained and tears started to pour down the man’s face. Julia could hear him saying over and over again "Thank you.".

Julia had to fight her tears as she pretended not to see what was happening. If she could, she would've given all 20,000 him right there. The next day was unexpectedly simple. Julia found the next recipients on the local news. A family had lost their home in a fire. The Richardsons looked tired on her phone screen. Two mothers, a daughter, and a son, stood in front of the ashes of what used to be their home.

After some internet sleuthing, Julia found a link to an almost empty fundraising campaign. She reached out on Twitter and within a few hours they were meeting at a café parking lot.

When she arrived, only one of the mothers was there.

"Julia?" Mrs. Richardson asked. She seemed a bit wary, but also excited.

Julia nodded. She took out the envelope and placed into Mrs. Richardson's warm hands.

"Thank you so much," Mrs. Richardson said. She pulled out a paper of her own. “The kids wanted you to have this.”

It was a little drawing from the boy and the girl. They had drawn themselves as stick figures smiling with third mothers. To the side there was another stick figure in brown crayon of what Julia could only assume was herself in brown crayon. “Is this me?” Julia asked.

"Yeah, the kids were so excited, they wanted to say thank you,"

Julia smiled.

"Tell them I love it."

Two more days, and just $4000 left. That should have been easy. But Julia woke up the next morning with a massive headache. She couldn't stand up, let alone ride a bike. So she slept away the next day.

By the time the throbbing in her head had subsided, there were only a few hours left on the countdown. Maybe she could make the deadline. She had no idea how, but Julia decided to try. She pulled on sweatpants and walked out onto the street, hoping for luck.

It wasn’t long before Julia was stopped in her tracks. A little girl loitered the street.

"Are you alone?" Julia asked her.

"I'm waiting for my daddy,” the girl said. "He's looking for a job, so I have to stay right here and wait. But he's been gone a long time now."

Julia knelt down next to the girl.

"How about I wait here with you until your daddy comes back."

They spent three hours playing games together on Julia’s phone. After a while, Julia stopped worrying about the money. She wasn't going to make it.

Then a pair of dark boots appeared at the edge of Julia's vision.

"Who are you?"

One minute left.

"I'm Julia, but more importantly-"

Julia grabbed the envelope out of her pocket and pressed it into the man's hands. There was no time to explain.

“This is for you,” she said.

00:00. Just in time.

“Just what are you talking about?”

Kristin's father opened the envelope and his stern look changed into a smile. Tears welled up at the corners of his eyes. He didn't say anything, and neither did Julia. She just hugged the girl and started the short walk back to her apartment.

"Congratulations,” the voice from the notebook chimed as she opened the door.

Julia didn't even hear the words that came afterwards. She just slumped to the ground and smiled. Twenty thousand dollars. Just enough to change someone’s life. Maybe even hers this time.