In January, she moved into a room in her mother’s three-bedroom house on the other side of Durham. But then her sister pushed Jaqueta’s laptop off of a shelf. The impact of the fall cracked the laptop’s screen. “It was accidental clumsiness,” says Janeta.
Jaqueta left her mother’s home and moved into a new shelter. This was not the first time that she had left home. In 2011, when she was pregnant with Jah’Maya, her mother asked her to move out.
“I was tired of living under my mother’s rules,” she said. “It just became not acceptable.”
The new shelter did have wi-fi access, but there was only one computer for the dozen or so women living there. Jaqueta slowly disengaged from school.
But Jaqueta never caught on to the fact that she had been dropped from the rolls at Everest. If you ask her what happened, she believes that the school suspended her in February and not back in October of the previous year. In her mind, even though she was not logging on to study, she believed that she was registered all the way through February of 2013.
Another thing she has never been clear about was the extent of her borrowing. When I talked with her, Jaqueta never knew if she had received grants or if she was paying for school with loans. Her only sense of the cost was the small fee she paid out of her pocket to start school.