$10,000

"Ms. P, do you think I'm asking for too much?" This from a soon-to-graduate Senior.

I know the answer without even hearing the situation: yes.

"What's that?"

"I told my parents when they go back to Mexico this summer they should sign the apartment over to me, leave me a car, and give me $10,000."

I feel the look come over my face that I have given her once for every dollar: "How much do you make in a week?"

"I don't get paid every week." She's guileless, just literal.

I don't snap but close by eyes: "When you get paid, how much do you make?" She's clearing about a thousand a month, seems unambitious for more.

"And how much is the rent? (And the electric and the gas and the groceries and such. Not to mention the four-dollars-per-gallon-by-then.) Have you done the math?" Though the answer is obvious. "You could never make it on that kind of money alone." Too bad the personal finance requirement doesn't kick in until next year, I think. Not that it would matter.

"That's why they need to leave me ten thousand."

"No, they really don't." And her eleventh grade friend and I are matching metronomes of negative head-shaking with the emphasizing eye-roll. "No, dear. Just, no."

Unlike, perhaps, the grown-ups down the hall I don't leap to, "Do they even have it?" They could, though easily is not the word. Nobody saves like these families, at least not in my experience. The discipline is a wonder to me with my typical American habits. Teenagers--unlike this one--with a second job procured just for cash to be stashed for a concrete and then achieved goal. Cars paid in full. Homes. Real estate investments (I'm serious). Four-wheelers. Mothers with bank accounts and extra thousands at home in a box, much to my vaguely worried consternation. "She knows it'd be insured in the bank, right?" I pass surreptitious messages home.

So this girl, good grief. Is she missing a gene? Has she been here too long? Entitlement must be contagious. The new American dream: to be supported by one's parents in the circumstances to which one has become accustomed, no matter the cost. Oblivious all along.