Indiana University

Indiana University is the familiar state-school reference point in Aza Holmes and Daisy Ramirez’s conversations about college: Daisy plans to attend, while Aza measures other possibilities against its cost and her family’s ties to it. The university makes higher education feel both concrete and constrained in the novel, bringing the friends’ unequal finances into focus even as Aza begins imagining a life beyond the options she had assumed were available.

Place in the Characters’ Plans

Aza identifies Indiana University as the state school in Bloomington, a couple of hours south of her home. Before reading a college guide, she had scarcely considered attending anywhere else besides Indiana University or Purdue. Her parents’ histories help explain that familiar frame: her mother attended Indiana University and her father attended Purdue, and both schools seemed inexpensive beside out-of-state alternatives.

Daisy, too, treats Indiana University as a settled destination. After picking up a college guide, she says she does not need it because she is definitely going there. Her decision gives the institution a different function from its role in Aza’s thinking: for Daisy, it is the chosen plan; for Aza, it is the default against which a widening range of possibilities can be measured.

Tuition and Unequal Means

The novel places Indiana University inside a persistent conversation about the price of education. Aza’s mother worries about future loans and points to the high cost of in-state tuition in the United States. Aza, still a high-school junior, jokes that she could win the lottery or sell meth to pay for college, but the humor sits beside her mother’s genuine concern about how to finance her education.

After Aza and Daisy receive money, Aza observes that $50,000 is less than half of what Indiana University would cost. Daisy’s response makes the difference in their circumstances plain: she calculates that the sum represents roughly 5,900 hours at her job, or about 700 eight-hour shifts—and even those shifts are difficult to obtain consistently. What Aza sees in relation to tuition, Daisy sees as years of labor. The university’s cost therefore serves not just as a price but as a measure of how differently the friends experience the same windfall.

Daisy’s college-guide reading extends that contrast. She is startled by schools that cost almost $100,000 per year and jokes about yachts, castles, and house-elves, concluding that even her newly wealthy self could not afford an expensive college. Her commitment to Indiana University remains intact amid those comparisons; the guide does not redirect her plan so much as clarify why the familiar state school suits it.

Aza’s Expanding Horizon

For Aza, the college guide opens a possibility beyond the local and inherited choices of Indiana University and Purdue. Reading about hundreds of schools, she imagines a small college on a hill, old buildings, classes in intimate rooms, and a library study carrel once used by Alice Walker. She recognizes that $50,000 would barely reduce the tuition at such a school, but considers scholarships because her grades and standardized-test performance might help.

Her imagined future moves across geography and academic interests: she pictures classes in politicized geography and nineteenth-century British women’s literature, walks on gravel paths, studying with friends, and conversations at a college coffee shop. The book lets her try out possible selves rather than commit to one destination. Against that expanding horizon, Indiana University remains both a real, affordable reference point and a symbol of the future Aza had previously taken for granted.