One of my best friends got evicted from her house a couple of months ago since her mom refused to work. We’re both seniors in high school, so it’s not like she had many options regarding where she could go. My parents and I didn’t want her ending up at a shelter with her mom, since the nearest shelter is nowhere close to our school, so we invited her to stay at our house until her mom got it together again. At first, it was pretty fun, I was literally living with my best friend. But recently, I’ve been feeling upset and frustrated with her due to a lot of different reasons.

I would say that my academic stats are fairly good, I’m a first generation immigrant, first generation college student, trilingual, I have a 3.8 GPA, a 29 on the ACT (around a 1380 on the SAT), I’ve taken 7 APs which I have all passed and gotten scores above a 3 on all of the exams, I’ve been in advanced math classes since 6th grade, and I have taken multiple Honors and dually enrolled college classes, apart from having 2 part time jobs and over 70 hours of community service. My friend, on the other hand, has taken one single AP class, didn’t pass it, and didn’t even take the exam, she has a GPA of 3.0, and not nearly as many STEM and ELA credits. Yet all I have received from the university I’m going to in the fall is a 2,000 dollar grant. It took my cost of attendance from $29,000 to $27,000. I also did not receive anything from the FAFSA (since they think that a $116K income for a family of 5– not including the new cost of having an extra person in our home— is enough to send a child to college with no aid), and my SAI is not considered to show “financial need” so I don’t qualify for many scholarships. I am literally commuting to college to cut the cost of attendance and we still do not have the money to pay for my tuition.

A couple of weeks ago, I found out that I received two scholarships from my high school, which totaled out to be $2,500 dollars. I was pretty excited since I was 100% losing hope that I wouldn’t receive any scholarships at all. I told my friend about it, and she replied with “that’s not bad.” Her comment caught me a little bit off guard, yes of course it’s not bad— it could obviously be a lot more money but at the end of the day, I won something! I replied to her, “Not bad? Then what’s a good amount?”

She said “Well, I’m going to college for free thanks to the FAFSA, and in fact, I might even be getting paid to go to college.”

I clearly did not receive that very well. I’m glad she doesn’t have to worry about paying for college, but at the same time, I have expressed my stress over the cost of college to her many times before, so it felt a little “in-my-face” when she made the (what I think was) unnecessary mention of not only getting college for free, but getting PAID to go.

More recently, just a few days ago, she told me she received a 5,000 dollar scholarship from the after school club that she attends. I congratulated her and told her I was happy for her, but again, I couldn’t help but feel like she doesn’t need to be telling me all about all the free money she’s getting simply because her mom refuses to work.

Now, just today, the results of a scholarship that many incoming college freshmen receive in our state thanks to Warren Buffet came out. She told me to check my results, and as expected, because I don’t meet the “financial need” requirements, I was denied of the scholarship. My friend proceeded to say “Well, at least you know you’re not poor like me!” before she opens her results, and finds out that she had received yet another full-ride scholarship to college. This time, I didn’t have it in me to even congratulate her. I was so angry, how could she be so poor when she’s living in my parents’ house, rent free, literally has no costs to pay when living with us, and won’t be paying for college, at all, while my family and I are stressing over how we will pay for my future education.
Since then, I haven’t talked to her. I just want to tell her that I don’t want to hear about her scholarships again or how much money she’s getting. Every time I see her, I get so jealous and angry. And maybe I shouldn’t be saying this, but sometimes I just barely think that if she really wanted to see what “poor” feels like, maybe she could move out of my house and go live with her mom in a shelter or wherever she ended up.

This has been more of a rant than anything, I’m sorry. AITAH for feeling this way?