She stood in my kitchen holding nine hundred dollars in babysitting money and told me she hadn’t known where the money for her braces came from until April. Her mother had told her insurance had finally agreed to cover most of it. Then one afternoon she heard Levi arguing with his father and realized every appointment she’d been going to had been paid for with money Levi had saved since he was eleven. She said she’d confronted her mother that night, and her mother told her not to get involved because Levi’s father had “offered” the money and would replace it eventually. That was why she’d stopped accepting rides to the orthodontist. She couldn’t sit beside her mother in the car pretending she didn’t know.
I called Levi downstairs, and when she handed him the envelope, he wouldn’t take it. He told her the braces weren’t her fault and that she should keep what she’d earned. She started crying and said there was something else he needed to know. The payment-plan printout listed her mother as responsible for the account, but beside the April payment was a handwritten note from the office: “Balance paid by transfer per parent request.” She had asked the receptionist which parent had called. It wasn’t her mother. It was Levi’s father, and he’d called the orthodontist three days before taking the money out of Levi’s account. This hadn’t been an emergency payment after a bill came due. He’d planned the withdrawal in advance.
Then she gave us the orthodontist’s card because the receptionist had told her there was something strange about the account history. I called with her mother present later that week, and we learned the original payment plan had been perfectly manageable — two hundred dollars a month, with no overdue balance at all. There had been no reason to take four thousand dollars from Levi in one payment. His father had specifically asked whether they would discount the treatment if he paid the remaining balance immediately, and they had. The discount was six hundred dollars, but only $3,400 ever reached the orthodontist. The full $4,000 had disappeared from Levi’s account, and when I asked his father where the other six hundred went, he stopped answering my calls.
