The Price of Not Saying You're Broke

Nine million dong a month. The group chat lights up close to eleven at night: hotpot buffet, four hundred thousand a head, coffee after. She lies there looking at the screen for a long while, doing the math. Nearly five hundred thousand for one evening — five days of her own food.

She went the last three times. Had a genuinely good time, too, none of it faked. It's just that back in her room, opening the banking app stung in a way she couldn't say out loud to anyone. It took her a while to admit something: she hadn't gone for the fun. She'd gone so they wouldn't find out she was struggling. Which meant that every one of those nights, she paid five hundred thousand to buy silence about her own salary.

This time she started typing the usual — I'm busy. Typed it, deleted it. Typed it again, deleted it again. Sitting there she almost laughed: the face she was guarding so carefully, nobody in that group had ever asked her to guard. Not one of them had ever followed up to ask what she was busy with. She had built it herself, stood watch over it herself, and worn herself out on it herself.

In the end she sent the true thing: money's a bit tight this month, could we do somewhere cheaper, or just get bún đậu and sit in the park after. Her heart hammered after she hit send, sure they'd think she was cheap. One of them replied straight away — sure, I'm running low too, I only dared say it because you did. Then two, three more: same here. That night the whole group ate sixty-thousand bún đậu on plastic stools by the road and talked until ten. No less fun than any of the other times.

I thought I was the cheapest one there. Turns out I just spoke first.

Everyone had been waiting for somebody else to say it first, and that shared silence was the thing costing all of them money. So — is there a message sitting in your phone right now, typed and deleted, just because you're afraid of what people will decide about you?