The hammer rang once. A spark jumped off the anvil and did not go out. It waited. They followed.

Tara's laptop died on a Tuesday in the middle of November. It did not make a noise or show an error. It simply went black halfway through a sentence and did not come back, no matter how long she held the button down.

It was seven years old. It had been her cousin's before it was hers. One of the hinges was held on with tape, and the letter E had to be pressed twice. It had written every Gazette story she had ever edited, and most of her application essay, which was due in eleven days.

The essay, at least, was saved somewhere else. Danya had made her promise that, back in September, after he lost a whole science project. She sent him a message that said you were right and nothing else, and he sent back a thumbs-up and an anvil.

But she needed something to write it on.

On Saturday, after her shift at the bakery, she walked down the high street in the rain to the electronics shop. It was warm inside and smelled of new plastic. There were laptops on a long white table with their screens all showing the same slow picture of a mountain lake.

There was one she liked. It was light and quick and had a proper keyboard, the kind where every letter worked the first time. The card in front of it said £450.

Underneath, in much bigger letters, was a second card.

Only £24.99 a month!

Tara looked at it for a long time.

Twenty-four pounds ninety-nine. That was less than half of one Saturday. She could hardly feel a number that small. She had been dreading four hundred and fifty pounds all week, and here it was, cut into a piece so small it barely counted.

She felt the panic of the week loosen in her chest. She could have it today. She could have it and still save for the rent deposit, and finish the essay by Friday, and nobody would have to know how close it had all come.

There was a leaflet in a plastic stand next to the card. On the front it said EASY FINANCE in friendly round letters, and there was a photograph of a smiling young woman holding a laptop very like this one.

Tara picked up the leaflet and turned towards the till.

Cyrus was on the till.

Tara knew him a little. He was in the year above, at the sixth-form college across town, and he worked Saturdays at the shop. He had written a piece for the Gazette in the summer about how to tell a real bargain from a fake one in the January sales. It had been one of the most-read things they had printed. He had a dry, slow voice and did not seem easily impressed by anything.

"That one," Tara said, holding up the leaflet. "On the monthly thing. Please."

Cyrus looked at the leaflet. Then he looked at her.

"What's the total you pay back?" he said.

"It's twenty-four ninety-nine a month."

"That's not what I asked," said Cyrus, quite kindly. "That's how much each piece is. What's the total?"

Tara opened her mouth and found that she did not know. She had not looked. The big number had been so small and so friendly that she had not thought there was anything else to look at.

She thought about Devon at the bakery in October, asking what Sundays would cost her before she could say yes. She thought about how close she had come to saying yes then, too.

"I don't know," she said.

"Shall we find out?" said Cyrus. "Before you sign anything. It's quiet. I've got a pen."

They sat at the end of the counter where the phone cases were. Danya had come in out of the rain to find her, because she had promised him hot chocolate after her shift, and he leaned on the counter to watch.

Cyrus turned the leaflet over. The back was not friendly. The back was small grey writing in long paragraphs.

"Here," he said, and put his finger on a line. "Twenty-four monthly payments of £24.99."

"Twenty-four months," said Tara. "That's two years."

"Two years," said Cyrus. "You'd still be paying for it in your second year at university." He wrote on the back of the leaflet. "Twenty-four times £24.99."

Danya did it on his phone before Cyrus had finished writing. "Five hundred and ninety-nine pounds seventy-six," he said.

Tara stared at the number.

"And if you pay all at once," said Cyrus, "it's four hundred and fifty."

"So the monthly one costs," Tara began.

"A hundred and forty-nine pounds seventy-six more," said Cyrus. "For the same laptop. Same box. Same lake on the screen."

Tara felt a cold little drop in her stomach, the same feeling she had had when she first read her payslip properly.

"Is that a scam?" Danya asked.

"No," said Cyrus. "It's written down. It's all there. It's just that the big number on the front is the small one, and the big number is on the back, small. That's what borrowing costs. You pay extra to have it now instead of later. Sometimes that's worth it. You just need to know the total before you decide."

"Small payments, big total," Tara said quietly.

"Add up every payment," said Cyrus. "Always. Every time."

Ms Okonjo, who managed the shop, came over when she saw them bent over the leaflet. She was tall and calm and had worked in shops for twenty years.

"If you don't like the two-year plan," she said, "there's the other one. Pay in three. Look, it's on the next card." She pointed. "Three payments. No interest at all. You pay exactly the same as the price. Lots of people find it really helps."

Tara looked. It was true. The card said PAY IN 3 · 0% INTEREST, and underneath, 3 × £150.

"Three times a hundred and fifty is four hundred and fifty," Danya said. "That's the same."

"It is the same," said Ms Okonjo. "I'm not trying to trick you. It genuinely helps people who need something now and get paid monthly."

Yusuf came in five minutes later. He had been passing on his way to the library and had seen them through the window. Yusuf had helped Tara read her payslip in October and had, ever since, been unable to walk past a piece of small print without reading it.

"Can I see?" he said.

Ms Okonjo, who seemed to find all this rather funny, handed him the pay-in-three leaflet.

Yusuf read the line under the big number. Then the line under that.

"It's interest-free," he said. "That's true. Three payments of a hundred and fifty. But if you miss one, there's a twelve-pound fee. And it needs a credit check, and you have to be over eighteen." He looked up. "So it'd be in your mum's name, not yours."

"Oh," said Tara.

"And it's still borrowing," said Yusuf. "It's just borrowing that doesn't cost extra if everything goes right."

"If everything goes right," said Tara.

"That's most of what small print is about," said Yusuf. "What happens if it doesn't."

Ms Okonjo nodded. "He's right," she said. "Most people pay on time and it's fine. But he's right."

Marcus had built Tara's budget with her in October, on the back of a paper bag, at the bakery. It had a job for every pound. Half of each month's Saturday money went to the rent deposit for her first term away. The rest covered her phone, her bus pass, climbing, and the occasional hot chocolate.

She rang him, standing by the phone cases, with Yusuf and Cyrus both listening.

"Read me the numbers," said Marcus.

She did.

"So the pay-in-three is a hundred and fifty a month," said Marcus. "And you save a hundred and twenty-seven fifty a month for the deposit. That's half of two hundred and fifty-five."

"Yes."

"Then a hundred and fifty is twenty-two fifty more than you save," Marcus said. "For three months. So either the deposit stops for three months and some, or something else in the budget stops. It doesn't fit as it is. A payment has to fit a budget that already has jobs."

Tara closed her eyes.

"What's the laptop for?" Marcus asked. He had asked her almost the same question in October.

"The essay," Tara said. "And university. And the Gazette."

"What does the essay need?"

Tara thought about it honestly. "A keyboard where E works the first time. And a screen."

"Danya," said Marcus, because he could hear him breathing, "doesn't the library do refurbished ones?"

Danya brightened. "Yes! The scheme. They fix up old ones from offices. Mr Pettit's son got one."

Yusuf had already found it on his phone. "Two hundred and eighty," he said. "Three years old. Six-month guarantee. They've got two in."

"It won't be as nice," said Tara.

"No," said Cyrus. "But it'd be paid for."

Tara did not answer straight away. She walked to the window and looked at the rain on the glass.

The trouble was not the maths. The maths was done. The trouble was that she wanted the beautiful one. She had wanted something new and hers for a long time, and she had worked every Saturday since October, and it seemed unfair that working hard should still end in a three-year-old laptop with somebody else's stickers half scraped off the lid.

She said this out loud, because Yusuf and Cyrus and Danya were the kind of people you could say it to.

"That's allowed," said Yusuf. "Wanting it isn't the mistake."

"The mistake would be not knowing what it costs," said Cyrus. "You know now. You can still choose the nice one. Lots of people would."

"And the essay?" said Tara. "Eleven days. The library ones need setting up. What if it isn't ready?"

Yusuf looked it up again. "The library lends laptops for a week," he said. "Free. You just need your card. You could write the essay on one of those whatever you decide."

Tara turned round. "So the deadline isn't actually the problem."

"The deadline was making it feel like an emergency," said Cyrus. "Emergencies make people sign things. That's half of why the small number is on the front."

Ms Okonjo, behind the counter, gave a small laugh. "I'll pretend I didn't hear that," she said. "But he's not wrong."

Danya was writing on the leaflet again. He drew a line down the middle, the way Tara had taught him in October, and wrote new one on one side and library one on the other. Under new one he wrote £450 now, or £599.76, or Mum. Under library one he wrote £280 in December, deposit a bit later. Then, after thinking, he added E works under both.

Tara laughed despite herself.

"What would be left over," she asked Marcus, who was still on the phone, "if I bought the library one from my savings?"

"You've saved a hundred and twenty-seven fifty so far," said Marcus. "Add all of November's pay at the end of the month and you'd have enough for it in early December. Use a library loan for the essay until then. The deposit would be about two months behind where you planned, but it would keep going after that, and you wouldn't owe anybody."

"And if I waited for the new one?"

"Then you'd be saving for a laptop instead of a deposit for a few months," said Marcus. "Also a real choice. Nobody can tell you which matters more. That's your bit."

The shop had gone quiet. The rain was still coming down outside. The mountain lake went on rippling on every screen.

Ms Okonjo came back over, not to sell anything, just to stand with them.

"I want to say one thing," she said. "Splitting a cost isn't wicked. My mum bought our first washing machine on a plan when I was little, and it changed her whole week. Pay-in-three really is interest-free. For somebody who's careful, it's a fair deal. I'd rather you knew all of that than walked out thinking we're crooks."

Tara believed her. It was the strongest version of the argument, and Ms Okonjo meant it.

Her phone buzzed. It was her mum, who knew about the laptop.

I can lend you the money, love. Don't stress. You can pay me back whenever. I just want you to have something decent for your essay.

Tara read it twice. Her mum meant that too. It would be the easiest thing in the world.

And there was the essay. Eleven days. A Friday deadline that did not care about any of this.

She looked at the leaflet, covered now in Cyrus's handwriting. On one side, the total: five hundred and ninety-nine seventy-six. On the other, the fit: twenty-two fifty a month more than she saved. A line underneath, in Yusuf's writing: missed payment = £12. In Mum's name. And at the bottom, in Danya's untidy letters, an arrow pointing to library, £280, two in stock.

The laptop she liked was beautiful. The one at the library was not. Her mum's offer was kind. The deadline was real.

None of it was a trick. That was what made it hard.

Ms Okonjo smiled at her.

"So," she said. "Which one?"

Tara looked at the leaflet one more time.

 

 

(Write what Tara says to Ms Okonjo.)

 

The spark dimmed to a warm dot and settled back on the anvil. The Green was just the Green again.

Back on the Green

That week a game Danya played offered him a bundle of coins for only 99p a week. He nearly tapped it.

Then he went to find a calculator, and worked out a year of it, and told Lan, who was seven and had no idea what he was talking about, that fifty-one pounds forty-eight was a lot of coins.

Afterword. The ideas in this case are the total cost of borrowing and fitting a payment to a budget. A small monthly number is designed to feel easy, but the cost of a deal is the total of every payment, compared with the price if you paid at once. Some plans, like many buy now, pay later schemes, charge no interest if every payment is made on time, but may charge fees for a missed payment and are still a form of borrowing. Lenders often show an annual percentage rate, which helps compare deals. Rules about who can borrow, at what age, and how costs must be explained differ between countries, so read the small print and ask. Finally, a new payment has to fit a budget that already has jobs: if it does not fit, something else stops. None of this decides for you. It only makes the choice visible. You can practise totalling payments, reading small print and building a budget in LedgerQuest.