Chapter 5: Long-Term Meal Ticket

Lyra's POV

I heard the noise before I got to the door.

I pushed it open. Everyone was in. Even Vivian Marlowe, who doesn't board most nights, was back.

Clarissa Thorne's bed sits empty twenty days out of the month. Vivian is usually still downstairs smoking at this hour. Nora Finch usually stays in the library until it closes. Tonight all three of them were here, all sitting, all watching me. I scanned their faces first. Then I looked at the floor.

Red roses, filling my entire side of the room from the foot of my bed to the windowsill, stacked high enough to block half the walkway, the top layer pressed with a ring of fine, glittering gold foil. When I pulled the door shut I caught two girls standing out in the hall through the gap.

The first number was the quantity. The second was how many people it took to haul several hundred stems up the stairs. The third was how many days this wall would keep circulating on campus media.

"I've been waiting forever. Why didn't you pick up?" Vivian reached over from the window and pulled me in — she had the only seat in the room the flowers hadn't swallowed, like the head of a table.

I dug out my phone. Black screen. "Dead."

"Look at the flowers first."

Nora pulled the card out of the roses and read it off, pinching it between two fingers. "Three hundred sixty-five roses, one for every day I'm thinking about you. Yours, Brandon Whitaker."

She laughed at her own reading. "Young Whitaker pulling out all the stops for you — put it out there that he doesn't quit until he gets what he wants. What's next, moving into the dorm?"

"Lyra, what do you actually think?"

I shook my head. Didn't take it.

Anything I say gets repeated. It comes out a little different every time it comes back, and by the third set of hands a version turns into leverage. Not answering was the only option that couldn't cost me anything tonight.

Nora clicked her tongue and slid the card back into the flowers. The bit of happiness for me in her eyes was real. That part I couldn't take.

Clarissa sat on the edge of her bed doing her nails and didn't look up. "Do you know who he is?" Flat, like she was reading something she'd already been through. St. Jude fraternity, the racing club, family in industrial coatings and pigments — a grubby, obscenely profitable new-money business with a layer of skin between it and anything artistic. He paid for the crew team's new shell, so he turns up at every dinner.

"He's been enrolled a year," she said, capping the polish. "Several girlfriends, on campus and off. Each one better looking than the last, and almost no gap in between."

She finally looked up and set the bottle on the desk. "But after the breakup, not one of them has a bad word to say about him."

A pause. Then the actual point. "He's average looking, but he pays out at the end like nobody else. That third-year at the law school got a high-jewelry necklace when they broke up. Six figures."

She said six figures while looking at me.

Nora stuck her tongue out. "Lyra, that doesn't move you? Six figures. What's a year of tuition here?"

I smiled and didn't answer. Six figures is an astronomical number to a student.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tempted. But for a woman playing this the smart way, reputation and bearing are the capital.

What a man will pay for a woman who lives at the edges is one number. What he'll pay for a woman with a clean name and a settled manner is another one entirely. Getting tangled up with a player brings money in fast, and it drags your own value down at the same speed. There's no steady, trustworthy future at the end of that road.

So Brandon Whitaker came off my list two weeks ago. Quietly. I'd touched his hand once. What came back was a single word: get. He isn't a gap, he's an appetite. People you can feed don't stick. He's offering money, not a position.

Two different lists, though. As a man I'd ever be with, he's finished — no second look, no maybe later. As a source, he stays on the list and stays there open: money in, nothing of mine out. He doesn't need my answer to keep paying. He needs the chase, and the chase costs me nothing.

Backup boyfriend? He doesn't qualify. Long-term meal ticket? That he can do.

"Stop it. Don't joke about that." I threw it out pretending to be annoyed.

What I want is money I can draw on whenever I need it that costs me nothing to hold. Not a name that drags me into a story about how new money behaves.

I plugged my charger in and the screen jumped. A transfer, with one line under it. Come out tonight. I've booked a table.

I stared at the number for three seconds. Taking it means admitting he bought my time. Sending it back is what actually pushes him away. So the money stays and the man doesn't. I sent one line back — not warm, not cold, half the thread left hanging, the refusal parked somewhere nobody could find fault with it. Odds are he sends again tomorrow.

The move is simply not to answer Brandon Whitaker. Turning down a rich kid who never loses raises my price.

That's the whole trick. A woman's number is whatever the bidding says it is. Answer nobody and you stay expensive.

Vivian Marlowe was still standing in front of the flowers with her arms crossed. "So nouveau riche."

Her jaw was set under her smile for about half a second before she fixed it, and the smile was the kind she puts on when there's someone else in the room. It wasn't about the flowers. It was aimed at me — small, real, and there.

None of that was tonight's problem. Tonight's problem was that a girl who never asks whether I'm free had already decided what my evening looked like.

She turned to me. "Get cleaned up. I'm picking you up for my birthday thing."

That's her. Self-centered down to the bone. Never gives notice, never asks whether I have plans, and everyone else arranges themselves around her.

She remembered the other two only after that, and remembered them without looking away from my closet. "Clarissa, you coming?"

"Got things to do. Can't." Clarissa capped the second bottle and dropped both back in her case. She hardly ever stays in the dorm — her father's a professor and her mother runs orthopedics at one of the city's top hospitals, and home beats a shared room on every count.

"Nora?"

"Going home for the weekend." Nora was already pulling her bag out from under the bed. Both her parents teach elementary school. Going home is the obvious move whenever the dorm gets loud.

Vivian brightened immediately, and didn't bother hiding any of it. She crowded up to the closet, dug through my clothes, and pulled a dress off the rail. "Wear the one I gave you."

I looked down at it. Four or five things hanging in that closet came from her, every one of them something she'd retired. She hands them over casually, the way you pass on something you don't want to somebody who needs it. I take them just as casually, like nothing's happening.

I'm five-six. She's barely five-four. Most of it I can't wear.

What doesn't fit, I sell. Designer loses most of its value the second it's off the rack, but it stacks, and it adds up to real money.

The dress was still in my hand when it came to me, the way it always does when I'm holding something of hers. My makeup and my clothes — in the beginning I learned all of it from her, piece by piece. That's probably where the imbalance started. She watched it happen up close: me getting better at dressing, prettier, with more men coming after me.

But a friendship held together with tape doesn't sink over something that small.

Of the three of them, Nora is the one I actually click with. She's pretty, decent company, with something soft around the eyes that she isn't doing anything to earn. Vivian cuts class so often that Nora and I end up in lecture together and walk back together most days. Vivian doesn't like her — she never had many friends growing up, and she's got a possessive streak about me with no reason behind it. On the days Vivian does show up, Nora sits with Clarissa.

Clarissa has a lot of superiority in her. She looks down on me, she works hard to get in good with Vivian, and Vivian treats her as a nuisance.

Day to day, none of us let any of it show much. In the big lecture courses the four of us sit together.

All told, the arrangement works, more or less. And there's a thin, careful thread running between every pair of us.

I took the dress off the hanger. Whatever the rest of the night turned into, I had a party to walk into first — and a room full of strangers to price before I could sit down at the table.