Page 1 of Daddy's Rule

Prologue

University of Pennsylvania

May 2012

Bas

"24… 17… 79… 45… 32… 58."

I stared down at the lottery ticket on the table, checking off each number as my friends sat silently beside me, their mouths gaping as they did the same. We didn't need to; we'd been playing the lottery with the same six numbers since our first week at Penn State. It was now our last week, and unless my eyes were playing tricks on me, we'd just won ninety million dollars.

We all started screaming at once.

"Oh my god. I think I'm gonna hyperventilate. Does anyone have a paper bag?" My roommate and fraternity brother Theo did not look anywhere close to hyperventilating as he sat unmoving, wearing a look of utter shock on his face.

If he did hyperventilate, it wouldn't be the first time. I immediately started rummaging for a paper bag.

"Okay… okay… what do we do? There's a number we call, right? Or something?" Bain, the only one of us to come from serious money, was the calmest.

"Fuck the phone. First thing in the morning we get in the car and go down to the lottery commission office. All of us together." Archer, a law student, was almost always the voice of reason in our group.

"I have a final tomorrow. In Econ. I can't miss it!" Nyla, the only female in our friend group, shook her head.

"You could just buy yourself an A," Lennon teased her.

Lennon was a joker who never took anything seriously. Not even winning ninety million dollars, apparently.

Nyla glared at him and Archer stepped between them. "We'll all go together tomorrow after Nyla's final. The rest of us can wait a couple of hours."

Appeased that we wouldn't do anything without her, Nyla snatched the ticket off the table and waved it in the air, whooping and hollering.

"Ninety. Million. Dollars! Whoop! Can you believe it? Four years of playing the lottery every single week religiously and we win on our last week together, when it's the biggest jackpot in recent history! Can you believe that? What are the odds?"

I opened my desk drawer and extracted a calculator.

Nyla knocked it out of my hand. "It was a rhetorical question, Bas. We don't need to know the exact probability of this happening to know the odds are insane."

Picking my calculator up off the floor, I straightened and leveled her with a glare, followed by an eye roll. "I was calculating the amount we can expect to get after taxes."

"Ugh, taxes."

Out of all of us, Lennon was the one who couldn't be bothered with logistics. With the exception of Archer, the majority of us had businessy majors. Lennon was an art major.

"What is it?" Theo pushed his glasses up on his nose and turned his attention toward me.

"Somewhere in the ballpark of sixty million."

"Well, there's six of us, so that's perfect," Archer reasoned, running his hand through his red hair. "Ten million apiece."

"Ten million apiece?" Bain, the preppy of the group, raised his eyebrows. "That's life-changing money."

To his family that much was probably a drop in a bucket, but he wasn't one of those wealthy, money-hoarding asshats. He knew how much a sum like that would mean to the rest of us.

"Does anyone remember what the current plan is?" Lennon asked, standing to grab a beer from my mini fridge and downing it before anyone had a chance to answer.

For years we had tossed around grandiose ideas of what we’d do if we ever won. None of us had really expected that we ever would, and the plans ranged from super sensible to utterly ridiculous and everything in between.

"There's too many to choose from." I shook my head, years worth of half-drunken dreams floating through my brain.

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