Page 45 of Cruel Riches

Harry: Engineering Games. It starts tomorrow morning, so my team is heading there later today. We’ll be back on Sunday night.

Me: Engineering Games?

Harry: It’s a competition. Pretty fun. Basically, colleges from all over the country send teams to complete design challenges and stuff like that. Winning team gets fifty grand for a research grant.

Me: Sounds cool.

Harry: You should come! We’ll be busy at the event for most of the day tomorrow, Saturday, and Sunday, but there’s always the night :) And I’m sure my teammates won’t mind if I sneak out of the hotel room for a couple of hours to hang out with you. You can just skip your classes tomorrow and catch up on the work later, right?

I frowned and chewed the inside of my cheek as I thought about my answer. Seattle was a two-hour ferry ride from Avalon City, so it took almost three hours to get there when you counted the drive from Arcadia Bay to the Avalon City ferry terminal.

As much as I liked Harry, I wasn’t going to ditch my Friday classes and go all the way over to the mainland just for a hookup. Especially when Harry was going to be busy for the vast majority of the trip, leaving me to sit in a hotel or wander Seattle alone.

Me: No, you should focus on your competition. Don’t want to let the team down. We’ll hang out another time.

Harry: Okay. Talk soon :)

I sighed and put my phone away. There was a strange churning feeling deep in my gut. Even though Harry had gifted me the phone and messaged me all the time, I couldn’t help but feel as if I were being blown off.

When I was a bit younger, Sascha told me that the only dating advice I needed was this: If someone was genuinely interested in me and wanted to see me, I’d never doubt it or question it. Not even for a second.

With Harry, I was starting to question it.

It was hard to put my finger on the exact feeling I got from his behavior, because he wasn’t outright avoiding me. It was just that he was never available at the same time as me, ever, and he only seemed to invite me to things that I was likely to say no to. Like the last-minute Seattle trip, for instance.

On the other hand, why would he buy me a two-thousand-dollar phone if he wasn’t actually interested in me? Men didn’t do stuff like that for girls they never wanted to see again, did they?

Then again, he was in a Blackthorne frat. Even though it was supposedly the lowest-tier one, I knew a guy still had to be uber-rich to get accepted into any of them. So maybe the phone wasn’t the sweet gesture I initially assumed it was. Maybe it didn’t mean much at all to Harry, because a few thousand dollars was just a drop in the bucket to him.

And there it is again,I told myself, pursing my lips. This is why I don’t bother dating. Too much worrying, and not enough focus on the stuff that actually matters.

Laurel was right earlier. I needed to focus on my studies—and also my dad’s case—from now on. If Harry was truly into me, I’d find out eventually.

“We should get going,” Ruby said, glancing at her watch. “The theater always fills up so fast.”

The three of us shared an Intro to Critical Thinking class on Thursday mornings. It was a compulsory course for all first-semester freshmen, so the lecture theaters were always packed. We had to arrive fifteen minutes early just to be able to get seats next to each other.

“Today, we’re going to be focusing on cognitive biases,” our professor began twenty minutes later, when the theater was jam-packed.

She started going through information written on PowerPoint slides that were projected onto a massive screen at the front of the room. I concentrated on taking notes, forgetting all about my issues outside of the class.

“So these systematic errors in the thinking process can end up causing—” The professor stopped abruptly and frowned as her PowerPoint slides suddenly switched off. “Sorry, everyone,” she said. “Something’s gone wrong with the computer. I might need a minute to fix it.”

She busied herself with the computer, aided by one of her TAs. While the rest of us sat and waited, several students pulled out their cellphones to check for messages or scroll through social media.

A shocked titter arose from a group of people in the middle of the room, and hushed murmurs spread throughout the lecture theater after that. More and more students pulled their phones out, raising their brows and clapping their hands over their mouths after looking at their screens.

“What’s going on?” I whispered to Laurel and Ruby as a few heads turned to stare in our direction. Within seconds, those turned heads had multiplied, and at least fifty people were looking right at me.

Ruby grabbed her cell and clicked a couple of buttons. Her face paled after a moment of staring at the screen, and she lifted a hand to cover her mouth. “Oh, shit,” she said, voice barely above a whisper.

“What is it?” Laurel asked. I craned my neck to look as well.

“Nothing. Don’t look at it,” Ruby said, abruptly turning her phone off and shoving it in her coat pocket. “I think we should leave.”

Too curious to let it go, I grabbed my own phone and switched on the screen.

An email had been sent from an anonymous account to the entire Blackthorne student and staff directory. The subject heading was ‘Blackthorne Student Gone Wild’.

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