Page 62 of Betting on the Brainiac

“The money that you don’t have? Honestly, I’m not dumb, but I’m having a hard time keeping up.” He sounds so apologetic that I laugh again.

“Let’s start with once upon a time, and if you need it broken down into a flowchart, you let me know.”

He gives me a skeptical double thumbs-up, so I start the story, the one the rest of my roommates know, from the founding of Copperhead Boots to my parents’ marriage. I leave out the whole frog-kissing thing, but in my defense, it’s only because it makes me sound incredibly dumb for believing it.

“And that’s the deep backstory.”

“So far, so good,” he says. “Don’t need the flowchart.”

“This is the part of the story I haven’t told before.” I draw a calming breath. Nothing I’m about to say would make my friends judge me or like me less, but it would make them look at me differently. It’s only because Oliver is a new friend that I’m okay taking that risk.

“Growing up, I understood we had more than other people. By high school, I understood we were rich. In college, I started to understand how rich, but by then, I didn’t want anyone to know about my family.”

“Were you worried about being used?” he asks.

I shake my head. “No. I was worried about anyone thinking I was like my parents. The most generous way I can describe them is unscrupulous. A massive financial scandal broke when I was a junior, and once I understood it, I made it my mission to punish them when the courts went too easy on them.” I pick up my phone and wave it at him. “Are you dying to google them yet? ‘Why does Armstrong Industries suck?’ would be a good search to start with.”

“Madi . . .” His voice is soft.

“That’s the first time you’ve called me that.”

“Should I not?”

I shrug. “It’s what all my friends call me. Go ahead.”

“Will you tell me, Madi?”

Oliver is so . . .present. I can barely remember thinking he was awkward when I met him. Maybe he was shy at first, but Oliver now is so comfortable with himself that I don’t think it would cross his mind to be self-conscious.

I study his eyes through his glasses. “Do you ever wear contacts?”

He goes still. “Why?”

“That gold ring around your irises is intense. You could up your rizz, easy.”

He gives me a half smile. “You saying I need to?”

“Don’t most guys want to?”

“Maybe if they can’t get women.”

“Oliver!” His half smile is still there. No, that’s a smirk, the kind that comes second nature to guys like Joey and Josh. It’s an earned smirk used by guys who already have a high baseline of rizz—the stupid name we’re giving charisma this year.

“I like my glasses, Madi. Is this your way of changing the subject?”

“No.” But now I kind of want to follow up on the idea of Oliver, rizz, and what he looks like without glasses.

“You were going to tell me why Armstrong Holdings sucks?”

“It’s heavy,” I warn him.

“Understood.”

A shadow of the sick, helpless feeling that had roiled through me the day I learned the truth almost ten years ago snakes through me now. “Copperhead Boots is our prestige brand. It could keep my parents comfortable for the rest of their lives. Private yacht comfortable. Never have to work comfortable. But that wasn’t enough for my dad. He has a brilliant business mind,but he sees everything in terms of numbers. Profit. He saw opportunities in the midnineties to expand into fast fashion and founded Jeneze, which is a pun on the early spinning jennies that made mass textile manufacturing possible.”

A pun, when nothing about this was ever funny. “He acquired factories in lower-income countries where he could get the buildings and the labor for cheap. It put Jeneze in the perfect position to explode when internet commerce took off. Jeneze was able to scale up faster than the brick-and-mortar retail giants. My dad ordered increases in production in his existing factories, but his crown jewel was Bangladesh. Still is. Second-highest producer of ready-made garments after China, and even when the government restricted ownership of new factories to Bangladeshi citizens, Jeneze had made enough locals wealthy that they happily serve as the front for his purchase of more factories.”

Oliver hasn’t moved, hasn’t taken his eyes off me, but I shift in my seat anyway, suddenly unable to find a comfortable position. “Sorry. I know this is dry.”

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