Trade Me (2 page)

I grind my pen into the desk and keep my mouth shut.

And then Blake raises his hand.

I’ve been trying not to look at him since class started. I’ve been trying not to
think
about him, because I’m already pissed off and I don’t need to feel more pissed off. But he’s the golden boy of the class, and when Fred gestures to him and he leans back in his seat, I can’t
not
look at him.

Blake is tall and blond. He has a light dusting of facial hair—more than scruff, less than a full beard—that would look unkempt on just about any other student. On him, it looks distinguished. He started college a little later than most students would, and before he came here, he had a high-level position in his father’s company. He glances around the room, smiling, supremely confident that whatever he’s going to say will be brilliant. Everyone else seems to hold their breath, already believing the same thing.

Blake also wears a suit and tie to class. Let me be honest: Most college students who dress up look like douchebags playing at being adults. They look like they care so much about their appearance that they’re afraid to relax. By contrast, Blake looks like he’s got the money to dress well and then another million bucks on top of that. He doesn’t have to give a shit about what anyone thinks of him.

I suppose he’s good-looking, if you like the juxtaposition of sharp with slightly disheveled.

Which I definitely don’t. Not today.

“Here’s how I see things,” Blake says. At the front of the class, Fred sets his hand on his chin and nods.

“We can discuss the effect that food stamps have.” Blake has a trillion-watt smile, one that could power every computer that his father’s company has ever produced. “We can argue whether policies like food stamps make people lazy. We can talk about incentives, and we can talk about money. And I understand those who say that all our good intentions do is create a permanent underclass that perpetuates the cycle of poverty, that people need to work for the benefits they’re given, not just have them handed to them for doing nothing.”

A tide of red anger fills me. My pen gouges the paper.

“But,” Blake says, “let’s say we grant all that is true for the sake of argument. What are the real alternatives? We’ve tried doing nothing, Dickens-style, and we know how that turned out. No matter what we do, we always have a permanent underclass. The only question we have is how we treat them, and what that says about us.”

Oh, that’s the only question, is it? Funny.
I
have other questions.

Shut up,
I tell myself desperately, but it’s too late. My mouth seems to work of its own accord.

“I see,” I hear myself say. “So poor people are lazy and doomed, but we should help them anyway so that you can take credit?” My face flushes as I speak.

Blake’s eyes widen. Slowly—every second seems slow right now, drowned by the beat of my heart—he turns to me. He sits right across from me; our eyes meet, and I can see the astonishment in his gaze. I can almost feel him taking in my stained sweater, my fading jeans. I’m nothing to him.

“I’m sorry.” He sounds honestly surprised, as if he can’t imagine that anyone would disagree with him, let alone a nothing like me. “What did you say?”

I should put my head back down. I should go back to holding my tongue, watching other people talk about my life. But I can’t. The only thing I’ve ever had to stave off the direst consequences of Murphy’s Law was a sweater and superstition, and Blake destroyed my faith in both today.

“You heard what I said.” My voice is shaking. “When have you ever been on food stamps? When have you ever had to work for anything? Who gave you the right to grant that poor people are lesser beings for the sake of argument? And who the hell are you to say that the only important thing is not whether people actually starve to death, but how the world will judge the wealthy?”

His face goes white. “I work,” he says. “I work really hard. It’s not easy—”

“It’s not easy being Adam Reynolds’s son,” I finish for him. “We all know how hard you work. Your dad told the entire world when he put you in charge of his interface division at the age of fourteen. I’m sure you’ve worked a lot of hours, sitting at a desk and taking credit for what other people do. It must be really hard holding down a part-time job that your father gave you. I bet it leaves you almost no time to spend your millions of dollars in stock options. Hey, I guess I was wrong. You do know what it’s like to get something in exchange for nothing. You’re an expert at it.”

His lips press together.

“But it doesn’t make you an expert on poverty,” I tell him. “I was up until midnight last night. I live five miles away, because I can’t afford to live in Berkeley. It takes me forty-five minutes to get to class. How long did it take you to park your BMW in the Chancellor’s spot?”

He looks at me, his eyes wide. “It’s…” He shakes his head. “It’s not a BMW.” As if that were the one salient fact in our prior discussion.

At the front of the class, Fred, the hapless instructor, is rummaging through his papers for the seating chart.

“It’s really big of you to say it doesn’t matter if people think my parents are lazy,” I tell him. “But they’re not
your
parents, and starting off your charitable statement by assuming that my family is subhuman is really, really crappy.”

“Hey,” Fred says. “Hey, uh…” He peers at the paper. “We don’t need to engage in personal attacks, uh…” He squints. “Uh.” Fred calls all the students by their first name, but my legal name has obviously stymied him. He shrugs and bulls on. “Let’s keep this about the issues, Miss Chen.”

“He got personal first.” My voice trembles. “I
am
this issue. My dad lost his job when I first started college. If my family hadn’t had food stamps then, I would have had to drop out.” I’m not going to cry. Not in front of everyone, and especially not in front of Blake. “None of you have any idea what you’re talking about. You don’t know what it’s like to go into a store and use EBT. You don’t know what it’s like to slink into a Salvation Army and hope that there will be something that will let you fit in with classmates whose weekly allowance would feed your family for two months.” I glare at Blake again.

Blake looks away. On the plus side—and this is not a huge plus—it looks like I won’t have to worry about Blake smiling at me anymore.

“And that’s why this issue is personal,” I say. “We’re invisible to you, except when you want to tell us what to do. You know what, Blake? Nobody here would care about a word you said if your family was on food stamps. Try trading lives with me. You couldn’t manage it, not for two weeks.”

He looks away from me. The tips of his ears turn pink, though, and his lips press into an angry line.

Nobody is looking at me, for that matter. They’re avoiding eye contact like I’m some kind of feral dog that needs to be put down. And that’s when I realize precisely how many people are witnessing this. How many of my fellow students are tapping out distress signals on the phones they’re cradling surreptitiously on their laps.

I can almost feel the Facebook posts springing up around me.

ZOMG. Some nobody just bitched out Blake Reynolds.

LOL did u hear she was on food stamps?

I look down at my stained sweater.
She was dressed like a homeless person. I shit you not.

It’s going to be all over the internet in a matter of minutes.

“Are you done, Miss Chen?” Fred asks sarcastically.

I’m almost hyperventilating in panic, but then I realize how ridiculous I’m being. The one good thing about being a Tina Chen at Berkeley is that I’m indistinguishable from any of the other dozens of Tina Chens around. I can be as inappropriate as I want. I’m not googleable. I bow my head, letting my hair fall around my face like a curtain.

Someone else’s hand is in the air. “I think that’s really unfair to Blake,” someone up front pipes up. “We all know how hard he works, and how hard his dad works. They’ve definitely earned everything they have.”

Fine. They don’t want to acknowledge me as a person. Nothing’s really changed. I don’t have the time or the energy to care. But apparently, the class has turned into a referendum on Blake, and now everyone has to have their say.

“I really like the tap-to-call feature on my Tempest,” another girl puts in. “It’s genius. Blake deserves everything he has.”

It goes on like that for a few minutes. I take copious notes throughout the entire debacle.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck shit shit shit shit fuck fuck fuck,
I write in my notebook in my neatest cursive. Everyone—Fred included—falls all over themselves to say how great Blake is. And then the tone shifts.

“I think
some people
need to stop blaming others for where they are. If
some people
stopped wasting energy on playing the victim, and started doing something instead, they’d get a lot farther in life.”

I hunch in on myself, preparing for even worse.

“Hey,” Blake says sharply.

He’s just two feet away from me. I’m not going to look at him.

But his tone is icy. “This has gone on long enough. Come on, guys. Enough of this crap. She’s right. We all know I won the nepotism lottery. I’m not an expert, and if I said something stupid, I’m glad she was willing to point it out.”

Silence falls in response. At the front of the class, Fred clears his throat, maybe now remembering that he has a job besides savaging students. “Right. Let’s…uh, let’s move on.”

And I? I do not want to feel grateful to Blake. I hate that nobody even recognized me as a person until Blake spoke up. And when I tilt my head to the side… I hate that he looks at me, that he gives me a silent nod, like he’s granted me his permission to criticize him.

I didn’t need his permission.

After class lets out, I take my time leaving so I don’t have to fake nonchalance on my way out.

The girl in front of me stands and then turns to me. “You know,” she murmurs in a low furtive voice, as if wanting to make sure nobody else hears her, “I thought you had a good point. I’m glad you said it. I didn’t want to.”

“Thanks.”

But I don’t want to talk, and so I wait until she goes. I consider whether my pen belongs in the front pocket or the side pocket of my backpack. I make sure my notebook is securely placed next to my textbooks. I check the zipper. Twice.

By the time I leave, the classroom is empty.

The hallway outside isn’t, though. There’s one person from class still there, and he’s the last person—the very last person in the world—that I want to talk to at the moment. He’s leaning against the wall, looking even more like a businessman than a student. He looks at me now. His eyes are the ridiculous blue of ocean waters on some tropical beach. They make me think of a spring break that I will never be able to afford.

“Hey,” he says.

I’m not sure how to respond. My hands are still shaking. I don’t think I can keep it together through a longer spat with him. I should have kept my mouth shut in the first place.

I give him the barest of nods and keep walking.

“Hey,” he repeats. “Tina.”

That does stop me.
Fred
didn’t know what to call me. How does
Blake Reynolds
know my name?

Slowly, I turn to him. I’ve never talked to him before today. Maybe he emailed someone while we were in class? One of his…people. Someone like Blake has to have people, right? He parked in an official visitor’s spot with impunity. Getting a class roster would hardly pose a problem.

But wait. Even if he got my name off the official class roster, he wouldn’t know I go by Tina. He’d only know my legal name—Xingjuan Chen.

I swallow.

And then he does something I’m not expecting. He gives me a sheepish smile. It’s so different from the cocky grin that he normally wears that I take a step back.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“For what?”

He shrugs. “You’re right. It’s not my place to say it doesn’t matter what people say about you. And I should have stopped that before it turned into a pile-on.” He indicates the room we just came from with a tilt of his head. “I was just taken aback.”

He looks at me like he expects me to shrug it all off, like I’m supposed to pat him on the shoulder and say that it’s okay.

But it’s not. And the fact that he thinks it
can
be just makes me feel worse. Nothing about my life is okay right now, and he can’t change that.

“Can I…” He takes a deep breath, and then, that cocky smile is back on his face, like he’s sure of himself again. “Can I get you coffee or something as an apology?”

He holds his hand out to me, like I’m supposed to shake it. When he does, his coat—impeccably tailored gray wool—pulls back from his sleeve. For a second, with his hand outstretched, I see dark ink against his wrist, the edge of a tattoo that seems completely at odds with everything I know about him.

For just that second, I wonder if I’m imagining it. His life has been an open book to the world ever since his father first put him in a television commercial at the tender age of twenty months.

Everyone knows everything about Blake Reynolds, boy prodigy, certain successor to Cyclone Systems. Everything…except I’ve never heard of that tattoo.

I take another step away from him, putting my hands behind my back.

“Let me explain something,” I say. “You get to park in a spot reserved for the Chancellor’s Office.”

He grimaces. “Yeah. I usually don’t. But when I started school, he…um.” He trails off, as if realizing that now is not the time to remind me that the entire university administration is no doubt slavering over the potential endowment boost his attendance represents.

“By contrast,” I say, “I have an hour between this class and my next one. If I can’t knock off one of my assignments in that time, I will be up until two tonight.”

His smile fades.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “You’re probably a legitimately decent person. But I don’t have time for your apology.”

“Two-second version, then. I’m sorry I was clueless. I’ll try to do better.”

He looks at me, his eyes serious, and that damned
something,
that coiling awareness in my stomach starts up again. It almost makes me mad that he won’t let me walk off steeping in my anger. No; he has to take that away from me, too.