Miss Sandra's office was small and put together in the way that said everything about the person who used it. One bookshelf, no clutter, a desk that had clearly never known disorder. The afternoon light came through the window at an angle that caught the left side of her face in a way the lecture hall had never quite managed.
Scott took the chair across from her and put his bag down and waited.
Sandra sat down. Looked at him.
She didn't say anything straight away. Just looked at him with the patience of a woman who had already decided how this conversation was going to go and was taking her time getting there.
Scott looked back.
Her blouse had that same two open buttons situation and from this distance, with nothing but a desk between them, the view was considerably more generous than it had been from the third row. He pulled his eyes back up to her face before she caught him.
'Focus,' he thought. 'She's about to end you.'
"What the fuck was that."
Scott looked at her.
Of all the things he had prepared for walking into this office, Miss Sandra dropping that word in that voice was not one of them. He sat with it for a second, recalibrating.
"I'm sorry?" he said.
"You heard me," she said. "What happened in that classroom today."
"I made an observation," Scott said. "About the learning environment."
"You made a scene."
"An observation," he said again, pleasantly. "About a genuine academic concern."
She looked at him for a long moment. "You think that was a genuine academic concern."
"The incentive structures in that classroom are severely —"
"Mr. Scott."
He stopped.
She picked up a pen from her desk and set it back down. "Why," she said. Just that.
Scott opened his mouth. Then closed it.
Because a system told me to. Because I jumped off a bridge last night and woke up this morning furious that I was still breathing and decided I had nothing left to lose.
"Curiosity," he said.
Sandra looked at him. "Curiosity," she repeated, like the word had arrived in a language she hadn't expected.
"Yeah."
"You disrupted my entire class out of curiosity."
"I raised a concern," Scott said. "The class disrupted itself."
She stared at him. "The class disrupted itself."
"Sixty people chose to react the way they reacted," Scott said. "I just said what I said."
"What you said," Sandra told him, and something in her voice had shifted, the composed evenness still there but working harder than before, "was a comment about my body. In front of my students."
"I made a comment about the learning environment," Scott said. "You happen to be a significant part of it."
The silence that followed had a different weight from the ones before it.
She looked at him for a long moment. He looked back. His eyes dropped to her chest for a second, the open buttons of her blouse doing exactly what they had been doing all day, and he brought them back up to her face and she had noticed both the looking and the catching and neither of them said anything about it.
Her neck had gone slightly pink from the collar upward.
"I need you to understand," she said, "that regardless of how you frame it, that classroom is not the place for it."
"You're right," Scott said.
She paused. He could see she had prepared for something else.
"I mean it," Scott said. "Wrong place. It won't happen in the classroom again."
"That is not quite what I said."
"I know," he said. "But it's what I'm agreeing to."
She held his gaze for a moment. Then: "Don't let it happen again."
"Alright." He held her gaze for a beat. "One more thing before I go."
Something behind her eyes became careful. "What."
"Where can I find the most expensive dress shop around here," Scott said. "Like genuinely expensive."
Sandra stared at him.
A long moment passed where she clearly could not connect what that question had to do with anything that had just happened in this room.
"Why," she said.
"Just need to know," Scott said easily.
She looked at him for another moment, something turning over behind her eyes, trying to connect a line between the classroom and this office and now this question and finding no clean answer anywhere.
"Clement Street," she said slowly. "There's a boutique called Maison. Third building from the corner." A pause. "Why are you asking me this."
"No reason," Scott said, and stood up. He picked up his bag. "Thank you, Miss Sandra."
He was at the door.
"Mr. Scott."
He looked back.
"Don't let it happen again," she said. Her voice was even. Her neck was still pink and she knew it and there was nothing she could do about it from where she was sitting.
Scott looked at her for a moment. Then smiled, small and easy, and left before she could figure out what the smile meant.
---
He found Maison on Clement Street forty minutes later.
The window display had that quiet confidence of a place that didn't need to try hard. Soft lighting inside, no visible price tags on anything. Scott pushed the door open and went in anyway.
The girl behind the counter didn't look up.
She was leaning against the register with her phone face up on the glass, dark hair falling across one side of her face, two small silver rings sitting in her nose and a matching pair climbing the curve of her ear. Not tall. The kind of unbothered that wasn't performed, it was just her default. She kept reading whatever was on her screen after Scott walked in and the door closed behind him.
Scott looked around. Dresses along one wall, jewelry in a glass case along the back.
He moved toward the dresses and started looking.
"You need help or are you just going to stare at things," she said, without looking up.
"Help," Scott said. "Probably."
She put the phone down with the energy of someone doing him a significant personal favor. Came around the counter and stopped a few feet away with her arms loosely folded, looking at him with the assessment of someone who had seen every type walk through that door and had already filed him somewhere unremarkable.
"Who's it for," she said.
"My lecturer."
She looked at him. "Your lecturer."
"Yeah."
She held his gaze for a moment. "You trying to get a better grade or ask her out?"
"Neither," Scott said. "Trying to get her to forgive me first."
She looked at him. "Forgive you for what."
"Said something in her lecture I probably shouldn't have."
She stopped moving things along the rail for a second. "In front of everyone?"
"Sixty people," Scott said.
She was quiet for a moment. Then: "Must have been bad."
"Depends who you ask."
She looked at him over her shoulder. "What did you say?"
"That she was too distracting to teach properly."
She stared at him. Then something moved at the corner of her mouth, gone before it became anything real. She turned back to the rack. "And you think a dress fixes that."
"It's a start," Scott said.
Then she pulled two dresses. One deep green structured at the shoulders and one dark burgundy with a particular weight to the fabric, the kind that moved with a person rather than just hanging off them.
"The burgundy," Scott said, before she finished holding them up.
She looked at the dress. Then at him. "You sure? You haven't even seen the other one properly."
"I'm sure," Scott said.
She set the green one back without arguing and moved to the jewelry case. She laid three options on the glass and Scott pointed to a thin gold chain with a small pendant and a matching bracelet sitting beside it.
She looked at his choice for a moment. Then back at him.
"She'll like this," she said. Just that. Like it had come out before she decided to say it.
She added everything up. "Eighteen hundred," she said.
Scott looked at the items on the counter. The dress in its tissue wrap. The chain and bracelet in the velvet box.
'This better fucking work,' he thought.
"Charge me two thousand," he said.
She looked up from the register. "Sorry?"
"Two thousand," Scott said. "The extra two hundred is yours."
She stared at him.
He looked back, steady, like it was a perfectly normal thing to say.
Her eyes went to his tee. His bag strap. His shoes. Then back to his face, and whatever she was thinking she kept behind her expression.
"You're serious," she said.
"Yeah," Scott said.
She held his gaze for one more second then processed the payment without another word.
Scott's phone buzzed.
He glanced at the screen.
[ DING! ]
[ YOU HAVE SPENT $200 ON A WOMAN. ]
[ CLASSIFICATION: FLAT ]
[ 2× RETURN: $400 CREDITED TO YOUR ACCOUNT ]
Scott stared at the notification.
He looked up slowly and let his eyes move across Roselyn where she stood behind the counter, dark hair falling forward as she wrapped the dress, the way her jeans sat on her hips, the way her sweater fitted across her chest.
'The system called this flat,' he thought.
He looked at her one more time. Then nodded slowly and put his phone away.
Roselyn finished wrapping and tied the handle of the matte black bag with a small careful knot. She pushed it across the counter toward him.
Scott picked it up.
She looked at him for a moment, something sitting in her expression that hadn't been there when he walked in.
"That's it?" she said.
Scott looked at her. "Yeah."
She held his gaze for a second. "You just spent two thousand dollars in here and you're not going to ask for my number?"
Scott looked at her. Then at the bag. Then back at her.
"Should I?" he said.
Something moved across her face. She looked back down at the counter. "Most guys would," she said, her voice back to that even unbothered setting. But the color that had climbed into her cheeks while he wasn't looking stayed there, quiet and unbothered by her attempt to ignore it.
"I'm not most guys," Scott said.
She didn't say anything to that. Just kept her eyes on the counter with slightly more attention than the counter required.
"What's your name," Scott said.
She looked up. "Roselyn."
Scott looked at her for a moment. At the nose rings. At the dark hair and the default unbothered and the pink still sitting in her cheeks that she clearly had no intention of acknowledging.
"Roselyn," he said.
"Yeah."
"That doesn't match you at all."
She looked at him. Not offended. Just agreeing with a fact that had been established long before he arrived. "I know," she said.
Scott picked up the bag. "See you around, Roselyn."
He was at the door when he heard her say something quietly behind him that she had clearly not intended to say out loud. He didn't catch the words but the tone of it told him enough.
He left.
---
He was crossing back toward the humanities block when he looked up and stopped.
Sandra was at the entrance, keys in hand, bag over one shoulder, clearly on her way out for the evening. She saw him the same moment he saw her and they both stopped.
"Mr. Scott," she said, with that careful even tone she used when something had caught her off guard and she didn't want it to show. "What are you doing here."
"Coming to find you," Scott said. He held up the black bag. "This is for you."
Sandra looked at the bag. Then at him. "What is that."
"An apology," he said. "For what happened in the lecture today. I meant what I said in the office but actions matter more than words."
He held the bag out.
She didn't take it. "Scott, that really isn't necessary —"
"I know."
"Nothing happened that actually requires —"
"Miss Sandra." His voice stayed easy. "I stood up in your classroom in front of sixty people and made a comment about your body. You're a professional. That put you in a position and you handled it with more composure than I deserved. This is me handling my side of it." A pause. "And if you don't take it I'm going to spend the rest of this semester sitting in your lectures thinking about the fact that I owe you an apology I never paid. Which is going to affect my concentration significantly." He looked at her. "Do you really want that on your conscience."
Sandra looked at him.
The silence stretched.
"That," she said slowly, "is the most elaborate guilt trip I have been subjected to in a professional context."
"Is it working."
She held his gaze for one more second. Then she reached out and took the bag.
She looked at it for a moment then opened it right there, pulling the tissue paper aside carefully, and when she saw the dress her hands went still.
She looked at it for a long moment. Then at the velvet box with the chain and bracelet sitting inside. Then back at the dress.
Then she looked at Scott.
"This is from Maison," she said.
"Yeah," Scott said.
"How did you —" She stopped. Something moved across her face as she put it together, the question in her office, the shop name she had given him without thinking, the bag now in her hands. "You went there because I told you."
"You told me where the best shop was," Scott said. "I just went there."
She looked at him for a long moment with an expression he couldn't fully read, something between composure and something else entirely that she was working hard to keep in the same place.
"See you in class, Mr. Scott," she said finally, her voice slightly less settled than it had been thirty seconds ago.
"See you, Miss Sandra."
He watched the door close behind her.
He stood on the pavement and waited.
Then his phone buzzed.
[ DING! ]
[ YOU HAVE SPENT $1,800 ON A BUSTY WOMAN WITH THE RIGHT CURVES. ]
[ CRITICAL HIT: 10× RETURN ACTIVATED ]
[ $18,000 CREDITED TO YOUR ACCOUNT ]
[ TOTAL BALANCE: $18,400.00 ]
Scott read it.
Then read it again.
Eighteen thousand four hundred dollars.
He stood completely still on the pavement outside the humanities block with the streetlights just starting to come on and let that number sit in his head for a moment. He looked at his banking app. The balance was there, real numbers on a real screen.
Twenty four hours ago he was on a bridge.
Twenty four hours ago he had nothing. Less than nothing. He had a piece of bread and nowhere to sleep and a friend who had finally, reasonably, put the phone down.
He turned away from the building and faced the empty street.
"Fuckkkk —" He caught himself. An older woman on the opposite pavement looked at him. He turned away. "Yes," he said, quieter, with every bit of the same energy. "Yes. Yes yes yes —"
He pressed his fist against his mouth and looked at the balance one more time.
Still there.
Then his phone buzzed again.
[ CONGRATULATIONS. YOU HAVE EARNED 2 COIN TOSSES. ]
[ NOTE: TAIL = BASIC SKILL OR REWARD. HEAD = ADVANCED SKILL OR REWARD. ]
[ WOULD YOU LIKE TO TOSS? ]
Scott selected yes.
Two coins appeared in his palm, solid and warm, catching the streetlight as he turned them over once.
'Both heads,' he thought. 'Come on. Give me something serious.'
He tossed the first one.
Clean arc. Came back down.
Tail.
[ AFFECTION SCAN UNLOCKED ]
[ THIS SCAN SHOWS YOU HOW WOMEN ARE INTO YOU ]
It activated immediately. Numbers appeared above the heads of every woman within his line of sight, floating clean and quiet. A woman walking past him on the pavement. 8%. Two girls crossing the road ahead. 12% on one. 6% on the other.
Scott stood there turning slowly on the spot, reading numbers off strangers.
'This might be useful,' he thought.
He tossed the second coin.
Tail again.
'Both tails. Of course.'
[ HEIGHT INCREASED: 5'7" → 5'11" ]
He felt it before he finished reading. A slow pressure moving through his spine, certain and quiet, his whole frame adjusting upward until it stopped.
He looked down at his feet. Then at the wall beside him.
"Four seconds," he said. "Twenty two years of being five seven and a coin sorted it in four seconds." He stood there for a moment just existing at five eleven. "Every tall man I have ever stood next to. Every single time. Four seconds."
He shook his head slowly and transferred six hundred dollars to Mrs. Gable with a message that just said rent, then kept walking.
He spotted her from the end of the street.
Mrs. Gable was standing outside the building entrance, arms folded, eyes fixed down the road. She saw him coming and something in her shoulders settled.
"Scott," she said.
"Mrs. Gable."
She looked at him for a moment. Then looked at the ground. Then back at him. "I got your transfer," she said.
"I know."
"That was more than what you owe," she said. "A lot more."
"Next two months upfront," Scott said. "So we don't have to have that conversation again."
She looked at him for a long moment. Yesterday she had put a padlock on his door and an eviction notice on his wall. Today he was standing in front of her having sent more money than she had seen from him in six months combined. She opened her mouth then closed it again.
"Wait here," she said, and went inside.
She came back two minutes later with a covered plate. She held it out to him without making a thing of it, the way you hand someone something you decided to do and don't need acknowledged.
Scott took it.
She looked at him then. Really looked at him, the way she hadn't since he walked up. Her eyes moved over his face, then up slightly.
"You look different," she said.
"Different how?"
She studied him for another moment. "Taller," she said slowly, like she wasn't fully convinced by her own answer. "I don't know. Just different." She shook her head and turned back toward the door. "Eat before it gets cold."
She went inside.
Scott stood there for a moment holding the plate.
Then he went upstairs, sat on his floor with his back against the bed, and ate in the quiet of his room. When he was done he set the plate aside and looked at his balance one more time.
Eighteen thousand four hundred dollars.
He lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
Tomorrow there was more to figure out. More to earn. More of whatever this thing had decided his life was going to look like from here.
'I'm just getting started,' he thought, and closed his eyes.