Chapter 510 | Plan B, Saved as Draft

Chapter 510: 510 | Plan B, Saved as Draft

Cameron Mitchell woke up on a couch that wasn’t his, under a Sigma Chi throw blanket that wasn’t his, with a crick in his neck and a frat brother standing over him holding a protein shaker like a subpoena.

"Bro," Brayden said. "Bro. You up?"

"No."

"You’re talking. That’s up." Brayden Kessler sat down on the coffee table, which groaned. He was already in his lacrosse warm-ups, cheeks pink from the shower, hair wet and spiked forward. "So, like. Not to be that guy."

"Then don’t be that guy."

"The five hundred, though."

Cameron looked at the ceiling. Popcorn texture, a water stain shaped like Ohio. Brayden’s apartment smelled like Axe, old pizza and a candle someone’s girlfriend had left behind in October. 7:31 AM, according to the cable box. He’d been awake at four and at five and at six, and every time the first thing he’d done was reach for his phone and check whether the app would let him in. It wouldn’t. The app didn’t take a card that declined.

"Spring break’s in like three weeks," Brayden said. "You said before spring break. You said you’d make McKnight cry in a parking lot. I’m not saying you can’t, I’m just saying. Venmo exists."

"My Venmo’s linked to the trust."

"Oh." Brayden absorbed this. "Oh, bro."

"Friday," Cameron said.

"Friday what?"

"Friday you get your five hundred. Friday you get to watch." He sat up. The blanket slid off his chest. "Go to practice."

Brayden looked at him for a second longer than Cameron liked, the way you looked at a guy who’d watched a company driver take his car away with a clipboard and a nod. Then he laughed, because Brayden always laughed, and grabbed his stick bag from the hallway.

"You’re crazy, bro. I love it. Door’s on the latch if you go out. Don’t eat my Lunchables."

The door shut.

Cameron sat in the quiet for a while.

He could have gone home. The penthouse was twelve minutes away, but the penthouse was his father’s building, with his father’s doorman, and he was not going to ride his father’s elevator up to his father’s view and sit in it like a dog waiting to be let back in. Trust paused until 25. His father had typed it the way he typed everything, as terms.

Fine. Terms.

He pulled his laptop out of his backpack and set it on the coffee table between a bong shaped like a skull and Brayden’s open box of Lunchables.

The folder was right where it had been since Saturday night. McKNIGHT, in Lexi’s stupid capital letters. She’d AirDropped it with her lips pressed together like she was handing over a kidney, and he’d smiled at her and said our story, and she’d believed him, because Lexi believed in stories.

He opened it.

Everything was there, labeled with Lexi’s little journalism-school neatness. The archive frames: a mask, a stage light, the electric-blue streak. boyfriend.mp4, fourteen seconds from a test stream nobody had watched. The bridge clip from last Friday’s debut, two thousand retweets and climbing. Screenshots of a burner Twitter account that had once tagged a camgirl’s promo page with booked coffee w/ the queen. finally. Dated December 26th. Three thousand dollars, if Leo Alfonsi’s mouth was to be believed, and Leo’s mouth was the most reliable thing about him.

At the bottom sat the newest file, which Cameron had dragged in himself last night: Lexi’s text from yesterday afternoon, screenshotted.

alexis’s cards got DECLINED at maison... and then she called McKNIGHT???? ... she’s literally living at his place now i’m calling it

Under it, a photo Lexi had taken weeks ago from across the street: a converted brick factory, Cooper Garment Lofts. Fourth floor windows, one of them lit.

Cameron looked at that photo for a long time.

McKnight had a building. McKnight had a business. McKnight had Chloe Kim, and the Van Der Berg girl sleeping on his couch, and a professor who’d called his thesis adequate and then called Cameron’s a C. McKnight had walked out of a hearing room yesterday with his hands in his pockets like a man leaving a Costco.

And Cameron had a couch, and a folder.

He opened the draft from last night. He’d written it after the second card, after the company driver had taken MITCH 1 away with a clipboard and a nod. He’d read it back a dozen times since. It was too long. Too many words was how you told someone you were scared.

He started cutting.

He took out the part about the parking lot. He took out the part about Eliza. He took out you think you’re better than me, because that one wasn’t a threat, it was a diary entry. He took out the word please, which he did not remember typing.

What was left was clean.

$40,000 by Friday, 8:00 PM.

Or it goes to @PCAtea. The scholarship office. Her sponsors. And a dry cleaner in Koreatown.

He read it out loud, quietly, to Brayden’s empty living room. It sounded like his father. That was how he knew it was right.

Forty to Sal by the 28th. Forty from McKnight by the 20th. A week of float. He could clear the line, get the app back, maybe win a little on the side, and by the time his father found out there’d be nothing to find out. The math worked. The math always worked if you did it fast enough.

He attached the side-by-side: an archive frame on the left, the streak under the stage light; a still from last Friday’s stream on the right, the same streak under a ring light. He didn’t need to write anything under it. People liked to connect their own dots. It made them feel smart.

Then, because he could, he opened a browser tab and logged into @PCAtea.

The recovery email was his now. Ten minutes in Lexi’s bathroom with the faucet off, and the account had a new owner and the old one didn’t know. He scrolled the queue. Lexi’s harmless garbage. A poll about the dining hall. A blurry photo of somebody’s Costco roses.

He typed a new caption with his thumb.

Friday. 8 PM. A love story he paid for ??

No teapot. Capital F. Lexi would hate it. He scheduled it for 9:00 PM tonight, so McKnight could have an hour or two of wondering before the text, and closed the tab.

His phone buzzed on the cushion. Not Eliza. A number he hadn’t saved and didn’t need to.

Nine days, college.

Yesterday it had been ten. Cameron laughed. It came out loud and easy, the way it always had, and then it kept going after there was nothing left to laugh at, until he was sitting alone in Brayden’s living room making a sound at a skull-shaped bong. He made himself stop.

He picked up the phone and opened Eliza’s thread. Her last message was from yesterday, after the hearing, after he’d left her standing in the hallway: where are you.

He typed.

come over. brayden’s. i need you.

He looked at it. He took out the period, then put it back. Delivered.

Three dots. Then: ok. 20 min.

Good. She’d come. She always came. She’d sat in that hearing room and read from her little document like a girl giving a book report, and she’d come anyway, because Eliza Hartwell knew what she cost and knew who’d paid it.

Cameron stood, stretched until his spine cracked, and left the front door on the latch.

He walked down the hall toward the bathroom, pulling his shirt over his head, and turned on the shower until the mirror fogged.

On the coffee table, between the bong and the Lunchables, the laptop stayed open, its screen bright and patient: the draft, the folder, the photo of the lofts, and a cursor blinking after the word Koreatown.