By the time Mandy brought up college again, the sun had already gone down and the Gallagher house had settled into its usual evening shape.
The television was running somewhere downstairs, low enough to blend into the rest of the house instead of taking it over. Fiona moved back and forth between the kitchen and the living room with that same tired, steady rhythm she always had at the end of the day, cleaning one thing while already thinking about the next. Carl and Debbie were arguing about something that had almost definitely started small and pointless, but by now it had grown into the kind of full-volume disagreement only siblings could maintain with that much commitment.
Upstairs, it was quieter.
Not silent. The house never gave anyone that much. But quieter in a way that felt separate. The floor caught some of the noise and dulled the rest. A muffled voice from below. A cabinet door. A burst of laughter from the television. Then nothing for a while.
Lip sat on the edge of the bed with a notebook resting loosely in both hands.
He had been looking through it for several minutes now without saying much, turning the pages slowly, stopping here and there at numbers written in the margins or short lists squeezed between rough calculations. The notebook itself was worn enough already to look like it had lived in his room for longer than it had. Some pages were neat. Most weren't. Words scratched out and written over. Arrows drawn sideways. Quick math, crossed through and redone. Half-finished thoughts he had written down before they could slip away.
Mandy leaned back against the wall beside him, one leg stretched across the mattress and the other hanging over the side. She had been quiet long enough now that Lip could feel it.
Not awkward quiet. Mandy never really did awkward quiet.
More like focused quiet.
The kind that meant she was watching him think and deciding when to interrupt it.
Eventually she did.
"You never really answered me."
Lip looked up from the page. "About what."
Her eyes stayed on him. "College."
There was no irritation in her voice, not exactly. But there was enough firmness under it that he knew she hadn't let the courtyard conversation go just because the day had moved on.
He closed the notebook and set it beside him on the bed.
"You've been stuck on that all day."
"Yes."
The answer came so quickly it almost made him smile.
Mandy shifted, sitting up straighter against the wall now. There was none of the loose, teasing ease from earlier. She looked completely awake, completely serious, and not especially interested in pretending otherwise.
"You should be thinking about it."
Lip rested his elbows on his knees and looked toward the floor for a second before glancing back at her. "I am thinking about it."
"That's not what it looked like earlier."
"No," he said. "Earlier it looked like I didn't tell you what you wanted to hear."
Mandy's expression didn't change much, but the line hit where it was supposed to.
"You're too smart to stay stuck here," she said after a second. "Everybody knows it. The teachers know it. You know it."
He let out a small breath through his nose. "That doesn't answer anything."
"It answers enough."
"No, it doesn't."
She frowned a little. "How."
Lip leaned forward slightly, forearms resting on his knees now, hands loosely clasped. "You keep saying college like it fixes the rest by itself."
Mandy stared at him. "I didn't say that."
"You didn't have to."
For a second the room went still around them. Downstairs, Carl raised his voice about something incomprehensible. Debbie yelled back immediately. Fiona said one sharp thing that cut through both of them at once, and then the noise dipped again.
Mandy kept her eyes on him.
"It gets you out," she said. "That matters."
Lip nodded once. "Yeah. That's what people say."
She looked almost offended by that. "You make it sound fake."
"Not fake." He reached back for the notebook. "Just not the only option."
That got her attention fast enough to cut through the rest of the conversation.
Mandy looked down at the notebook in his hands as he flipped it open again.
"What is that."
"Something I've been working on."
He turned a few pages, then angled it toward her.
The pages were messy. Not random, but definitely not neat enough to make sense at a glance. There were numbers running down the sides, short lists of items, arrows connecting one calculation to another, notes squeezed in between lines where he clearly hadn't left enough room the first time. A few brand names were scribbled down. Shipping costs. Rough price estimates. Profit margins figured out and then redone.
Mandy leaned in a little.
"I have no idea what I'm looking at."
Lip pointed near the top of one page. "You know how people buy stuff online now."
"Like eBay."
"Yeah. Like that."
She looked back at the page.
"What about it."
He tapped the list again. "Most people think you need money first. A lot of it. Inventory, a shop, storage, all that."
Mandy watched his finger move across the page. "Do you not?"
"Not always."
That made her look at him again.
Lip turned another page and showed her a shorter list. Cheap jewelry. Headphones. Accessories. Smaller stuff. The kind of things people bought fast and didn't overthink if the price looked right.
"You set up a site," he said. "You put the stuff there. Somebody orders it. Then you send that order to whoever actually has the product, and they ship it out."
Mandy stared at him.
Then at the notebook.
Then back at him.
"So you're selling things you don't even own."
"Basically."
"That sounds sketchy."
He laughed quietly. "Only if they never get it."
She kept looking at him like she still hadn't decided whether to laugh too or call him insane.
"And people actually do this."
"Yes."
"How do you even know that."
"Because I've been reading."
Mandy settled back against the wall, though her eyes stayed on the notebook. "And this is your grand plan."
"It's one plan."
"You have more than one?"
"Obviously."
That got a small look out of her, half disbelief and half reluctant amusement.
He turned the notebook back toward himself and flipped to another page, this one with rougher numbers and a few boxed-in estimates. Startup costs. Ad money. Percentages. What one small product sold enough times could turn into after fees if he didn't completely screw it up.
"I don't need it to be huge right away," he said. "I need the first one to work."
Mandy was listening closely now, her earlier frustration with college redirected into concentration.
"And then."
He pointed to another line of numbers. "Then that pays for the next one."
She watched him trace the lines on the page.
"And then."
"The next one does the same."
Something changed in her face then. Not because she suddenly fully understood the notebook. She probably didn't. But she understood enough to see that this wasn't some vague thought he had thrown together because she annoyed him about college once.
He had been thinking about it for real.
For a while.
"That's why you took the job at the Alibi."
Lip looked at her. "Partly."
"To save money."
"Yes."
She sat with that for a moment.
Downstairs, the television got louder for a second and then lower again. A door shut somewhere. Somebody moved through the hall and kept going. The room itself stayed still.
Mandy looked back at the notebook. "So your answer to college is this."
"My answer to college is that I'm not relying on one path."
She frowned slightly. "You say that like you already know it's going to work."
He did not answer right away, which in itself was answer enough.
Mandy saw it immediately.
"You really believe this."
"Yes."
It wasn't arrogance in the way he said it. Not showy. Just certain.
That seemed to catch her off guard more than if he had given her some big speech about dreams or escaping the neighborhood. He sounded too calm for it to be fake.
She reached over and took the notebook from him before he could stop her.
He let her.
Mandy looked down at the pages again, slower this time. Her fingers ran over a margin full of numbers, then paused on one page where he had started listing ideas and crossed half of them out.
"Why didn't you tell me."
Lip leaned back against the wall beside her. "You were busy trying to drag me to college."
"That's not an answer."
He looked at her profile for a second before answering. "Because I wanted to figure out if it made sense first."
"And now?"
"Now it does."
That quieted her again.
Mandy was not the kind of person who got impressed easily. She had too much experience with people talking big and doing nothing. Too much experience with promises that evaporated the second they met actual work. He knew that. Which was why he didn't try to oversell it now.
He just let the notebook sit in her hands.
After a while she looked up.
"You don't sound like you're bullshitting."
One corner of his mouth lifted. "I'm not."
"That's unsettling."
"That's planning."
Mandy shook her head once, small and disbelieving, but there was something else there too now. Not agreement exactly. Not surrender. Just the first crack in the wall she had put up around the idea because it wasn't the one she had chosen for him.
She handed the notebook back.
"So what," she said. "You save cash from the bar, build a site, sell random cheap stuff to strangers, and somehow that gets you out."
"When you say it like that, it sounds worse."
"It sounds exactly like what you said."
He smiled faintly. "You're leaving out the part where I actually know what I'm doing."
"Do you?"
"Yes."
She narrowed her eyes at him. "That's a dangerous amount of confidence."
"I did the math."
Mandy let out a quiet breath that was almost a laugh. "Of course you did."
He opened the notebook again and pointed to another page, more to show her he wasn't making it up than because she needed the details now.
"The first one only has to work well enough to fund the second. I'm not trying to build everything at once."
"Mm."
"And small stuff is easier."
"Still sounds insane."
"It's not insane."
"It is from where I'm sitting."
That made him laugh once.
Mandy crossed her arms over one knee and looked at him properly again, like she was trying to line up the boy sitting on the bed in a Gallagher bedroom with the version of him she was now being asked to believe in. The one with pages of numbers. The one working evenings at the Alibi not because he liked hauling boxes but because he had already attached the money to something bigger.
"You've thought this through way too much."
"That's usually the point."
"If this blows up in your face," she said, "I'm going to be unbearable."
"That's fair."
"I mean it."
"I know."
She studied him another second, then let her head rest back against the wall. The tension had gone out of her shoulders a little. Not completely, but enough.
Downstairs, Carl started up again, louder now, and Debbie immediately matched him. Fiona's voice cut through both of them with the tired authority of someone who had done this too many times to bother raising her volume anymore. The television kept murmuring under everything, the sound so familiar it barely registered as separate noise at all.
Mandy glanced at the notebook once more.
"If this actually works…"
He looked over at her. "It will."
She rolled her eyes immediately. "You say that like the whole thing's already done."
"I know what I'm building."
That got a real laugh out of her, quick and unwilling, the kind that slipped out before she could decide not to give it to him.
She shook her head. "That's not any better."
She went quiet again after that, but it was a different quiet now. Less resistant. More thoughtful.
When she finally looked back at him, there was that same sharpness in her face as always, but softened around the edges by something he knew better than to name out loud.
"So where am I in this brilliant plan."
Lip closed the notebook and set it aside. "With me."
Mandy raised one eyebrow. "That's a vague answer."
"Fine." He leaned back against the wall beside her. "You help."
"How."
He glanced at her. "You notice things people miss."
She did not interrupt, so he kept going.
"You know what sounds fake and what doesn't. You know what people look at. You know when something's off." He paused, then added, "And you don't quit just because something gets annoying."
Now she looked mildly amused.
"That your pitch?"
"It's spot on."
"It's flattering."
"Don't get used to it."
She smiled despite herself.
For a second it looked like she might argue again, just because that was how she handled almost anything serious that got too close. Instead she reached over, lifted the edge of one notebook page with her fingertips, then let it fall back into place.
"If this turns into a disaster," she said, "I'm blaming you for all of it."
"That's fair."
"And if it works…"
Lip turned his head toward her.
Mandy met his eyes, the corner of her mouth lifting.
"Then you might actually be the smartest idiot I've ever met."
Advanced Chapters: 10