"Be honest," Scott muttered, low enough that only the air conditioning caught it. "Who actually thinks the government isn't completely cooked?"
Nobody answered. He wasn't talking to anyone.
'Think about it,' he thought, watching a dust mote drift through the projector beam. 'The government owns something that actually helps people, then suddenly efficiency is the word of the day and they sell it off to some private firm. Prices go through the roof, politicians still run things from the back, the big men eat well, and the rest of us just keep paying for the privilege of being alive. A scam. A clean, well-dressed scam.'
And here he was, trapped in the third row of an economics lecture on a Wednesday afternoon, which was its own kind of joke.
He wasn't listening. Hadn't been for the last forty minutes, and under normal circumstances he would've been gone an hour ago, but the reason he was still sitting here had nothing to do with attendance and everything to do with who was standing at the front of the room.
Miss Sandra was explaining natural monopolies.
He was watching the way her white blouse handled the situation it had been put in, which was not easy. Every time she reached up to write something on the board the fabric pulled tight across her chest in a way that made the whole room go slightly quieter without anyone deciding to do that. Scott had noticed this on the first day of semester and had kept noticing it every class since, along with about fifty other guys who had no real academic reason to be here but showed up anyway, on time, every week.
She turned her back to write something down and the room did that thing again, that specific silence, everybody watching the dark fabric of her skirt follow the movement of her hips with the kind of attention they were not giving the whiteboard.
"Soo fucked up," Scott breathed.
He was talking about the government.
Mostly.
"Mr. Scott."
He snapped forward. Miss Sandra had turned back around and was leaning against the desk with her arms folded, and the movement had caused things to settle in a way that made Scott's throat go dry before he'd processed that she was looking directly at him over the top of her glasses, which had slid slightly down her nose. She hadn't pushed them up. Just looked at him with a gaze that was far too sharp for his current condition.
"I asked you to define the primary disadvantage of a natural monopoly for the consumer," she said. A small pause. "I'm waiting."
The hint of a smirk at the corner of her mouth suggested she knew exactly what he'd been thinking about, which was the most uncomfortable thing that had happened to Scott this week.
"I... it's the... the pricing," he managed. "The consumer has no alternative so the —"
Someone in the front row laughed. Quietly, but it carried.
Miss Sandra let him hang there for one more second then turned her attention to a girl three seats to his left, who sat up straight and delivered a clean, complete answer about price exploitation and absent competition without a single pause. The kind of answer that came from someone who had done every reading. Scott had heard there were people like that. He respected it the way you respected things that had nothing to do with your life.
"Exactly," Miss Sandra said, and turned back to the board.
Scott sank slightly in his seat and stayed there until the bell rang.
He was two steps from the door when her voice reached across the room one final time.
"Assignment on the portal by Friday. Hard copies to the class rep. No extensions. Prompt is on the board."
Scott looked at the board. He had written nothing. He looked at the class rep, Miller, a guy who wore ironed polo shirts and had the energy of someone who genuinely enjoyed having information other people needed.
'I'll have to text that bastard,' Scott thought, and left.
---
He got back to his building as the sun turned the sky a bruised purple and found a heavy-duty padlock on his door and a neon-orange notice taped to the wood.
EVICTION NOTICE. SIX MONTHS OVERDUE. VACATE IMMEDIATELY.
He read it twice. "The woman actually did it," he said quietly, to the notice itself. She'd told him last month she would and he'd nodded and promised and done absolutely nothing about it, and here was the result of that strategy.
He went downstairs and knocked on the landlord's door.
Mrs. Gable opened it almost immediately, which meant she'd been waiting, which meant this was going exactly the way he feared.
"Mrs. Gable —"
"No," she said.
"Just listen for one —"
"I said no, Scott. Find my money before you come back to this door." She looked at him with the flat, unbothered expression of a woman who had heard every version of this conversation and had stopped finding any of them interesting. "I've been patient long enough."
"I just need to grab a few things from inside, I'm not asking for —"
"Goodnight, Scott."
She closed the door.
He stood in the hallway and knocked again. Once. Twice.
Nothing. Not even footsteps. Just the boiled cabbage smell and the old carpet and the silence of a door that had made its decision.
He kicked the baseboard.
"Goddamn it!"
His stomach answered with a long, hollow growl that had been waiting for a quiet moment to make its case. He hadn't eaten since a sleeve of crackers the night before. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled ten dollar bill and some loose change.
Ten dollars. Total.
He pulled out his phone and called Francis, because Francis was the last number that still picked up.
"Yoo, Francis —"
"Bro." Francis sounded tired before Scott had finished the greeting. "I don't have another cent. Not a dime."
"No, listen, I'm not asking for —"
"Scott. Stop. You're asking. You're always asking. I've got the fifty from last month still sitting there and you haven't even mentioned it." A pause that had genuine exhaustion in it. "Get a job, man. Don't call me for a while."
Click.
Scott stood in the hallway with the dead phone in his hand and stayed with it for a moment without fighting it. Francis had answered every time for two years and had never once asked for anything back. A man could only carry that so long before he put it down.
'Can't even be mad,' Scott thought. 'He tried for me.'
He bought a loaf of generic white bread for three dollars at the corner shop, the cheapest thing on the shelf. The guy behind the counter slid the change across without looking up, the practiced indifference of someone who had seen men buying survival bread at this hour before and had stopped having feelings about it.
Scott found a bench at the edge of the park and sat down. He held the bread in his lap and looked at it for a moment. Seven dollars left. No room. No plan. He was about to tear the loaf open when he saw her.
She was standing at the park's edge, looking frayed, her hair a tangled mess of dark silk. She looked like someone who had been walking for a long time and had run out of reasons to keep going.
Scott looked at her. Then he looked at his bread and the seven dollars sitting in his pocket.
'She needs it more than you do.'
He already knew what he was going to do before he finished the thought.
"Hey," he called out.
She turned. Even in the dim light, worn down and disheveled as she was, she stopped him cold. The kind of face that had no business looking that way under a broken park lamp.
"When did you last eat?" he asked.
She didn't answer. Which was its own answer.
He walked over and held out the bread and a five dollar bill. "There's a shop two blocks down. Get something warm."
She stared at his hand for a moment. "That's yours."
"Don't worry about that."
She took it slowly, like she was waiting for him to change his mind. He didn't. She looked at him once more, something unreadable moving behind her eyes, then turned and walked away without another word.
Scott sat back down on the bench and stayed there until the cold started to bite properly.
He put his hand in his pocket for his phone.
It wasn't there.
He checked the other pocket. His bag. He stood up and looked around the bench, turning in a slow circle like it might appear if he just looked patient enough.
Nothing.
He sat back down. 'When did I last have it?' He retraced the day. The lecture. The stairs. The hallway outside Mrs. Gable's door. He'd definitely had it then, he remembered the dead weight of it when Francis hung up. After that he'd walked to the shop, sat on this bench, seen the girl.
He looked in the direction she had gone.
Long gone.
"You have got to be kidding me," he said quietly.
He sat with it for a while. No phone. No money. No food. Locked out of a room he couldn't afford anyway, with a landlord who had already made her decision and a friend who had finally, reasonably, put him down. The cold was settling in properly now, working through his jacket like it had somewhere to be.
He thought about calling someone. Then remembered he had nothing to call with.
He thought about going back to the building. Then thought about the hallway, the carpet smell, Mrs. Gable's door, and sitting on the floor outside his own room until morning with the eviction notice looking down at him.
He stood up.
He walked.
He didn't decide where he was going, not consciously, but his feet knew and he let them lead. The city thinned out around him the further he walked, the noise dropping away until it was just streetlamps and empty road and the sound of water somewhere ahead.
The bridge appeared out of the dark like it had been waiting.
Scott walked to the railing and stood there, looking down. The water was black and far away and completely indifferent to him, which felt appropriate.
'Nobody would even notice until the smell,' he thought, and almost laughed, because even now that part of his brain wouldn't turn off.
He put his hands on the railing. The metal was cold and rough with old paint and he gripped it and looked down and let himself look, really look, for the first time without flinching away from it.
He was so tired.
Not sleepy tired. The other kind. The kind that had been building for so long he'd stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing a sound that never goes away.
He climbed up onto the lower rung. The wind hit him properly up here, pushing at his chest like it was trying to make a suggestion.
He looked down one more time.
Then something moved in his peripheral vision and he turned his head.
She was standing at the far end of the bridge. The same woman. He was sure of it before he could explain how. The dark hair, the way she stood, something about the shape of her against the lamplight that his brain recognized before his eyes finished the job.
She was looking directly at him.
Scott stared back. Neither of them moved for a moment, just two people on a bridge in the dead of night looking at each other across the distance.
He turned back to the water.
'Not like she's going to do anything.'
And he was right. She didn't move. Didn't shout. Didn't come running. Just watched him the way you watch something that has already been decided.
Scott looked down at the black water one last time.
Then he let go.
The cold hit him like a wall the moment he broke the surface, driving every thought out of his head at once, and then the dark water closed over him and swallowed everything.