Chapter 1

"Jamie Forrest, you only told me you were up after you'd already brushed your teeth. I'm extremely disappointed in you. I need to teach you a lesson, so you only get paid for one check-in."

A PayPal notification popped up: one cent received.

I frowned, stuck. The cheapest bowl of oatmeal in the morning cost thirty cents. Even with today's one cent, I was still one cent short.

"Dad, I had a fever last night and felt awful. That's why I overslept. I'm rushing to make it to class. I promise it won't happen again."

I was practically groveling, trying to reason with him.

Dad's voice was firm. "Son, everyone has to pay for their own mistakes. Wrong is wrong. Don't make excuses.

"You've never given me any trouble. I don't want you turning into a bad kid who makes excuses for what he did wrong."

I hung my head, deflated. The urge to have moved fast enough to avoid being late was gone. "Got it, Dad. I'm heading to class."

"That's my boy. Go on, and listen to your teachers. Same as always, tell me everything about class today: what the teacher covered, what you did, and how well you did it."

I obediently replied, "Okay."

I walked into the lecture hall and, as usual, went to stand at the very back.

Our morning classes were usually general-ed lectures, packed with students I didn't know. Some of them whispered, "Hey, why does that guy always stand in the back?"

One who knew the story grinned slyly. "Him? He's a total daddy's boy. Every time the professor says a sentence, he snaps a photo and sends it to his dad to report in.

"His phone is junk, and the camera can't even be muted. Click, click, click. It's so annoying that the professor made him stand in the back so he won't disrupt class."

I couldn't help lowering my head. I clutched my phone, its screen a web of cracks, and hid from everyone's stares.

Among them were my roommates, the ones I used to get along with fairly well.

A while back, they'd seen Dad sending me money every single day, so they egged me on to treat them.

But I had no money, so all I could do was say no. I kept turning down their invitations to eat out after that too.

They decided I was stingy and hard to get along with, and without a word, they all drifted away from me.

What they didn't know was that every transfer from Dad was one cent.

Even checking in over a thousand times a day, I could only earn a few dollars.

Maybe it was the heat. Our dorm had no air-conditioning, and our dorm leader came down with mild heatstroke and a low fever.

Before lights-out, he weakly complained about it to his parents on the phone.

Our roommates comforted him, bringing him water and medicine. Nobody liked me, so I didn't crowd in.

I went to the dorm kitchen, filled his thermos with hot water, and came back to sit quietly on my bed, watching what was going on over by him.

Early the next morning, his parents came to campus and took him to the hospital to get medicine.

His dad was generous. When they brought him back at noon, he treated all of us to lunch.

At the table, our dorm leader kept joking around with his parents. They didn't get annoyed at all. They just smiled at him fondly, piling his favorite dishes onto his plate and reminding him of this and that every so often.

I ate hot entrées I hadn't tasted in ages, sneaking glances at how they interacted out of the corner of my eye.