SELF MADE

Ten Percent

The account was called Riverbend Federal Savings, which meant nothing to Adrian except that it was three bus stops further than the bank he already used, which meant it took him forty extra minutes on a Tuesday to open it. He almost talked himself out of it twice on the ride over. Forty minutes was forty minutes he could've been picking up deliveries. Forty minutes was real money he was choosing not to make in order to go set aside money he didn't have yet.

He did it anyway.

The teller who opened the account for him was maybe five years older than him and visibly unimpressed by the eleven dollars he deposited to open it — eleven dollars being ten percent of the hundred and ten he'd made in tips the day after his meeting with Kade, which he'd tracked with the fanatic precision of someone terrified of getting it wrong.

"That's fine," she said, when he apologized for the amount. "Money's money."

It didn't feel like money. It felt like a number on a screen that used to be his and now, according to a rule handed to him by a stranger in a gray sweater, wasn't supposed to be touchable. He walked out of the bank feeling lighter and also faintly ridiculous, like he'd just paid eleven dollars for the privilege of pretending he had a plan.

---

The hard part wasn't the first day. It was the eleventh.

Rent was due, and Adrian was forty dollars short of it — the exact math not adding up in the particular, sickening way it hadn't added up in years, except this time there was a version of him with forty-one dollars sitting untouched in an account three bus stops away, and every part of him that had grown up watching his mother juggle bills wanted to pull it back out. It's temporary, he told himself. It's not really breaking the rule if I put it back next week.

He didn't do it. He wasn't sure, lying awake that night doing the math a fourth time, whether that was discipline or just stubbornness about not admitting to Kade that he'd already failed the first assignment. He picked up two extra delivery shifts instead, ate ramen for four days straight, and made rent with eleven dollars to spare and a headache that didn't fully go away until the following Monday.

He didn't tell Kade any of this when Thursday came around again. He just handed over the notebook, now with a running log of every deposit and every place the money had *wanted* to go instead, and Kade read through it in silence for what felt like a very long time.

"You almost took it back out," Kade said. Not a question.

"How'd you know that?"

"Because everyone almost takes it back out around day eleven. It's not psychic. It's arithmetic — that's usually about when the first real bill lands after the first real deposit." He closed the notebook. "You didn't, though."

"Barely."

"Barely's the whole game, for a while. Nobody does this comfortably in the beginning. If it felt comfortable, everyone would already be doing it." Kade set the notebook down between them like it had earned a place on the table instead of just in Adrian's pocket. "Next lesson. Harder than the first one, and you're not ready for it, but I'm going to give it to you anyway because you clearly don't wait to be ready before doing things."

---

He ran into Marlowe again on a Wednesday, which he would later come to understand was not remotely a coincidence, though at the time it felt like exactly the kind of luck he didn't get.

She was in the lobby coffee shop on the ground floor of Kade's building — a place Adrian had started detouring through on his way out, not entirely by accident, though he hadn't fully admitted that to himself either — sitting alone at a corner table with a laptop open and an expression that suggested whatever was on the screen had personally wronged her.

"Adrian-who-doesn't-know-my-father," she said, without looking up, which meant she'd clocked him before he'd said anything, which he found unreasonably satisfying.

"You remembered."

"You're hard to place. Everyone in this building is placeable in about four seconds. You took me almost a full elevator ride." She finally looked up, gestured at the empty chair across from her with the particular carelessness of someone used to people sitting where she pointed. "Sit. I need a second opinion from someone who isn't already invested in telling me what I want to hear."

He sat, mostly out of curiosity, and partly because he hadn't figured out yet how to say no to her, a problem he suspected was going to get worse before it got better.

"What am I looking at?"

She turned the laptop. A spreadsheet, dense with numbers that meant nothing to him yet in the specific way they would've meant nothing to him three weeks ago and meant slightly less nothing now. "A merger. My father wants to fold a competitor's fund into ours. On paper it's smart. In practice—" she stopped herself. "You don't care about this."

"I don't know enough to care about it yet," Adrian said, which was true, and which seemed to catch her slightly off guard — like most people either pretended to understand immediately or didn't bother pretending to be interested at all.

"That's a better answer than I usually get." She turned the laptop back toward herself. "What do you do? You never said."

He thought about lying, or at least rounding up. Instead he said, "I deliver food. And I'm trying to learn how money actually works, from someone in this building who apparently knows."

He expected her to lose interest fast — the honest answer usually did that, in his experience, with people who lived in buildings like this one. Instead she studied him for a second, something recalculating behind her eyes.

"That's either the most naive thing I've heard all week," she said slowly, "or the smartest. I haven't decided which."

"Give it time."

"I intend to." She closed the laptop, which felt like more of a decision than it should have. "I have to get back upstairs. But you're going to tell me who's teaching you, eventually. I'm curious who in this building has the patience for a student who admits what he doesn't know. Most of them don't."

She was gone before he could answer, the same way she'd left the elevator — already three steps ahead, like standing still cost her something she wasn't willing to spend.

Adrian sat with his coffee going cold and understood, with the specific dread of someone who'd just made rent by eleven dollars and had absolutely no business getting distracted, that this was going to be a problem.