RUIN ME, I DARE YOU.

POV: Viv Castellan

Four hundred and thirteen dollars and sixty-two cents.

That was how short Viv Castellan was on her half of the rent, and the first of the month was nine days away.

She checked the number again, as if it might have changed in the last ten seconds. 5:04 a.m. The café was empty, the lights were too bright, and the milk steamer hissed behind her like it had opinions.

$61.38.

The scholarship covered her tuition. It did not cover rent, groceries, or the phone bill that somehow came due every month. Those were hers, and so was the math.

She had run it every way she could think of. Skip meals: not enough. Sell her textbooks: not enough, and she needed them. Pick up extra hours at the café: that was the plan, the only plan, the one she had built the whole month around.

She locked the screen and slid the phone into her apron.

"You're early," said Greg, coming out of the back with a crate of oat milk.

"Three minutes."

"Still early." He set the crate down and didn't quite look at her. "Hey. About next week's schedule."

Her stomach dropped before he finished.

"I can't give you the extra shifts," he said. "Corporate cut the budget. I'm sorry, Viv. I know you were counting on them."

She kept her face still. She'd had a lot of practice.

For one second she almost told him. That she had trimmed her budget twice already this month and there was nothing left to trim except herself. That "I'm sorry" didn't pay rent.

But Greg hadn't made the decision, and explaining wouldn't change it.

"It's fine."

"It doesn't sound fine."

"It's fine, Greg."

He let it go. People usually did when she said it like that.

The first customers came at six, and Viv made coffee the way she did everything: fast, exact, and without wasting a word. A girl in a sorority sweatshirt wanted her latte "literally exactly 130 degrees." A man in a suit wanted it yesterday.

At 6:45, a guy in a Blackwood Baseball hoodie leaned on the counter like he owned it, two friends behind him.

"Large coffee."

"Four dollars."

He tapped his phone, then squinted at her name tag. "Viv. You always look like someone just canceled your birthday."

"I'm making coffee."

"Could you smile while you do it?"

She slid the cup across the counter.

"I can," she said. "It costs extra."

His friends howled. He grinned, delighted, and dropped a dollar into the tip jar.

"Keep the change."

"How generous."

Viv watched the dollar for exactly one second. It wouldn't fix anything. She still wasn't going to pretend she hadn't seen it.

Then she turned to the next customer.

She was out of her apron by eight, a granola bar in one hand and her statistics notes in the other, crossing the quad fast before the cold could settle into her bones.

Statistics was the one subject that had never lied to her. Numbers behaved. They said what they meant and they added up the same way every time.

People were the problem.

The tutoring center was in the library basement. It smelled like old paper and burnt coffee. She didn't have a shift there until Thursday, but the bulletin board by the door was where the real money lived.

She scanned it the way other people scanned menus.

SAT prep, $25 an hour. Essay editing, $20. A flyer for someone selling a futon.

Then, near the bottom, a cream-colored card with a gold border, pinned like it belonged to someone who had never worried about the cost of a thumbtack.

PRIVATE TUTOR NEEDED: UNIVERSITY STATISTICS. $45/HR.

Viv read it twice.

Forty-five dollars an hour was nearly double anything else on the board.

It wouldn't fix nine days. But it would stop the next nine weeks from looking exactly like this one.

Then she weighed the other side. A private student meant working around someone else's schedule. It meant hours stolen from her own studying. And rich students with private tutors rarely enjoyed being taught by someone who knew more than they did.

"Interested?"

The coordinator had appeared at her elbow, a folder under one arm and the look of someone who had answered the same question forty times today.

"Maybe," Viv said. "Why the gold border?"

"The student's family likes things to look serious." The woman tapped the card. "He's failing. Badly."

"How badly?"

"Badly enough that he needs someone working with him regularly."

"Sounds like I'll have my work cut out for me."

The woman studied her. "Do you have time for this? Honestly?"

"No," Viv said. "That's never stopped me."

The woman almost smiled. Viv's eyes dropped back to the card, and that was when she saw the line at the bottom, in small, neat print.

Student: M. Hale.

The granola bar stopped halfway to her mouth.

"Hale," she said.

"Mason Hale. He's a pitcher for Blackwood. His family owns the hotels."

For a moment, Viv barely heard the sounds around her.

Viv knew that name.

Not from campus gossip or the sports page. She knew it from a time much earlier: a hallway, a closed door, her father's voice on the phone. Low. Tight. Saying one word.

Hale.

He hadn't said it like a name. He'd said it like a weight.

When he hung up, he had stood very still, as if he were waiting for something to come through the wall. Then he had seen her in the doorway, and his face had changed.

"Nothing," he'd said. "Go to bed."

She had never forgotten how it sounded. She had never heard him say it again.

"Do you two know each other?" the coordinator asked.

"No."

It was true. It was also the kind of true that felt like a lie.

Something cold moved through her chest, small and sharp. A coincidence, she told herself. Hale wasn't a rare surname. Half the country had met one.

The hotel family was not half the country.

She should walk away. Any sensible person would. Her life was already stacked as high as it could go without toppling, and she did not need a rich boy who didn't try, or a name that tightened her chest.

But the card said forty-five dollars an hour.

And her phone, warm in her pocket, said sixty-one thirty-eight.

And beneath both of them, quieter and harder to ignore, was a question she had never been able to put down.

"I'll take it," Viv said.

The coordinator blinked. "You haven't met him."

"I don't need to."

"He's difficult."

"So am I."

The woman pulled a form from her folder and held out a pen.

Viv hesitated, just for a breath, with the pen above the line. Then she signed her name. Her handwriting was steady. It always was.

She told herself it was for the money.

It was almost true.