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Just then a door clicked open and the hallway hushed. Victoria, hair in a tight bun, stalked out of an office across the hallway. She was wearing sky-high heels, making her six feet tall, and she looked made of ice.

“Dr. Jaynes, I’m sorry you had to come all the way down here.” An older police officer approached, holding out his hand. They obviously knew each other, since he didn’t introduce himself. She eyed him but didn’t say a word and didn’t take his hand, then turned abruptly to one of the lawyers. She whispered something to the lawyer, who looked up and said, “They go through the back door. Understood?”

“I didn’t see any media….” The cop stopped talking at their expressions and changed direction. “Of course.”

The apologies were beginning. This was exactly why Novak donated millions of dollars to campaigns, to the university, to other powerful people’s causes. He needed to have this kind of influence just in case something like this happened.

I watched Victoria dismiss herself from the conversation and wander farther down the hall. At first her mind was elsewhere, but then she focused on something. And she smirked. I leaned forward to see what she was looking at. Victoria had heard about the stranger in our midst and was checking him out.

John sat on a chair across from where Victoria was standing. He had the balls to confidently lock eyes with her, which probably accounted for her smirk. I’d never seen anyone stand up to her like that, let alone an eighteen-year-old boy. Or maybe that was exactly the type of person who was unafraid: someone like Angus.

I saw John had been given his phone back. He looked down at it and then up at Victoria again, as if reconciling what he was reading with the live version of her. I guessed what he was reading. Victoria probably did too. I understood why he was questioning his sanity right now, wanting to know more, trying to justify what he’d seen. John actually succeeded in making Victoria uncomfortable. She pivoted on her heel and stalked back down the hallway toward us.

“Let’s go,” Victoria rasped at Liv and me, exposing the fact that she wasn’t totally in control. The police officers snapped into motion, ready to provide us with an escort. Liv stood up, and I reluctantly followed. We had to pass John on the way to the exit. His was a front-row seat to this Kennedy-like show of power—the rich people getting their kids off, the regular person completely screwed. I kept my eyes down, not liking at all that I felt ashamed.

I saw him slide his feet back in anticipation of our passage, either to be polite and make room for us to pass, or because he didn’t want us near him. As I drew closer, I strained to see out of the corner of my eye if I’d been right about what was on his phone, but I couldn’t quite see.

John loosely cradled his phone in one hand and then put it in his pocket. His ratty beach towel and All the King’s Men had been returned as well and sat in a pile on the bench beside him. With a look I forced the paperback book to fall from the bench and skid under Liv’s feet as she walked by. She tripped and stumbled forward. John reflexively half stood up and grasped her arm to steady her. I was one step behind them and deftly removed the phone from his pocket during the diversion.

Liv recovered from the rare stumble and shot John a look of death for touching her. She replaced the flip-flop she had lost, and our procession continued toward the exit, his phone now plastered to my side. I looked straight ahead and kept walking, feeling his eyes on my back.





Victoria put the G-Wagen in reverse and tore out of the parking lot, not speaking to either of us. From the blacked-out window of her Mercedes-AMG G65, I saw a Honda Accord in the parking lot, a Patagonia LIVE SIMPLY sticker on the bumper. I guessed it belonged to John’s family, since it was the only other civilian car in the lot.

No one spoke. The atmosphere was so glacial, even Liv knew better than to say a word. I sat in the backseat, which gave me a small amount of privacy. I took out John’s phone to look at it. It was strange holding something that had just been in his hand.

The phone wasn’t passcoded. It was as easy as sliding the power on, and the screen came alive with exactly what I thought would be there.

It wasn’t the more generic profile of my father featured in the billionaire’s issue of Vanity Fair. It was the story that came out shortly after from a semitrashy online news source. Entitled “Novak Jaynes, the Luckiest Man Alive,” it was the one that had made all the rounds on social media, my school being ground zero. I was a little surprised it hadn’t been scrubbed from the internet, given Novak’s resources. I knew it by heart, but I found myself reading what was on his screen, wanting to see it from John’s perspective.

We’ve all heard the phrase “born lucky.” But how many times can you get lucky before people start to wonder if something more is at play? At first glance Novak Jaynes is an accomplished hedge fund manager with movie-star looks, living a dream life of wealth and power in Austin, Texas. This began as a straightforward look at a man whose hedge fund has achieved outsize success and who had the good fortune to miraculously survive a near-death incident. But the profile took an unexpected turn.

In the summer of 2001, just before the events of September 11, a twenty-four-year-old named Novak Jaynes started a hedge fund in a home office with $100,000. He predicted and profited handsomely from the market swing in 2001, single-handedly building the fund to one hundred million dollars in a breathtakingly short amount of time. He profited again during the market crash of 2008–2009. Today Novak Jaynes has an estimated net worth of over 1.2 billion dollars and has presumably made his investors millionaires several times over.

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