Trade Me (Cyclone #1)(3)

Which I definitely don’t. Not today.

“Here’s how I see things,” Blake says. At the front of the class, Fred sets his hand on his chin and nods.

“We can discuss the effect that food stamps have.” Blake has a trillion-watt smile, one that could power every computer that his father’s company has ever produced. “We can argue whether policies like food stamps make people lazy. We can talk about incentives, and we can talk about money. And I understand those who say that all our good intentions do is create a permanent underclass that perpetuates the cycle of poverty, that people need to work for the benefits they’re given, not just have them handed to them for doing nothing.”

A tide of red anger fills me. My pen gouges the paper.

“But,” Blake says, “let’s say we grant all that is true for the sake of argument. What are the real alternatives? We’ve tried doing nothing, Dickens-style, and we know how that turned out. No matter what we do, we always have a permanent underclass. The only question we have is how we treat them, and what that says about us.”

Oh, that’s the only question, is it? Funny. I have other questions.

Shut up, I tell myself desperately, but it’s too late. My mouth seems to work of its own accord.

“I see,” I hear myself say. “So poor people are lazy and doomed, but we should help them anyway so that you can take credit?” My face flushes as I speak.

Blake’s eyes widen. Slowly—every second seems slow right now, drowned by the beat of my heart—he turns to me. He sits right across from me; our eyes meet, and I can see the astonishment in his gaze. I can almost feel him taking in my stained sweater, my fading jeans. I’m nothing to him.

“I’m sorry.” He sounds honestly surprised, as if he can’t imagine that anyone would disagree with him, let alone a nothing like me. “What did you say?”

I should put my head back down. I should go back to holding my tongue, watching other people talk about my life. But I can’t. The only thing I’ve ever had to stave off the direst consequences of Murphy’s Law was a sweater and superstition, and Blake destroyed my faith in both today.

“You heard what I said.” My voice is shaking. “When have you ever been on food stamps? When have you ever had to work for anything? Who gave you the right to grant that poor people are lesser beings for the sake of argument? And who the hell are you to say that the only important thing is not whether people actually starve to death, but how the world will judge the wealthy?”

His face goes white. “I work,” he says. “I work really hard. It’s not easy—”

“It’s not easy being Adam Reynolds’s son,” I finish for him. “We all know how hard you work. Your dad told the entire world when he put you in charge of his interface division at the age of fourteen. I’m sure you’ve worked a lot of hours, sitting at a desk and taking credit for what other people do. It must be really hard holding down a part-time job that your father gave you. I bet it leaves you almost no time to spend your millions of dollars in stock options. Hey, I guess I was wrong. You do know what it’s like to get something in exchange for nothing. You’re an expert at it.”

His lips press together.

“But it doesn’t make you an expert on poverty,” I tell him. “I was up until midnight last night. I live five miles away, because I can’t afford to live in Berkeley. It takes me forty-five minutes to get to class. How long did it take you to park your BMW in the Chancellor’s spot?”

He looks at me, his eyes wide. “It’s…” He shakes his head. “It’s not a BMW.” As if that were the one salient fact in our prior discussion.

At the front of the class, Fred, the hapless instructor, is rummaging through his papers for the seating chart.

“It’s really big of you to say it doesn’t matter if people think my parents are lazy,” I tell him. “But they’re not your parents, and starting off your charitable statement by assuming that my family is subhuman is really, really crappy.”

“Hey,” Fred says. “Hey, uh…” He peers at the paper. “We don’t need to engage in personal attacks, uh…” He squints. “Uh.” Fred calls all the students by their first name, but my legal name has obviously stymied him. He shrugs and bulls on. “Let’s keep this about the issues, Miss Chen.”

“He got personal first.” My voice trembles. “I am this issue. My dad lost his job when I first started college. If my family hadn’t had food stamps then, I would have had to drop out.” I’m not going to cry. Not in front of everyone, and especially not in front of Blake. “None of you have any idea what you’re talking about. You don’t know what it’s like to go into a store and use EBT. You don’t know what it’s like to slink into a Salvation Army and hope that there will be something that will let you fit in with classmates whose weekly allowance would feed your family for two months.” I glare at Blake again.

Blake looks away. On the plus side—and this is not a huge plus—it looks like I won’t have to worry about Blake smiling at me anymore.

“And that’s why this issue is personal,” I say. “We’re invisible to you, except when you want to tell us what to do. You know what, Blake? Nobody here would care about a word you said if your family was on food stamps. Try trading lives with me. You couldn’t manage it, not for two weeks.”