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My name is Marion Harding, the only daughter of the Harding family.
My father was terrified that growing up spoiled would leave me out of touch with real life, so he ordered me to live in a four-person dorm all through college.
He dressed it up as learning how ordinary people struggle and picking up some social skills.
For the sake of dorm harmony, I swallowed my temper and kept my head down.
Then came the first dorm dinner of the semester. As the room leader, I fronted more than a thousand dollars. When it came time to settle up, everyone owed $263.
But my roommate Lucretia Lambert dropped a $23 payment in the chat, with a snide little note attached.
"Oh please, I had like three bites and a glass of iced tea. If we're really going by what I actually ate, twenty-three is already generous."
The few roommates who usually stuck by her all left the messages on read, silently backing her up.
The last few times we'd bought shared supplies for the dorm, I'd quietly covered Lucretia's share without a word.
I never imagined that all my swallowing would just make her bolder.
I looked at that $23 payment and tapped return.
Then I dumped the itemized menu and the screenshots of her chat into the class group and tagged her.
"Three bites? That $298 plate of salmon sashimi you ordered—who inhaled half of it in one go?"
"And that half a roast duck you packed up and took home, was that for the dog?"
"Pay the difference in the next ten minutes. If you don't, I'll bring the bill straight to the faculty advisor's office. And if that doesn't work, we can go settle the tab down at the police station."
……
The group chat exploded.
Lucretia didn't reply directly. Instead she fired off three sixty-second voice messages.
I hit play on speaker, and her sobbing filled the room, like she'd suffered some terrible injustice.
"Marion Harding, I know your family's rich. Half the designer brands you use I've never even heard of. You just look down on a poor student like me, from some little nowhere town."
"I didn't even want to come to this dinner today. You were the one who said it was everyone's first meal together, so for the sake of dorm unity I forced myself to go."
"I've never eaten sushi that expensive in my life. I thought you were treating us as the room leader… Was it really worth humiliating me in the class group over two hundred bucks?"
The message finished, and Cicely Lawrence, in the bunk across from me, shot up from her bed, rolled her eyes, pushed up her glasses, and started in with that snide tone of hers.
"Marion, don't you think that was way too harsh?"
"We're all in the same dorm. You know perfectly well Lucretia's family doesn't have money—I'm the one who filled out her financial aid form. Two hundred bucks is a milkshake to you. Do you have to push someone to the edge before you're satisfied?"
In the class group, a couple of the guys who liked to play the neutral, reasonable type jumped in too.
"Marion, take a step back and let it go. No need to string a classmate up for a public execution."
"Right? Pretty girl like you, how can you be this petty. So materialistic."
"It's not that much money, just chalk it up to bad luck. Don't ruin things between classmates over it."
Staring at the group chat filling up with blame, I was so angry I laughed.
If my father hadn't frozen my black card, if he hadn't forced me to live on campus for the grassroots social experience, threatening to cut off my trust fund, I'd have moved into a big place off-campus ages ago.
Me staying here did not make me an ATM for a pack of two-faced fakes.
Too lazy to type, I pulled up the video the sushi restaurant's owner had sent half an hour earlier.
My father was a top-tier VIP there, and while filming a promo for the restaurant's anniversary, the owner had happened to catch our table.
I clipped a ten-second stretch in high definition and threw it straight into the class group.
In the video, Lucretia was going at it with both hands, grabbing thick-cut salmon worth over two hundred dollars and shoving it into her mouth without even dipping it in anything.
The plate in front of her was piled with seafood shells, and when the bill came she moved even faster, asking the server for three takeout boxes and hauling the entire half of that several-hundred-dollar roast duck over in front of herself.
Her voice in the video was perfectly clear: "Marion's not short on cash anyway, so I'm taking this duck home for a late-night snack, don't fight me for it. I've been low on nutrition these past couple days."
The moment the video went up, all the guys who'd been so loud a second ago went silent. I pressed the voice key right after, my tone cold.
"Who said I was treating anyone? Before we left I said it was split evenly. You got cotton in your ears, didn't hear me?"
"You call this never having eaten anything expensive? The way you were cramming it into your mouth, a starving ghost has more restraint. Every one of those three bites was cash in your mouth."
"Cicely, since you're so kind, you cover her two hundred. Quit standing there running your mouth, building your little shrine to your own sainthood with my money!"
No one in the room said a word. Cicely's face went red.
She glared at me through gritted teeth, couldn't force out a single word, let alone hand over any money.
Five minutes later, a two-hundred-dollar transfer popped up in my messages.
Lucretia walked in from the hallway, eyes red, glaring hard at me.
"There's your money. Marion Harding, you're so aggressive you won't spare even a shred of decency between classmates. You'll get what's coming to you!"
I didn't even lift my head, just tapped to accept the payment.
"Whether I get what's coming or not, I don't know. But if you ever try to use being poor as a shield to take advantage again, I promise I'll make you sorry you ever met me."
