Get Out of My Head
Get out of my head.
Grace Fairfax.
She stood there, staring absently at Harvard’s snow-covered campus.
“······.”
So many thoughts crowded through her mind.
She was the daughter of Silver Fairfax, the CEO of GreenHell, one of the largest multinational corporations in the United States.
Nothing in the Fairfax family was ever handed out for free.
If you wanted something, you first had to prove that you could turn it into maximum efficiency once it was in your hands.
Get excellent grades on an exam before you were allowed a tutor. Earn money from nothing before you were granted startup funding. That was how things worked.
So Grace’s brothers and sisters had to struggle from a young age, constantly proving their worth, their talent, and their potential.
Grace had entered Harvard as valedictorian, but in the Fairfax family, that still wasn’t considered anything extraordinary.
After all, her siblings had also graduated at the top of the Ivy League.
If you didn’t produce results, there was no next step.
That was the force driving Grace forward.
She thought back to the time she had first entered Harvard.
Bang— bang— bang—
The night Kurt Cobain’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” had been blaring through the air.
The basement lounge of the dorm where the freshman welcome party had been held was thick with the smells of sweat and beer.
-Load up on guns and bring your friends
Load up the guns and bring your friends
-She’s over-bored and self-assured
She’s too bored, too self-assured
-With the lights out, it’s less dangerous
With the lights out, it’s less dangerous
-Here we are now, entertain us
Here we are now, entertain us
-I feel stupid and contagious
I feel stupid and contagious
-Here we are now, entertain us
Here we are now, entertain us
-A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido
A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido
-A denial, a denial, a denial
Deny it, deny it, deny it
-A denial, a denial, a denial
Deny it, deny it, deny it
-A denial, a denial, a denial
Deny it, deny it, deny it
.
.
A cheap mirror ball spun from the ceiling, scattering dizzying light as students clutching red plastic cups staggered around the room.
In one corner, someone had vomited beer into a flowerpot, and boys and girls were tangled together everywhere she looked.
Grace had no desire to be at a place like that.
She preferred a quiet library to a raucous party like this.
And yet, for one purpose alone, she had remained there with absolute discipline.
Connections.
Connections were assets in the future, and a party was the most efficient place to build them.
Even knowing that, though, it was still a torment to look at such a pathetic scene.
Then, in the midst of all that noise, one person stood out for his stillness.
A calm-looking Asian man.
How should she put it? He stood at the edge of the chaos, neither joining the noisy, disordered party nor falling out of it entirely.
Why was that?
Grace felt that his purpose was the same as hers.
Someone who didn’t necessarily want to mix in, but who wanted to keep every detail of the place in view, just in case there was a chance to make a connection.
And in the pi memorization contest that followed, her impression of him became even clearer.
When Grace memorized 321 digits of pi in three minutes, he memorized a full thousand.
The fact that he stopped exactly at 1,000 digits made it feel as if he were saying he could have gone on forever.
From that moment on, Grace committed the name Lee Sanha to memory.
And that impression deepened even further in Professor Cromwell’s class.
Professor Cromwell’s class was not something even Grace could take lightly.
In his oral exam, widely regarded as the hardest of all Harvard’s tests, Lee Sanha proved himself with terrifying perfection.
“Are you saying international oil prices in the second half of 1991 will stabilize around twenty-five dollars a barrel?”
“Yes. After the end of the Gulf War, the restoration of Kuwait’s oil fields is progressing faster than expected. OPEC’s production cuts will also clash with Saudi Arabia’s market-share strategy. Within three months, prices are likely to fall into the low twenties.”
“An interesting analysis. Even Wall Street analysts are still split on the issue.”
Some of the students in the lecture hall laughed.
But as class went on, and as time passed, the analysis Lee Sanha had offered at the time proved to be exactly right.
International oil prices moved precisely as he had predicted, and the price that had been wavering above thirty-five dollars a barrel fell into the low twenties.
Those who had laughed at him then could no longer even remember that they had done so.
There was only one person who knew it.
Only Grace, who had been watching Lee Sanha closely and writing down his answers in her notebook, understood what had happened.
It was the first time in her life she had ever experienced being intellectually overwhelmed.
The fact that the person who had overwhelmed her was a man her own age was shocking in itself.
Was that why?
She wanted to bring him over to her side.
No matter how gifted a person was, no one could excel in every field.
When you met a powerful opponent, you didn’t try to beat them in a fight—you made them yours.
That was the survival strategy of the winner, no, the method of the ruler.
So she showed him something she had never shown anyone else before.
Something she had kept tightly hidden, something secret and private, something she had never told a soul.
Her future plans.
“I’m going to create an investment club by the winter term of my freshman year. The name will be Blood & Guts. But it won’t be some waste of time for pencil-pushers who only buy and sell paper stocks in a simulation. It’ll be an aggressive club that hunts down anything that actually makes money and tears into it.”
“GreenHell’s heirs compete fiercely from a young age. Mostly through school reputation and grades. Once they become adults, they have to go straight out into society. They start with nothing and have to claw their way up to at least the level of a president at a GreenHell affiliate. Without help from the family—only through their own effort. Only then can they put their names in the succession race.”
“If next time’s mock-investment return keeps the same pace, I’ll officially recruit you into the club. Of course, I’ll give you equity too. We could go public together, or make an exit together. What do you think?”
And then sell the company to GreenHell.
After that, inherit GreenHell.
Become the head of the Fairfax family.
When Grace laid out that ambition, Lee Sanha had made a reply that was just as shocking.
“The plan’s interesting. But we still barely know anything about each other, don’t we? I think we’d need time to get to know one another.”
Even now, she remembered that conversation word for word.
“Time to······ get to know each other?”
“Yeah.”
“So you mean we should get to know each other right now? Me and you?”
“Right?”
Even without any experience in that area, she understood what that meant.
This was the pattern when a young man and woman began dating.
Grace had never actually been in a relationship, but she had seen plenty of related media.
Romance novels······ or dramas, that sort of thing.
But the wall reality erected was high.
She was the bloodline of a conglomerate family; her counterpart was from an ordinary working-class household.
To go beyond a simple business partnership and into the relationship of lovers, there would be a great many obstacles to overcome.
So Grace asked:
“You mean you think you······ and I······ are at the level where we could······ get to know each other? I don’t have any bad intentions—I’m just asking honestly because I’m curious.”
“What does rank have to do with two people getting to know each other?”
“It’s not······ irrelevant. Even if we don’t care about it ourselves······ there’s still society’s gaze to think about.”
And here, his answer was a masterpiece.
“I don’t care about society’s gaze. What matters is knowing exactly what I want, and then efficiently obtaining whatever I need to achieve it.”
The moment she heard that, Grace was struck as though lightning had passed straight through the top of her skull.
It was just like her grandfather’s words—the man who had founded GreenHell from nothing.
No matter what others said, pursue your own objective, discard what gets in the way, and take in whatever helps you.
That utterly simple, efficient way of life—the one most ordinary people could never manage.
Grace found herself momentarily spellbound by the force radiating from the Asian man standing before her.
It was the kind of thing other people would call being “enchanted,” “captivated,” but she didn’t know that then.
“My answer to your proposal is······ yes. Let’s do that. Let’s get to know each other.”
Grace fled the scene before she even understood what she was saying.
Then she lay on her dorm bed, kicking furiously at the blankets for no reason at all.
After that, she kept following Lee Sanha around.
Even when he wasn’t looking at her, she was looking at him.
Even when his name began to be heard all over the lecture halls, she listened closely while pretending not to care.
“Hey, I’m talking about that Asian guy from economics. Isn’t he seriously hot?”
“Yeah, he’s totally the rising star these days.”
“Looks like Caroline has already started making her move.”
Caroline? That tall blond girl? What was so great about her?
From that point on, Grace found herself, without realizing it, becoming aware of mirrors.
She would sweep her hair back, then run her fingers across the pale line of her neck exposed between the gold strands.
Maybe because her mind had begun wandering so much.
Even the club project she was pushing forward started to pick up little noises and complications.
The lottery hoarding project.
The principle was simple.
Before the first-place winning ticket had been drawn, the remaining supply amounted to roughly two million tickets—about 10 percent of the total issue.
In that case, the profit from winning would be greater than the cost of buying up every remaining ticket.
After all, if you added the first prize of $8 million to the unclaimed second-, third-, fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-place prizes, the total came to around $9.2 million, while buying all the remaining tickets would cost only about $2 million.
Grace wanted this project to succeed.
First you produced results, and only then did support come after.
By the rules of the Fairfax family, she intended to succeed at this lottery project and then bring in angel investment from the Harvard Alumni Association.
But the pace of buying up the remaining tickets had begun to slow, and then slow even further.
The number of tickets already acquired was about 1.6 million.
Grace had tracked down Harvard students who needed spending money and hired them as part-time workers.
Eight dollars an hour, with transportation paid separately.
The area they covered stretched from convenience stores in downtown Boston to gas stations in the mountain valleys of Berkshire.
They divided up their assigned zones and went from convenience store to gas station, buying up lottery tickets one by one.
But luck refused to cooperate.
Even after the number of tickets she still hadn’t purchased fell from two million to four hundred thousand, there had been no first-place winner—or even a second-place one.
There were thirty-two third-prize winners, 192 fourth-prize winners, 1,284 fifth-prize winners, and 18,044 sixth-prize winners, for a total winnings sum of $136,216.
But the purchase cost for the tickets alone had reached $1.6 million, and once she added eight weeks of wages and transportation for thirty part-timers, the total spending had climbed to more than $1.65 million······ meaning she was currently down by over $1.5 million.
With her manpower pool, she simply couldn’t reach the fine capillaries scattered across Massachusetts—the convenience stores and lottery shops buried in backwoods dead-end towns.
[Hey, miss! We can only sell ten tickets at a time! That’s the rule!]
[Grace······ the western outskirts are impossible. The truck got stuck in a snowdrift, and it took five hours just to call a tow. Could you maybe cover the repair costs too?]
[Each store has fewer than twenty tickets in stock. Buying ten at a time from one place is just dust gathering dust. At this rate, even a year won’t be enough to finish.]
The acquisition rate had nearly frozen at around 80 percent.
And to make it worse, in the thirty-sixth round of the Power Jackpot scratch lottery that Grace had been buying up, not even the second-place prize had appeared, let alone the first.
If things stayed like this, it was over.
If someone scratched the first-place ticket out in some rural backwater, everything would turn to ashes, and all the money, time, and pride she had poured into this would vanish into thin air.
The problem was clear.
The tickets were spread too thinly, too widely.
How was she supposed to gather them all up when they had been scattered across thousands of sales points throughout Massachusetts, only twenty or thirty at a time?
Boston itself was one thing, but there was no one willing to go out to isolated gas stations in the Berkshire valleys.
The part-timers had no desire to keep driving four hours round-trip through snow and unpaved roads just to buy twenty lottery tickets.
This wasn’t something she could fix simply by raising the hourly wage.
And time kept passing.
“······.”
Grace looked out the window.
The blizzard was growing fiercer, and the clock was moving toward 11 p.m.
Now there was only one face in her mind.
Lee Sanha.
The man who had once poured out $12 million worth of luck in a derelict warehouse in Texas.
What would he have done?
“······.”
Grace bit her lip.
This was not the time to protect her pride.
If there was a strong opponent, embrace him and make him your ally, so that his strength becomes your own.
The words left behind by her grandfather, the founder.
“I don’t care about society’s gaze. What matters is knowing exactly what I want, and then efficiently obtaining whatever I need to achieve it.”
For some reason, Lee Sanha’s words overlapped with those in her head.
In the end, Grace grabbed her coat.
And at 11 p.m., she met him in front of the men’s dormitory, with a blizzard raging around them.
Lee Sanha, the man who had never once left her mind since the day she entered Harvard.
From far away, Lee Sanha walked toward her.
In a warm, gentle voice that could have melted the frozen tip of her nose, he asked, “Grace? What are you doing out here?”
The moment she heard him, Grace barely managed to swallow the tears that nearly burst from her eyes.
Then she said, “Sanha.”
The word she would never have uttered to anyone else, no matter how badly they beat her.
“······Help me.”
Somehow, with him, she felt like she could say it.