Hiring the Right Men for the Job
I took Grace to the common room on the first floor of the dormitory, in a quiet corner far away from the stairs.
At a time like this, with most classes already over for the term, there weren’t many people around.
Besides, it was quite late, so the common room was completely empty.
When a place that was usually packed went suddenly silent, it couldn’t help but stir something strange in the people who remembered how crowded it had once been.
That was what the end of the semester felt like for us.
“······.”
“······.”
I had Grace sit down on the sofa in the common room.
The dry heat from the radiator was creeping over us little by little.
Snow clinging to Grace’s coat was slowly melting away.
I held out a hand to her.
“Give me your coat.”
“······.”
Grace took her time removing it.
White flecks of half-melted snow still clung to the ends of her blond hair, and the snow gathered on her eyelashes had already melted into little drops of water.
Her shirt was damp from the melting snow, so I looked away and handed her the outer layer I’d been wearing.
“Put this on for now. It’s dry.”
“······.”
After a moment of hesitation, Grace slipped into my coat.
The moment she had it on, she buried her nose in it, which told me she must have been cold.
I headed for the kitchen in the corner of the common room.
There were rows of Heineken bottles lined up along the windowsill, one lonely sock draped over the radiator, a potted plant that had died after its owner went back home, and a half-empty bottle of Gatorade that had been sitting on the side table since I first came to Harvard.
I pulled out a box containing my personal items from the back of the refrigerator.
Inside were sealed containers of milk and cocoa powder.
I heated the milk over the gas burner and stirred in the cocoa powder.
“Have something warm.”
“······Thanks.”
Grace accepted the mug I handed her.
The steam rising from the warm cocoa thawed the tip of her nose.
I stood in the kitchen and asked, “What are you doing here at this hour? And without even calling?”
“Ahem. I was just······ I mean, it’s nothing. I was passing by and saw the light on.”
“You asked for help earlier, didn’t you?”
“That was just me speaking without thinking······ I saw you and suddenly said something stupid······”
“Is that so? Then since you’re here, just warm yourself up a bit.”
I decided to pretend I didn’t notice.
Just then, Grace started to get up from her seat.
Growl—
A deep, unmistakable rumble echoed through the dorm common room.
I looked at Grace. “Want something to eat?”
“No, it’s fine. I’ll be leaving soon anyway······.”
But her stomach, cruelly enough, had no interest in obeying its owner’s dignity.
Rumble—
Grace shut her mouth.
“······.”
“Eat first. I’ll make something in a minute.”
“Ahem. Actually, I haven’t eaten anything today······.”
Grace, who had been halfway to standing, sat back down on the sofa.
Still clutching my coat tightly in her hands.
I went back to the kitchen and rifled through the refrigerator.
Inside the communal fridge were boxes labeled with all kinds of names.
They were containers for everyone’s personal ingredients.
Some of them even had padlocks on them.
I pulled out my own food box and took the ingredients from inside.
There was a lump of cold rice wrapped in plastic, three eggs, a bit of scallion, some jerky, ham, and bacon I’d bought as emergency rations.
And beside them, jars of red seasoning paste.
Gochujang sauce my mother had made herself and sent to me.
Since I know you’re not going to eat properly, at least toss in a spoonful of this and boil it up. It’s got all kinds of vegetables and seasonings in one jar!
When I was younger, why had I hated this taste so much?
After my regression, I missed it so badly that I was making sure to eat it with every meal.
I rolled up my sleeves and set a frying pan and a pot on the gas stove.
A simple omurice and budae-jjigae should be enough, right?
I started with the budae-jjigae.
I poured water into the pot and added diced Spam and scallions.
The moment I stirred in two spoonfuls of my mother’s seasoning paste, the sharp, savory scent of gochujang flooded the kitchen.
Grace, sitting on the sofa, lifted her nose and sniffed.
“······What are you making?”
“Budae-jjigae.”
I gave her a brief explanation of what budae-jjigae was.
“In Korea, after the war ended, there was a time when everyone was starving. That dish started when people picked through the garbage thrown away by soldiers at U.S. military bases, then boiled it with gochujang. The funny thing is, now it’s one of the most popular foods in Korea.”
“Hmm. Kind of like meatloaf, then?”
In the United States, meatloaf was one of those cases.
Back during the Great Depression in the 1930s, poor Americans who couldn’t afford much meat mixed a little ground beef with a mountain of breadcrumbs and onions, then baked it into a meat pie stretched to feed more mouths.
Of course, poverty in America and poverty in Korea weren’t on the same scale, so budae-jjigae in Korea had ended up containing actual trash, like cigarette butts, shoe brushes, and condoms, while American meatloaf simply compensated by using less meat and more breadcrumbs and eggs.
Grace nodded.
“······We used to make meatloaf at my house sometimes too. My grandmother liked it.”
“So in the end, it’s all the same. Food people ate to get through hard times eventually becomes the taste they miss most.”
In a way, making my mother’s omurice and budae-jjigae now was my own attempt to remember a certain period of life through food.
Before long, the budae-jjigae was finished.
Meanwhile, the omurice was coming together in the frying pan.
Sizzle—
I stir-fried chopped Spam and scallions in oil, added cold rice, drizzled ketchup over it, and tossed everything quickly together.
The sweet and tangy smell of tomato mixed with the spicy aroma of the stew.
The rice grains, coated in ketchup, puffed up on the pan, and I gently laid the separately cooked omelet over the top.
When I sliced through the center with a knife, the soft yolk spilled out and spread over the fried rice.
Grace let out an admiring breath.
“Wow, you’re really good at cooking.”
“Isn’t this just what everyone does?”
“I can’t do anything like this at all. Ever since I enrolled, I’ve basically always eaten out.”
Grace watched my hands in a daze.
Then she picked up a spoon and took a bite of the rice I’d given her.
“!”
Her blue eyes widened into perfect circles.
After that, she began eating like she’d forgotten the world around her.
“Eat slowly. Nobody’s going to steal it.”
But even before I’d finished saying that, more than half the bowl was already gone.
Only then did Grace clear her throat, suddenly embarrassed.
“······No, it’s just so good. I think it’s better than the food made by the chefs at my house.”
“I’m honored to have beaten the Fairfax family’s chef.”
That seemed like enough ice broken for now.
As I ate, I asked, “So. How’s the lottery buyout project going?”
“!”
I must have hit the mark.
Grace fidgeted.
She was gathering the thirty-sixth round of Power Jackpot Scratch lottery tickets.
This Massachusetts lottery had a total print run of twenty million tickets.
They cost one dollar each, and the first prize was eight million dollars.
More than ninety percent of the total run had already been sold, so a thirty-seventh batch had gone out, but the first prize still hadn’t been claimed.
Scratch-off lottery tickets were usually scratched the moment people bought them, so it was entirely possible that the jackpot really had not come out yet.
That meant the remaining ten percent, or roughly two million tickets, still held the first prize somewhere inside them.
The cost of buying all two million would be only two million dollars.
And if you added the eight-million-dollar first prize to the second and third prizes that still hadn’t been claimed, the total winnings came to about 9.2 million dollars.
Theoretically, if you could buy up all the remaining tickets, it was a guaranteed profit.
On top of that, Grace planned to win the Oddball Entrepreneur Competition with this project and use that victory to attract angel investment from the Harvard Alumni Association.
······The problem was the pace.
She had already bought around 1.6 million tickets, which was about eighty percent of her target.
The remaining twenty percent was scattered across convenience stores and gas stations in remote places like the Berkshire Mountains and the northern border region.
The part-timers she’d hired in Boston couldn’t reach those backcountry godforsaken places.
Grace pulled a crumpled map and ledger out of her bag and spread them on the table.
“Actually······ there was something I wanted to talk to you about.”
“The tickets are coming in slower than expected, right?”
“Y-yes. How did you know?”
“When I first heard about your project, that was the part I worried about most. I didn’t think the people you hired to buy them would move the way you wanted. The western Berkshire side and the northern border region, right? The areas where you’re having trouble buying them up?”
“······!”
Grace’s eyes went wide.
I continued.
“Boston and the surrounding suburbs are probably already stripped clean. The problem is the rural backwaters. There’s too much snow, so the part-timers’ cars can’t get in. Most of them are probably front-wheel-drive sedans anyway, so getting stuck on unpaved roads is inevitable.”
“R-right. How did you······”
“And those stores probably don’t even have much inventory to begin with. You can’t buy more than ten tickets at a time, can you? Who’s going to drive four hours round trip just to pick up twenty tickets? The hourly wage just wouldn’t make sense. And car trouble would be constant. On top of that, most of those areas are hostile to outsiders, so if some Boston college kid showed up trying to clean out all the tickets, there’d be places that refused to sell on principle.”
Grace stared at me, speechless.
“You were right about everything. You should’ve told me sooner!”
“I wasn’t fully sure myself. You were so confident in your presentation too. I didn’t want to pour cold water on it for no reason, but if I’d known it would come to this, I should’ve at least floated the idea.”
“······.”
I asked her one more time, “The part-timers you hired were mostly Harvard students or students from colleges around Boston, right?”
“······Yeah.”
“What kind of cars did they have? Honda Civics? Toyota Camrys?”
“Most of them were something like that.”
“All front-wheel-drive sedans. Not nearly enough for snow-covered unpaved roads in the Berkshire Mountains. In weather like this, you’d need at least a mid-size truck to get through places like that.”
“But the people who own mid-size trucks are mostly transport operators. They’re not going to drive all the way out to the countryside just to earn that kind of hourly wage and buy lottery tickets······.”
Grace lowered her head, looking deflated.
Her theory and plan hadn’t been bad, but failing to account for weather and road conditions had been fatal.
On top of that, the paltry hourly wage and little incentives she’d offered probably hadn’t given the part-timers much motivation either.
Crinkle—
Grace clenched the map in her hands.
“It’s so, so frustrating. Only twenty percent. And the jackpot is probably in there. In the end, all I’ve done is a favor for somebody else.”
“No.”
“?”
Before she could sink any deeper into disappointment, I cut in quickly.
“It’s not too late. There’s a way. We just need to buy up the tickets scattered all over those rural backwaters.”
“How?”
She looked at me with rabbit-wide eyes.
I placed the empty dishes in the sink and said, “Just change the ‘men’ you use to buy the lottery tickets. Not those green college kids driving flimsy front-wheel-drive cars. Use men who can drive eighteen-wheelers through unpaved roads even if a blizzard’s raging or a tornado’s blowing.”
“No, where are you supposed to find people like that?” Grace asked, sounding baffled.
And I answered her question myself.
“We’ve got them at my house. Two hundred a day······ no, these days it’s five hundred a day.”