Read the Need, Then Add the Style

The next morning, I finished my workout and headed for the lecture hall, Peter beside me as a matter of course. We were walking the long corridor shoulder to shoulder when I asked, a grin tugging at my mouth.

"But why?"

"Tastes run all over the place. I figured it'd be better if we made a spread of them, split up by theme."

"They'll show up in no time."

"Why are you so sure of yourself?"

Because I had already seen the future.

I opened the lecture-hall door instead of answering, and the noise rolled out to meet me. Class was minutes away, and not one of them was getting ready. They were all too busy talking.

Hm. Was it really my place to look down on them, when I was the one slipping off campus on an outing pass to get a business off the ground?

The room was built like a theater, with no assigned seats, so we found two empties in a row and sat. The babble didn't let up. We had landed in the middle of our classmates, and it was deafening.

"So? How much did you make?"

"Make? I got cut in half."

"Didn't ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠you have a source?"

"A source is only as good as the source. Hearsay was useless."

Postmortems I would rather not have heard, and heard anyway. Most of them were stories of getting gutted in the market.

And then, of all people, exactly one voice rose, bright with triumph.

"Me? I doubled mine."

Julian Burnett, wasn't it. The boy who had shown up to the pre-term gathering in a green suit and strutted around. What had he said. He had made a point of being the second son of the Standard Bank chairman and gone about prying into other people's family ties. Something like that.

"H-how do you double your money?"

"Where did you put it?"

"Give me a little of that information too..."

One by one they drifted toward Julian. Everyone needed to settle down. It would be quieter that way.

"Please. Since when is doubling it worth all this fuss? Give me a little more time and quadruple wouldn't have been out of reach."

"Really?"

"What did you even do?"

The more eyes gathered, the more it seemed to feed him. Julian pitched his voice higher still.

"Why do you think? Because I've got the information in a death grip."

"We heard plenty of information too."

"You think all information is the same information?"

"Then what?"

"Finance is what you get when you strain out every rumor floating around out there, keep only what has a source you can trust, and then—because even that still worries you—stand up a verification team."

He talked for a long while after that. For all the talk, he was too busy condescending to share a single fact. By rights they should have peeled away one by one. They didn't. The murmur held, and a few of them stayed glued to Julian's side on the chance he might let even a scrap fall.

Let them. I was just about to tune it out.

"Didn't someone say there was an investment genius besides me?"

A tone anyone listening would have heard as mockery.

"All that noise about shoveling in money with paintings, and lately it's strangely quiet, isn't it?"

Perhaps he wanted to look good for Julian. One of them cut in.

"American universities love that kind of thing."

"American universities?"

"Yeah. America likes a story, so these days people build their applications that way instead of with grades."

"Oh, that's a thing?"

"So I heard."

I had already lived thirty-five years once. I was past the age where scrapping with first-years could feel like anything but an embarrassment, so I could let it slide a time or two. Of course, depending on my mood, that allowance had a way of collapsing. Ahem.

Luck was with them. Our form master came in five minutes early.

Must be economics. Maybe that was why they'd been going on about returns. That aside—

Where is Olivia?

I looked around and couldn't find her. Hm. The one folded over a desk, short on sleep, was some other girl. So was the one hunched down, secretly fishing a snack out of the drawer.

Wait.

Maybe they thought it beneath them. Students at a school for aristocrats wouldn't lay a finger on a men's magazine. And yet, when I caught the cover—

Dragon Planet.

Kids who got through life on nothing but the pride of being unlike everyone else. Dragon Planet, they couldn't resist. I grinned.

While I was turning all this over, the teaching assistants finished installing the Bloomberg terminals. Our form master switched on the microphone.

"Picking up from last time, today we'll be talking again about the investments you chose."

He had barely opened his mouth. Julian was already shifting in his seat, the face of a boy half-mad to brag about what a single week had earned him. He never raised his hand. He only kept throwing the most naked looks, until the teacher, it seemed, could no longer pretend not to see.

"Julian, is there something you'd like to say?"

"It's only that I was curious about something."

"Go on."

"Last class we named what we'd invest in and got feedback."

"And?"

"I was wondering how everyone's results turned out..."

"You want to know what your friends made?"

"Yes. Looking at someone else's portfolio can be a kind of study. In that spirit, I'd be more than glad to share my own results as well..."

"Not yet."

"Pardon?"

"A single week has passed. Something goes up a little, and that is no promise the climb will hold. It may just as easily collapse."

"But what about when you've already sold and locked in the profit? Then it can't rise any further, and it can't fall either, can it?"

"That is only half true."

"...?"

"You're going to take what you earned and put it into something else, aren't you? Then the same wheel starts turning. It may rise. It may fall."

"..."

"So there is no need to soar and sink just because a profit showed up today. What matters is the number stamped in your account at the end of term. Are we clear?"

Right then, the scratch of a pen. Peter, in the seat beside me, was writing something down on a scrap of paper.

Scratch, scratch. I wrote my answer right underneath.

We were all investing the same sum. If I claimed I wasn't curious how much the others had made, I would have been lying.

Our penciled exchange was just winding down around then. Class had started, so why wasn't Olivia coming in? No—before that, why did this class never call the roll?

For the time being, economics is something I can skip...

That was the conclusion I was settling on.

Meanwhile, Olivia was on the phone with Ralph Warren.

A short laugh slipped through the receiver.

Ralph Warren laughed for a good long while. Then—

In that instant Warren's voice changed, as cleanly as if someone had thrown a switch. The word clothes had turned the power on. It was the voice he used, surely, whenever he sat down with someone on business, and a hint of tension crossed Olivia's face for exactly that reason.

A moment later, the click of a lighter came down the line. He would have just drawn hard on the cigarette, deep enough to hollow his cheeks.

Warren had always insisted on it. If you wanted to understand men's dress, in the end you had to understand the uniform.

She agreed. Shearling laid over the collar to stop a knife of wind. A coat never made for style, and still more elegant than any jacket you could name. Perhaps it was the hint her father had given her.

She turned the words over under her breath for a long while.

Perhaps it was simply that his daughter had called after so long. When he hung up, Ralph Warren looked visibly brighter.

She wants to make menswear? A good sign. Ralph Warren was, in the end, a house with its weight set on men's dress. If father and daughter were going to work under one roof, an understanding of menswear was not optional.

He had been turning over how to coax her toward it. And here she was—saying she would go to university, saying she wanted to design. Lately she offered him nothing but the words he most wanted to ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠hear.

Heh heh heh. Maybe all of it came from having chosen her friends well.

Yes. I was right to fight tooth and nail to send her to the Royal School.

In high spirits, Warren went through the files. I can't take every call myself. And leaving a daughter alone, when she had only just set her heart on something, was harder still.

Let's see. There had to be someone fit to mentor Olivia. He pulled a few proposals he liked from the folder. Hm. This one was too wild. That one was well-behaved, and dull because of it. Then his eye stopped cold.

Yes. This one.

A hand that was proper and sleek at once. A design in which even a single button showed the trace of real thought—the very thing he had pressed on Olivia. Warren hurried to the résumé.

Good that he didn't have the air of a model student. He would have tasted how bitter life could be, and so he would be able to talk with Olivia. Ralph Warren snatched up the receiver.

"Among the people who joined this year..."

The name written in the upper right.

"There's a Tom Brown, isn't there? Have him come see me for a moment."