“Wait.” I came to fuller attention. “Lily said you have debt. Isn’t that why you wanted me to come here?”
“That’s what I told her. But the truth is, I wanted to show you something.” Wendi nodded her horns at the laptop resting on the floor. “I’ve been working on a program that I think works well with . . . what you and Emily Johnson have been doing.”
“We’re not doing it anymore,” I said.
Wendi rolled her eyes, stubbed out her cigarette, flicked the filter across the room, and picked up her laptop. “I’ve created software that would enable you to systemize on a larger scale the base design you and Emily have generated.”
“I have no idea what any of those words mean,” I said.
“It means I don’t want anything from you.” Wendi pulled her amp closer to mine. “I’m presenting you with an opportunity. In plain English, I’ve designed a pay-it-forward network. Let me show you.”
She fingered the computer’s touchpad mouse with her purple-polished pointer finger. “This program allows you to track all the money you and Emily move around. Checks can go in and checks can go out, and you control it all. So if you wanted to, you could subsidize whoever you approve—me, for example, or some other lowly Titan assistant drowning in student debt—and then allow them to contribute what they can if they choose to. But I see by your glazed eyes that I’ve lost you.”
She’d lost me when she picked up her laptop.
“Look.” Wendi snapped her fingers to direct my attention to the screen. “Here’s where people can submit their student-loan-debt statements. And here’s where you or Emily, or anyone, can submit monetary contributions to the site’s account. And here’s where you click to send people their e-checks. That’s pretty much it, very simple.”
“So it’s like a charity?” I asked.
“It’s not a charity.” Wendi reached into the cooler and pulled out another can of red, white, and blue Budweiser. “I like to think of it as a program to aid in the redistribution of wealth. Robert’s wealth.”
She let that statement float for a few seconds. “For example. I don’t have student-loan debt, but I do my boss’s expenses. So if I join the network, I can fudge his expense reports just like you and Emily have been doing, but now you can put those funds toward another network member’s debt.”
“So it’s an expense account scheme,” I said. “Plain and simple. That’s the brilliant idea you’re pitching?”
Wendi set her laptop down onto the floor, then put her boots up on the milk crate that served as her coffee table. “It’s not a scheme,” she said. “Think about the potential here, Tina. We’re not only the ninety-nine percent, we’re the assistants to the one percent. There’s power in that.”
I looked around Wendi’s cruddy basement apartment. At the cardboard-box bookshelves and repurposed lamps. The cracked claw-foot bathtub that served as a planter for what may or may not have been marijuana.
I had to ask: “Are you proposing this as a way to get rich?”
Wendi squealed with laughter like a poltergeist. “No. I don’t want to become rich, because then I would have to despise myself. I’m proposing this to make Robert a little less rich, but not enough that he notices.”
I considered this for a moment. To be honest, there was a Robin Hood–esque element to Wendi’s idea that I found tempting. My college self would have jumped at it. Actually, that’s a lie. My college self would have listened attentively with owl eyes while the more active activists at the Women’s Center jumped at this idea. But philosophically I would have totally been on board.
While I was lost in this thought, Wendi tossed me another beer and I reflexively ducked out of its way, letting it drop to the floor.
“Sorry,” I said. “Habit.” I picked up the beer, opened it without thinking, and it exploded all over the two of us. “Sorry again,” I said, but Wendi hadn’t even flinched.
“So this program,” I said, thinking back to the dream boards currently being constructed in my kitchen. “It would allow me to prevent people from using the money for anything but student-loan debt. Right?”
Wendi nodded gravely. “Not everyone’s so honest as you.”
“You think I’m honest?”
“I think you’re okay, Tina,” she said. And from Wendi Chan that was saying a lot.
—
I RETURNED HOME to find Emily pouting, knees to chest on the kitchen floor, which itself now looked like a haywire linoleum dream board, a sea of discarded, half-crumpled cutouts of luxury goods mottled by smears of glittering paste. Ginger was nowhere to be found.
“You came back!” Emily jumped up and ran to me for a hug. “I was afraid you’d gone for good.”
I kept my arms at my sides but allowed her embrace.
“Fine,” I said into the skin of her bare shoulder, which smelled like a gardenia—all she was wearing was a lace nightie. “I’m back in. But only if we do this my way.”