Prince of Greed

Eveline’s first week of college was cursed from the start as she entered with high hopes and ignorance.

Moving onto campus meant moving her little sister’s luggage back into their parents’ vehicle. It was an annual exchange altered only by Eveline’s lack of belongings alongside Val’s pink suitcases in the backseat.

Eveline shut the trunk and brushed off her hands. “That’s everything.”

“Do you really not want help moving in?” Val asked.

“Do I really want mom and dad sniffing around my neighbors’ dorms and causing a scene?”

“Okay, fair point. But I’m only asking for purely selfish reasons.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Of being nosey and wanting to see your dorm room.”

“That’s what that stupid disposable thing you gave me is for—”

“It’s a camera! It’s not a new concept.”

"Whatever.”

“You never use it! Use it!”

“I said whatever.” She stuck her tongue out at Val, which earned her a finger to her cheek. She gritted her teeth against the pressure as Val dug her forefinger in with contempt.

“Easy now, before you bruise her on her big day!” their mom chided from the porch. Their dad was stepping out the front door and shutting it behind her, grandma nowhere in sight.

Eveline’s jaw clenched as her mother approached. She was dressed to impress an executive chairman—another reason Eveline loathed to even consider letting her anywhere near her dorm room. Her neighbors would think she was a nepo-baby (which she debatably was, not that she wanted to admit it).

She grimaced against her mother’s weirdly affectionate hug. The skin of her collarbone was milky and warm from the summer heat and the fact that she was wearing a blazer. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d hugged, but she hoped it was the last.

“Mom, stop.”

She squeezed tighter. “But I’ll miss you—"

“Okay, I’ll miss you too,” she said, straining through every word until she released her.

Her satisfied sigh made her feel like she’d lost her integrity. She staggered back a little, heel slipping off the pavement and into the grass. Her mother dabbed her eyes with the pad of a manicured thumb.

“I don’t know why I’m so emotional,” she said, reverently. She sniffed, smiled, and patted Val on the head as she passed to reach the passenger door. “Imagine if we’d been dropping you off at Yale. I’d be inconsolable.”

“I’m sure that would do wonders for my reputation,” she said. A thump on her head sent her nearly face planting, only to have herself teetered into her father’s side.

Her father ruffled her hair out of her ponytail. “Good luck, kid. Valentine—let’s get moving.”

“Okay,” Val said, and spared the time it took their father to start the car to hug Eveline.

She squeezed Val around the middle and said, “Call me if you need anything.”

“Back at you. And don’t forget cameras exist. And postal services."

“Whatever.”

Eveline waved until they were down the street and she could no longer see Val’s pearly smile through the gridlines on the back of their parents’ Buick.

By that afternoon, Eveline was stuck in the waiting line on the stairs of her dorm building. Between passing families and students milling about, it was single-file up and down each flight of carpeted stairs and dark oak paneling. Considering it was only a ten minute walk to her grandma’s house, she’d walked with two suitcases and nothing else.

Sweat had accumulated in her armpits.

Christ, she thought, scrubbing her cheek against her shoulder, you’d think they’d put AC in!

The heat only accumulated further up she went. By the top floor, the fourth, Eveline was flushed and hoping her roommate wasn’t in.

She very much was, and Eveline should have counted that as odd, seeing as Eveline was otherwise the first fourth floor student to arrive.

Eveline slowed at the sight of her open door at the end of the hall. The diamond grilles on the tall, stained glass windows at the end of the hall turned the wood threshold into fuzzy, red and gold slashes. Eveline’s sneakers hesitated on the carpet runner as she peered past the crack in the door.

A silhouette passed under the door, only to double back.

Eveline straightened when the door jerked fully open.

Before her stood a freckled girl with dark, shaggy hair astonishingly windswept like she was ten steps out of a salon. It was made wild by her hand darting up to brush it back so Eveline could see the glint of a piercing at the corner of either brow.

“Ah,” they both said.

The girl smiled, sharp and pointedly amused. She pointed to herself. “Myka. Sorry I got here a bit early, so I just picked a side.”

“That’s fine,” Eveline said. When Myka didn’t move, Eveline startled. “Oh. I’m Eveline.”

“Eveline?” It felt as though no one had ever said Eveline’s name before then. Myka tapped a finger to her chin, snapped her fingers, and said, “Can I call you Evie? You look like an Evie.”

Eveline laughed. “Sure. My family calls me Vinny.”

“Well, we aren’t family yet, so Evie will do.”

Eveline was struck momentarily dumb by the effect of Myka’s smile. She’d never seen a smile so picturesque—like an airbrushed celebrity on a bodega tabloid meant to capture her and make her question cutting the cover off and pinning it to her bedroom wall. A pinup.

As Eveline entered, she found Myka’s side tidy if not barren. Eveline’s was no better by the time she unpacked. All the while, Myka studied her from her bed until Eveline extracted a radio from her bag.

“Ah! What’s this?” Myka said.

Eveline squinted at her, giving the device a shake. “A radio. Wanna listen to something?”

“Do I ever!”

So Eveline propped the stand out and said, “Quality’s not too great, but it’s something my nonna used to use.”

Myka flopped back on her bed and clasped her hands behind her head in lieu of a pillow. The radio crackled into focus as Eveline dialed to her favorite station with complete muscle memory. The static deflated into a crispy guitar solo.

Myka crossed an ankle over one knee, barefoot. “What’s this?”

“The Police.”

“Police?”

"The Police.” Eveline should have filed this away as evidence, but Myka accepted the correction without question and simply hummed at the ceiling, foot bouncing.

“I like this,” she said at last. She turned onto her side, head propped up on her hand and knee up. “What’s your favorite musician?”

Eveline considered this. “I like AC/DC.”

“A-C-D-C...” Myka tested the letters, tentative, before saying, “Can we listen to them?”

Eveline shrugged. “I don’t have a CD player.”

“Oh. I’ll get one,” Myka said, and just as Eveline suspected she’d dig through her bags, Myka left the room. Barefoot.

She came back twenty minutes later with a CD player, and Eveline asked, “Did you leave it in your car or something?”

“Car? I don’t own a car,” Myka said, flipping the CD player across the room. Eveline was lucky to have caught it as Myka flopped back on her bed, sifting through a stack of disks, and asked, “Do you know how to drive?”

Eveline was so thrown that she didn’t consider where else the music could have come from. She read through the handmade track list on the back, impressed by the mix. Half-distracted reading, Eveline said, “Yeah, but I don’t own a car either.”

“That sucks. I’ve always wanted to learn how to drive. Could you teach me?”

Eveline snorted. “We’d need a car first.”

“Ah, really? That’s easy.”

She blinked. “Easy.”

Myka shrugged. “I mean, how hard could it be?”

She blinked again. “Getting a car? It’s not like you can walk into a dealership and say, ‘Give me the keys.’ That would definitely make it easier.”

Myka opened her mouth and looked to be on the brink of saying: ”Really?" Her shock faded quickly. “I see your point,” she concluded. She settled back in to listening to the latest song on the radio, foot tapping to the beat. “I need to think about this.”

Eveline was dumbfounded. She thought to press the discussion further, but decided that if her roommate was an idiot, she’d rather not be an active participant in discovering it.

Instead, she said, “We should probably get our books before the school store is sold out. Do you have your list?”

“List...” Myka repeated, testing the word again as she sat up as if in a trance. “List, list, list... Ah! List!” She swiped it out of a ratty duffle bag, crumpled and barely legible.

They compared lists, which Eveline swiftly ascertained, “Are you a theology major?”

“No, philosophy. You?”

“No. English. Are you planning to apply to seminary school or something?” Their college had a famous seminary chapter, and any philosophy major was bound to merge with them. Eveline didn’t exactly peg Myka as a priestly fellow—exhibit A being her brow piercings and, as Eveline observed further, earrings.

Myka tapped a finger to her chin. The backs of her hands were dark with smudged ink. “Mm... I don’t think they’d let me. I’m more interested in the philosophy of it all.”

“I-I see...” Weirdo, Eveline thought.

She tucked her paper into a tote bag and said, “I don’t know how you can wear sweatshirts in this weather. We’ll be walking a ways.”

“I like the heat.”

“Are you from the south?”

“Sort of. Don’t you like the sun?”

Eveline’s expression flatlined. Of her siblings, Eveline was notorious for being the only one to burn in the sun. “Does it look like the sun and I get along?”

She hadn’t expected Myka’s smile, nor the sincerity as she said, “Yeah! The little sunburn on your nose is cute!”

Eveline was too stunned to speak.

Myka reached over to poke at it with her thumb and forefinger. “It’s starting to peel, too.”

Reflexively, Eveline batted her hand away. If the fourth floor was hell, Myka’s skin was inferno. “Sh-Shut up. You can’t just touch peoples’ sunburns,” Eveline said.

Myka pouted as she followed Eveline’s march out of the room. “Aw, why not?”

“For one, they hurt.”

“Did that hurt?”

“A little.” She locked the door behind them and turned so she wouldn’t have to see Myka’s face.

Myka didn’t cling as Eveline had worried. Instead, she floated about as if tethered to Eveline’s side at a distance. Between the dorm and the store, Eveline observed a miracle: the way the sea parted, the way people noticed Myka and stopped in their tracks just for a moment. It made traversing the narrow dorm stairwell smooth and painless.

Even dressed down in hoodies as she was, Myka was captivating. Her hair always knew how to fall—fluffy and shining in the sun, her bangs whisked down the middle to frame her round, childlike cheeks.

At the wall of textbooks in the school store, they were watched from the aisles by a cluster of girls as Eveline scanned for the last textbook on her list.

“Dammit,” she said.

Myka, who had been skimming through a parable for a 4000 level course, set it aside to glance over Eveline’s shoulder. “Course 2041... Missing!”

“I should have picked it up last week,” she sighed.

“Were you here last week?”

Eveline nursed an oncoming headache. She still needed to read that book before class on Tuesday. “Practically. My nonna lives pretty close. She might have it in her library.”

“Maybe someone picked up an extra,” Myka said, embarrassingly loud as she glanced around them.

“Who would even—”

“Here, you can have mine!” came a voice behind them, and the moment she turned, a girl from the aisle cluster thrust a book in Myka’s direction. “I-I was just picking it up for my roommate.”

“I couldn’t take it from your roommate,” Eveline said.

Myka flipped the book up so the victorian-era cover faced Eveline. She was all dimples and jest. “Then she should have picked it up herself,” Myka said, and then turned to the girl. “What’s your roommate like? Do you think she’ll be mad?”

Eveline was beyond logic at this line of questioning. Who just asked people stuff like that, and then proceeded to grill them like they were in therapy?

The girl went on about being labeled a pushover in high school, and Myka listened intently, leaning back against the shelves with her full attention on her. Eveline glanced between them as a label seared itself into her forehead.

Third-wheel.

Mildly bewildered, Eveline walked away as Myka went on flirting with the girl. She’d never witnessed two girls flirt so unabashedly—at a catholic university no less.

But then Eveline recalled her attendance at various catholic boarding school institutions before all this and decided she shouldn’t have been so surprised.

At the checkout line five minutes later, Eveline was found and bestowed the book by Myka.

“I really don’t need it,” Eveline said.

Myka stared at her. Her faint smile dampened a bit, and it sent a cold thrill through Eveline’s body. It fractured off across her spine and called her attention to what used to be instinct: fight or flight. She was trapped between the two.

Unable to act or speak, Eveline just watched as the book lowered a fraction and Myka said, “But I got it for you. Don’t you want it?”

What’s the significance of this? Eveline wondered. It felt a lot like anxiety, of which she was familiar with, but this was out of pocket. Anxiety with her parents, with her sisters, she could understand. It came naturally.

This anxiety felt foreign and desperate to appease.

“Why did she even give you the book?” Eveline asked, but she already knew the answer. “I think she was flirting with you. You shouldn’t take advantage of people like that.”

As tainted as the book was now, Eveline snatched it from her. With a scowl, she added, “But I might as well take it. Thank you, I guess.” She’d never be able to read that book without thinking of the girl’s faceless roommate now and how upset she might have been to not get the book in time for class.

“She was flirting with me?” Myka said, and the lilt of surprise nearly sent Eveline tripping as they stepped forward in line.

She whipped around and said, ”Yes. And you flirted back at her!”

“I did? I was just asking questions. Interesting.”

“It’s because you’re conventionally attractive. You’re probably numb to it.”

Myka gasped at her, and Eveline went hot with the realization of how sincere her comment was. She could no longer feel the AC in that school store basement. If she’d made such a comment in high school, her classmates would have grilled her for it. They knew she was gay, but not that gay.

“Don’t—Don’t let that go to your head,” Eveline snapped, turning back around.

“I’m flattered!”

“M-Myka, seriously. You’re acting oblivious.” It dawned on her that Myka probably lived in California. She believed the attractiveness levels in California skewed higher than the rest of the country, so Myka could have been a 7 there rather than a whopping 11/10 here.

She chose to believe this and live in willful ignorance until Myka offered the information up herself.

They spent each day leading up to the semester out in the quad while waiting out freshmen activities. Myka, sunbathing and reading, and Eveline, trying not to burn herself by sticking to the shade and ample amounts of sunscreen. In the dappled sunlight on the grass, Myka swung her feet to and fro and flicked through the pages of her newly purchased book on Biblical Hebrew. She murmured quietly to herself, the breeze catching in the unruly waves of her hair.

Eveline glared at her from over the seam of her book binding. Summer hadn’t relented to September, and yet Myka was in baggy jeans and a hoodie. It was unnatural, but then again, Eveline had never been to California.

She chose to believe this.

“Tell me why you’re staring?” Myka said, quietly, patiently, like she was commenting on her reading instead of Eveline’s blatant staring.

Eveline’s unease toiled again. There was something pointed about every question Myka directed at her. Like a threat, and Eveline’s amygdala responded to it.

Eveline looked to her book. The words blurred together as a cold drip of sweat slipped between her shoulder blades. The heat, which Eveline had consciously ignored, swept in and suffocated her lungs with humidity.

“I’m not staring.”

Myka lowered her book, lifted a brow, and turned it onto Eveline.

Eveline shrugged. “You don’t have to sit with me, you know.”

She knew as well as Myka that Myka could make herself a staple in the social ecosystem blossoming on campus.

The way people responded to Myka was magnetic. The way they observed her was less so. They tended to keep Myka at a distance, content to watch like a celebrity through a television screen. Eveline wasn’t given that option, rooming with Myka and all.

“But I like sitting with you,” Myka said, and her smile returned to stamp away Eveline’s anxieties. The nauseating concern dissolved, and Eveline could almost forget that it kept happening.

Classes started and on Tuesday, Eveline entered lecture and wished she hadn’t. By the end, it was clear she’d made an enemy, and that enemy couldn’t stop glaring at her from across the room.

Eveline’s attempt at a swift getaway was negated by her newfound enemy’s speed and agility, and determination to capture her attention.

“You’re Myka’s roommate, right?”

Eveline staggered back from the exit, and then off to the side so they could stave off a traffic jam. As their peers flitted past, Eveline got a good look at the girl—loud with her dyed pink hair and even louder with her neon green crop top that probably made the seminary students on campus shriek inside.

Eveline cleared her throat. “Yeah, I am. Is there a problem?”

The girl laughed. “A problem?”

The moment Eveline had noticed her death glare, she’d waited for their professor to do roll call so she could ask, “Bridget, right?”

Her head tipped to the side, amusement fading to begrudging respect. “Yeah. And you realize that book isn’t getting restocked, right? None of the local bookstores have it either. They overenrolled students to 2041 this year.”

Ah, the roommate. She was the only enemy she could imagine making ever since Myka’s confusing acquisition of the book.

Eveline flipped open her bag and dug for it. “I realized that after—I felt bad taking it, and I finished it last night so you can keep it.”

Despite the hesitation on her face, she held out her hand. “That’ll make quoting it later difficult.”

“But that’s not your problem anymore, is it?”

“Agreed. You aren’t as bad as your roommate. I expected you to be a pill.”

“How so?”

Bridget gave an annoyed huff, tossing her ponytail over one shoulder. “Half the people I talk to either love her or hate her. It’s only been three days but it’s like people lose their minds when they talk to her. You know my buddy’s girlfriend gifted Myka her CD player. My buddy got her that shit for her birthday, like, two weeks ago. Made a mixtape for her and everything.”

“What?” This was beyond convincing the girl to relinquish Bridget’s book, but even then, Myka didn’t convince. The roommate had offered. It took half a second longer for Eveline’s blood to turn cold at the realization that she’d been listening to a mixtape meant for someone else’s partner. “That doesn’t sound right.”

“Really? Then how do you figure it? Because it sounds to me like she stole it and threatened her not to say.”

Eveline floundered. By then, the lecture hall was empty and their voices echoed back to them. She didn’t need Myka’s stern expression to feel the nerves crawling in wondering if Myka could overhear them.

“I’d really like to continue this conversation,” she admitted as genuinely as she could, “but I need to get to my next class. Are you busy right now?”

Bridget checked her watch. “I have half an hour. If you don’t mind, I’ve been really interested in getting her CD player back.”

Out of curiosity, Eveline asked as they walked out together, “Does she miss it?”

“No, but I thought she’s just been pacifying my friend. He’s really beat up about it. Thinks his girlfriend hates him—I don’t really know,” Bridget explained.

“I can’t get it to you now, but maybe next class?” she offered, and Bridget agreed. After taking the steps down to the quad, Eveline said, “I thought it was weird how Myka got the book from your roommate.”

“How so?”

“Your roommate offered it up. Myka didn’t even directly ask for it—I don’t even think Myka was talking to her,” she said.

Bridget considered this, a hand cupping her chin. “You aren’t the first to say this. She was with some girls from our floor, and they all said something similar, but they felt bad for Myka.”

Eveline’s steps slowed. She paused, facing Bridget. Her brain was reeling too much for her feet to keep up. ”Bad for her? It wasn’t like she was lamenting a great loss or anything sentimental. It was just a book.”

“So you find it strange as well?”

Eveline’s relief was overshadowed by Myka herself being sighted across the quad. It was easy to spot her between the colorful summer shirts and khaki shorts—all black and long sleeves, catching sight of Eveline and waving amicably.

“Is that her?” Bridget asked, following the line of Eveline’s wave in return.

“Yeah.”

“Well, if you don’t mind, I’m going to keep my distance,” she said, and internally, Eveline agreed.

She couldn’t explain this rush of protectiveness she felt, and how oddly it clashed with possessiveness. Her little bubble with Myka, while confusing, was also rewarded with moments of sheer bliss when Myka smiled at her as she closed the distance and ignored the attention she gleaned from passersby.

Like Eveline was the center of her world.

She wondered if this was how Bridget’s roommate felt as Myka listened to her and flirted back. Perhaps it was just the work of a crush she could brush aside later. They were roommates, after all.

“How was class?” Eveline asked.

“Confusing! But the professor seems nice,” Myka said with an added nervous laugh. She rubbed at the back of her head, glancing past Eveline in the direction Bridget took off in. “Who was that?”

Eveline was relieved to see that Myka’s smile stuck. “Just someone from lecture. We both hung back to ask the professor questions about the summer readings.”

“Cool. I love her hair. Do you think I would look good in pink?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Harsh!”

“Black might be your color, though. To match your clothes.”

As Myka trailed alongside her to her next class, Eveline considered her loose partnership with Bridget to be the key she wanted. Bridget was proof that Eveline wasn’t going insane, because outside her little bubble with Myka, there were third-parties being affected.

By what, she wouldn’t know for certain until the end of her first week of college.