The day I moved out of the Lu house, I took only one suitcase.
Inside were a few changes of clothes, my mother's medical records, and a copy of Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives that I'd been studying for three years. The pages were dog-eared, the margins filled with densely written notes.
The townhouse door closed behind me without a sound.
I stood at the entrance of a basement in Queens. The landlady was an elderly Cantonese woman who looked me up and down. "You'll be living alone?"
"Yes."
"Three hundred a month. First and last month's rent."
I counted out six hundred dollars. Forty-seven dollars and three coins remained in my pocket.
The room was six square meters, windowless, with only a small ventilation grate that opened to ground level. From it, I could see the feet of pedestrians passing by. A single mattress lay in the corner, its springs broken, sagging into a hollow when you lay on it. I used a door plank to fashion a desk and clamped a reading lamp to it.
As the ceiling began shedding dust, I was bent over that door plank, reading.
Ash settled on the pages. I brushed it off with my sleeve and kept turning.
Rats scurried in the corners; cockroaches crawled from the cracks. I bought a bag of mothballs and placed them in the four corners. The smell was harsh, but it worked.
I found three jobs.
From 4 AM to 8 AM, I washed dishes at a Chinese restaurant. Twelve dollars an hour. My fingers peeled; dish soap foam permanently embedded under my nails.
From 9 AM to 5 PM, I worked the register at a Chinese supermarket. Fifteen dollars an hour. Standing eight hours made my legs swell until I couldn't squat.
On weekends, I taught Chinese to the children of Chinese immigrants in Flushing. Twenty dollars an hour—my highest-paying job.
Eighteen hours of work a day. Four hours of sleep.
I lost fifteen pounds in the first month. Not from hunger—from exhaustion. I couldn't afford restaurant food. Expired bread from the supermarket was a meal, washed down with free water.
But I managed to secure a visitor's pass for an NYU public lecture.
The first time I went, security kicked me out.
"No student ID, no entry."
The second time, I hid in the bathroom until the class bell rang, then slipped in. I sat in the last row, my cap pulled low, barely daring to breathe.
The professor at the podium was Donovan Black. Gray hair, aquiline nose, eyes like blades.
He was lecturing on derivative pricing models.
"This formula," he said, writing a series of equations on the blackboard with a piece of chalk, "has been used in the industry for twenty years. No one has ever questioned it."
My hands trembled.
Not from fear. Because—he was wrong.
I stared at the equation on the board, calculations racing through my mind. Where it was wrong, why it was wrong, what the correct version should be.
I raised my hand.
"The student in the cap," Donovan said, narrowing his eyes. "Do you have a question?"
I stood, my voice slightly unsteady. "Professor, your formula is wrong. The risk premium in the third term should follow a logarithmic distribution, not a normal distribution. Using a normal distribution underestimates tail risk. The 2008 subprime crisis happened precisely because of this error."
The classroom fell silent for three seconds.
Donovan stared at me for a full ten seconds.
Then he smiled.
"You're right."
He erased the formula on the blackboard and rewrote it. Then he walked to where I stood, looking down at me—he was tall, I had to crane my neck to meet his eyes.
"What's your name?"
"An auditor."
"I know," he said. "I asked for your name."
"Song Qingci."
"Miss Song," he said softly, "the error you just pointed out—I've been teaching for twenty years, and you're the first to notice it. If you can pass the entrance exam, I'll take you on personally."
What he didn't know was that my SAT scores were five years old. I had no letters of recommendation. I couldn't even afford the application fee.
What I didn't know was that Donovan Black was a legendary trader on Wall Street.
And the fund he managed had deep ties with Lu Corporation.
Fate, sometimes, has a cruel sense of humor.
I returned to the basement and pinned the admissions brochure to the wall.
Application deadline: two months away.
Through the ventilation grate, pairs of shoes passed—leather shoes, high heels.
No one looked down at the single light burning in the basement.