An Education in Ruin

by Alexis Bass

  Theo rubs his forehead nervously; it’ll be much worse than that for the Mahoneys.

  “But you’re the one who stands to lose the most,” Jasper says.

  Rob scratches her chin like she’s thinking hard—another gesture meant to insult Jasper—before she speaks. “What’s the saying? You can’t lose something you never had? I was nineteen when I started Robames. Not a penny of my own money went into the company.”

  “The lawsuit is going to destroy you, regardless,” Jasper says.

  “I understand why you’re afraid of this lawsuit, Jasper,” she says. “But I’m not afraid of it. Not at all. As long as everyone cooperates and does what they’re supposed to, it should be fine.”

  “What about public percept—” I start to interject so Jasper doesn’t yet reveal that he’s not willing to lie under oath no matter what she does with the recording of him cheating.

  Rob cuts me off with a laugh. “Public perception? Fixing that is the easy part. Winning people over has never been hard for me.” She crosses her legs and leans back, especially relaxed as she tells us, “I’m not done yet. Not with this company. Not with the Roba-Fix.”

  “This is off the record, Roberta. You have our phones. You disabled the cameras.” Jasper’s doing very well, keeping his demeanor calm and his voice friendly. “You can admit that the Roba-Fix is dead. You should at least…”

  He doesn’t finish and I watch the effect this has on her. The way she holds her breath like she thinks he still will. The sternness in her voice when she says, “I should at least what?”

  Jasper makes her wait before he tells her. “You should at least admit it to yourself.”

  This makes her shoulders go rigid. “It’s not dead until I say it is.”

  “How are you going to raise the funds to keep an impossible product going after this lawsuit exposes the truth?” He’s leaning forward as he speaks to her, the only tell that he’s under stress.

  “There are plenty of options,” she says. “I can mortgage my assets, buy some more time. Plus, it could take years to sort out the details of the lawsuit.”

  “But it will eventually get sorted out,” Jasper says. “And you know they have a case. A very strong one at that.”

  “Right now,” she says. “Right now, they think they have a case.” She leans on the armrest and moves one hand as she talks, her gold cuff sliding up and down her wrist. “But they’re not big-picture people. They’re driven by deadlines and rules, and they abide by a narrow point of view.” She’s speaking like she’s addressing an auditorium of people, some of that Rob James magic flaring up. “Progress doesn’t happen with deadlines and rules and narrow points of view. It happens when we put faith in new ideas. It happens when we embrace courage, when we take risks. So who knows what Robames can accomplish if given the space and freedom and time.”

  “Come on, Roberta.” His tone stays gentle and he gives her a small smile. “You’re a dreamer, but you’re also a realist. Jacob Pruitt wouldn’t’ve written a proposal changing the foundation of Robames if he thought there was a chance in hell you could win this lawsuit. He was protecting his investment, yeah. But he was also protecting you.”

  “Don’t stick up for him just because she’s here.” She nods in my direction. “Maybe the Jacob Pruitt is not as brilliant as we’ve all been led to believe. Maybe he’s as shortsighted and greedy as the rest of them. Did you even read the proposal?”

  “I did,” Jasper says. “I think it’s a great solution.”

  Rob shakes her head. “If I accept the agreement under his proposal, I’m basically a bartering tool between Robames and the Justice Department. I’ll be forced to buy back shares.” Her voice turns stern. “They’ll tell the investors that I can’t pay back a lien on my assets, on my patents. My ideas. They’ll strip me of my voting rights for the company I created myself.”

  “But have you considered the alternative? You could end up in jail,” Jasper says. “Is it worth the risk?”

  “Plenty of people still believe in me. Plenty of people know I’m going to do great things for this world.” She makes a point not to look at Jasper and stares at the coffee table, at our pile of phones. But I wonder if he’s who she most wants to hear this—of all the people who have given up on her, she wants him to know she’s not alone. It makes me think that she must be more alone than ever. “You don’t get it,” she says, frowning. “I would be banned from being an officer or director of any public company for a decade or more. What am I supposed to do in the meantime?”

  “You could do anything—a million other things,” Jasper says. “You could go back to Yale?”

  “I hated it there. I like it out here. I like putting a dent in society and making changes. Improving things. I like growing a company and boosting the economy. I like having a hand in steering the ship of progress.”

  I understand what she means—the importance and freedom of doing something on your own, the way Mimi wants a fresh start to make a road for herself instead of continuing down the perfectly paved path my father laid out for her.

  “You can still do all that. One day.”

  “But not with the Roba-Fix, and I’m not done with it yet—I’m not ready to give it up. It’s a product the world needs.” She twists in her seat. “My mother was very sick, you know.”

  “I know,” Jasper says quietly.

  “A device like the Roba-Fix would’ve really improved her life.” She leans back, her eyes shifting to Jasper.

  “I remember the day you got back from her funeral,” he says, his voice softening, “when we were sitting in the courtyard and you told me you were going to do something so that no one would have to suffer the way she did ever again.”

  Rob looks down and nods. “Since in the end, I couldn’t save her…” Her face creases like she’s about to cry. She puts her hand over her forehead, trying to shield us from seeing. I’d wanted to know what was driving her. It’s fear. It’s loss. It’s grief. It’s complicated.

  “Roberta, don’t.” Jasper’s voice is almost a whisper. It’s full of sympathy and pain. He gets up and crosses the room. For a moment, it’s like the rest of us aren’t there, it’s just the two of them and everything they went through together in the past, so much he’s not told me that’s just between them. It hurts him to see her upset, I can tell. Jasper kneels in front of her. Whatever he’s saying to her, he’s saying it too quietly for the rest of us to hear. She nods as he speaks, and eventually she leans forward and hugs him. He holds her with an arm around her shoulder and his hand against the back of her head, the way he sometimes holds me.

  It’s pretend, I tell myself. It’s only for show. But the cameras are disabled and our phones are turned off.

  Jasper finally lets go of her, but he doesn’t return to his seat. He stays next to Rob as she wipes her eyes, pulling herself together like she’s just remembered we’re all sitting there.

  “None of you understand the things I’ll lose if I accept the proposal.” Her gaze falls on Jasper. “Or what I’ve already lost.”

  Jasper doesn’t say anything, though he’s staring at her like he wants to.

  When the silence has stretched on for too long, Theo says, “With this proposal, Robames will still revolutionize medical research.”

  “But it won’t be mine anymore, will it?”

  “It will always be yours because it would never have been possible without you,” Theo says.

  Jasper closes his eyes for a second, like he knows this won’t be enough for her.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Rob says. “The proposal is off the table, anyway. The investors have stopped campaigning for it.”

  “What do you mean?” Stewart says, his voice tight and urgent.

  “Jacob Pruitt had a meeting scheduled this weekend to argue again for the proposal. But he canceled it at the last minute and hasn’t made an attempt to reschedule it. I think they’ve finally accepted that I’m not giving up; that I’ll never give up.”


  “So you don’t care that what you’re doing is wrong? Or what it costs our families?” Stewart says. “You’re delusional if you think it’s not going to ruin you, too.”

  Jasper glares at him—a warning to stop. Anastasia frowns. The hostility coming off him is hard to understand given how little this loss will affect his life, especially compared to what the Mahoneys will be losing.

  “My mind is made up,” Rob says. “There’s nothing any of you can say to change it.” She squares her shoulders and straightens her posture. “Sorry for wasting your time. You can all go.”

  Stewart snatches his phone from the table and storms out of the room, leaving Theo to collect the cameras and his laptop. Anastasia and I help, fishing cameras off shelves and out from behind books. Jasper stands, but doesn’t leave her side.

  I think that maybe he still wants to talk with her after the rest of us have left, but when Theo, Anastasia, and I are about to walk out, he joins us.

  “Collins,” Rob says. We turn to face her. “Can I speak with you alone?”

  Fifty-two

  Rob James stands next to me in the doorway, watching Theo, Anastasia, and Jasper walk down the hall, leaving us alone in the common room. When they round the corner and are out of sight, she closes the door.

  “What’s your phone number?” she asks, taking her phone out of her pocket. She inputs the numbers as I dictate them.

  My phone chimes with a message from her. She watches as I open it. It’s a recording. I press play and see Jasper in a hotel room. I don’t have to watch more than a couple of seconds before I realize what it is.

  “Why are you giving this to me?”

  “Don’t you want to watch it all the way through?” But she doesn’t wait for me to answer and comes to her own conclusion. “So he did tell you.”

  “About how you’re blackmailing him—yeah, he told me.”

  “I didn’t force him to cheat.”

  “He never said you did.” Anger flares up in me. Is her plan to show me this recording to make me think differently of Jasper, to get me away from him? Or is it a test, to see how much I’d be willing to overlook?

  “Why did you give this to me?” I repeat, letting the malice come out in my voice this time.

  She smiles. “It’s yours now.” She holds up her phone and I watch as she deletes the video. “See?” she says. “That’s my only copy. I promise.”

  “With everything I know about you, how am I supposed to believe that?”

  “Because I promised.”

  It’s a silly answer, especially coming from someone like her, who can command a room and persuaded many people to finance her company based on an idea.

  I need her to know I am utterly unconvinced. “Why wouldn’t you give this to Jasper yourself?” Why include me, like some kind of intermediary?

  “I don’t trust him with it.”

  She doesn’t trust him. Well, that’s rich. “What do you mean?”

  She sighs before she speaks, like she’s thinking of exactly what she wants to say. “Let me guess, he told you that nothing between him and me was real, that it was only an infatuation?”

  “He might’ve said that.” The pleasant expression on her face would indicate that this answer from me is some kind of win for her, so I add, “He also said he regretted everything that happened between the two of you; that he’d take it all back if he could.”

  She nods to herself, a smile forming on her lips—another reaction from her that I wasn’t expecting. “Do you think that he’d be this upset with me—this hurt—if what he felt for me wasn’t real?”

  “I don’t know, Rob. You set your laptop up to record him and left the decathlon answers out, as if you knew what he’d do and you wanted to catch him doing it so you’d have something to hold over him.”

  “That’s not why I did it.”

  “Oh, really.” I don’t believe her at all. “Then what? You were testing him?”

  “Of course I was testing him,” she says. “How else was I supposed to know?”

  “Know what?”

  “He told me he was in love with me,” she says, the words rushing out of her. “How do you know if you can believe anyone when they say that? How do you know who to trust?”

  “If he didn’t cheat, that would’ve proved he loved you? How?” Her logic doesn’t make any sense to me.

  “No,” she says. “If he cheated, then I’d know—I’d know what he’d be willing to risk for me. For us.”

  “But he didn’t mean to break a record. He didn’t know being the decathlon champion would result in an early acceptance to Dartmouth.”

  “He knew that winning the decathlon would make him an ideal candidate to intern with me. And of course he knew it would help with Dartmouth. Dartmouth was always our plan. Why do you think I put Robames headquarters so close to its campus?”

  “He did it to impress you.” I want her to feel the sting of this, of what he was willing to do for her. How can she possibly feel okay using it against him?

  “And he did,” she says, stars in her eyes. “And I finally believed him when he said he loved me. I finally trusted him.” Her smile falters. “But then, when he interned for Robames, he started to question things about the company. He doubted me, second-guessed what I was doing. He didn’t understand why I had to lie. I watched him fall out of love with me. I felt him pull away. And the worst part—” Her voice cracks. “It was obvious he was wracked with guilt over what he’d done. I could tell he’d started to hate himself for doing it and couldn’t even enjoy the good things that were happening to him, like he didn’t think it was worth it. He didn’t think I was worth it.”

  “You proved him right the second you used the recording to blackmail him. It didn’t matter to you why he did it or that it was exactly what you wanted him to do.” She shakes her head. Another nonanswer that isn’t good enough. “So, what, am I supposed to thank you now? Do you think Jasper is going fall on his knees in gratitude that you suddenly had a change of heart after torturing him for these past months?”

  “No, not at all,” she says, but I still have more questions.

  Why is she playing the hero now, giving Jasper his life back? Why she is using me to deliver the news? There has to be a catch. There always seems to be one when it comes to her.

  “Why did you send me this recording instead of Jasper?” I ask.

  “Because I don’t want him to have it,” she says. “Collins. If you really care about him, you’ll delete the recording the second you leave this room. You’ll tell him I gave it to you and that you destroyed it. If he trusts you, he won’t need to see the proof. He’ll just believe you.”

  She’s planting doubts; she thinks that since I witnessed the way Jasper responded to her when she spoke about her mother, how caring he was toward her, that I’m in a weaker position. She’s not wrong entirely, but I won’t let her get to me.

  “I don’t need to test him the way you did. I’m going to tell him however I want.”

  “I’ve always known there was a time limit on how long I could blackmail Jasper,” she says. “I know how he thinks. I saw how guilty he felt. It was only a matter of time before he’d try to turn himself in. If you don’t get that about him, then perhaps you don’t understand him as well as you think you do.”

  I don’t want to stand here and listen to her anymore, hear her boast about how well she knows him and how all the tests she performed to get him to prove how much he cared worked in her favor.

  “If there’s nothing else, I’m going to leave.”

  “So leave,” she says. “But if you really care about him, you’ll listen to me. You won’t risk that he could get his hands on it, because he’ll only use it against himself.”

  Fifty-three

  Jasper, Theo, Stewart, and Anastasia are waiting for me in the end of the B wing. Dim light from the lamppost in the courtyard streams in through the stained-glass windows, giving the hallway a sort of glow.

  The air c
rackles with tension as I approach; they’re still edgy from the meeting with Rob, since it didn’t go in our favor.

  “What did she want?” They all must be wondering this, but it’s Stewart who says it. “Is she going to reconsider the proposal?” he adds.

  I shake my head as I move toward Jasper. “She deleted the recording. I watched her do it.” I take his hands and squeeze them, anticipating the excitement and relief he’s going to feel. I don’t care that Anastasia is standing there, her head whipping back and forth trying to catch up after all that she’s witnessed tonight. Theo will have to fill her in however he sees fit. Right now I only care that Jasper knows he’s free. “She’s not blackmailing you anymore.”

  Jasper’s eyes get wide, then his gaze lifts and he looks past me, like he thinks someone is at the other end of the hall. But no one is there and I try to quiet the voice in the back of my mind telling me that when he heard she’d let him off the hook, the first thing he did was search for her.

  “That’s great news,” Theo says, patting Jasper’s back.

  Jasper looks at me and smiles. He squeezes my hands. He whispers, “Are you sure?” and I nod.

  “So nothing about the proposal, then?” Stewart says. “You didn’t think to try to convince her when she was letting her guard down and doing the right thing for Jasper?”

  “No, I—” Is that what I should’ve been doing?

  “Roberta’s mind was made up,” Jasper says. “There’s nothing Collins could’ve said to change that.”

  “Maybe not,” Stewart says. “But she could’ve at least warned us that her father had stopped pushing for it. Canceling that meeting and everything.”

  “How would she have known about that?” Jasper says. But now they’re all looking at me.

  “Did you know about it?” Stewart asks.

  My hesitation is enough to make Stewart toss his hands in the air and shake his head at me. “My father had already failed countless times to convince her.”