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A Turn of the Cards A Novel by Rebecca Anderson For D, wherever he is. I hope he's still writing. And with thanks to Ken and Raena, who are richer in spirit than any of the characters I could ever hope to describe in this story. I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. ? Ecclesiastes 9:11. A WORK OF FICTION This is a work of fiction. All incidents are imagined and not based on real people or events. For a full disclaimer see the postscript at the end of this novel. A Turn of the Cards is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Full details of the license can be found at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ MIKE CHECK. CHECK ONE TWO. Mom and I were standing in the kitchen of my parent's house in Lincoln, Nebraska, crying, as I tried to explain the mess I had made of my 24 year old life." "I'm not a criminal, Mom. I would never do anything illegal." "Do you need money?" "Of course not! Mom, I have lots of money." "Illegal money." "No, legal money. Perfectly legal money. I haven't broken any law." "So, why? Why did you do this to yourself?" "Because I'm an idiot?" "I'm not going to disagree with you, if that's what you're hoping." "I'm not going to disagree with me, either, Mom." I gathered myself together. We looked at one another, both of us in tears. Eventually I realized there was no easy way to begin to make her understand, so I stood up and walked over to the bench to put some coffee on. "If you've got time, I can tell you the whole story. It's not a good story. I'm an idiot. I know." "Make three cups. I'm going to get your father. He deserves to hear this, too." "Okay, Mom." I started to make the coffee, knowing it would be the most difficult conversation I would ever have. Or so I thought, at that time. CHAPTER 1. HEY Harvard makes mistakes too, you know. Kissinger taught there. ? Woody Allen # In 1996 I was 23, newly graduated from Harvard, with a low-paying job as a sysadmin at a biotech company called Gene Systems, Inc. I figured I would eventually go to graduate school, but I wanted a year or two out in the world before I tried that. Life away from the stress of college was good socially, but it wasn't easy financially. The cost of housing in Cambridge had always been high, but as the tech boom of the mid 1990s began it accelerated out of all proportion to the ability of the local population to pay. The area was full of students and recent graduates but a lot of them were subsidized by their parents, or had high-paying jobs, or had partners who had high paying jobs. Locals didn't stand a chance. None of these things was true in my case. I was living in Somerville, near Davis Square, in a three bedroom apartment which was the upstairs half of a large house. I lived with my former Harvard roommate Pete, who was almost always around, and a lesbian friend Talia, a fellow sysadmin/database administrator who actually worked at Harvard, but who only seemed to be home once a month. All of us had crippling student loans, and none of us had family wealth to fall back on. I had started at college on a scholarship, but after a little personal meltdown in my sophomore year I'd had to pay to finish my degree. Final year tuition had been $24,880. That doesn't sound like all that much money now for Harvard, but it was hell back then. Mom and Dad and my grandmother had helped a little, but I was still buried under a mountain of debt. Relative poverty aside, my friends and I had a good time. The presence of half a dozen of the nation's finest academic institutions in or around Cambridge, and the more than one hundred thousand or so undergraduates attending, makes the city and its surrounds an unusual hotbed of youthful sexual tension. The party scene was hot. In the mid-90's geeks were suddenly almost cool. It seemed as though everyone (except me) was working for startups, or knew people who were. Even undergrads were being poached if they could write code. Young women could still afford to pick and choose the guys they went out with, but increasingly they started to go out with guys based on their personalities and intelligence instead of their personalities and looks. Which was fine with me. I wasn't the next Bill Gates, but most of the girls in town didn't know that, and, while there were gold-diggers everywhere, a lot of the girls were smarter than the guys they were chasing anyway. An added bonus on the dating front was that in Cambridge there wasn't the stigma attached to the Big H that there is in the rest of the country. Girls in Cambridge are happy to date Harvard geeks. It's no big deal. Elsewhere you have to deal with the usual annoying mix of envy, resentment, and social-climbing. Drop the H-bomb in a conversation in Nebraska and see where it gets you. Not that Harvard is anything like the way it's presented in the movies. Oh, maybe it is for the 10% or fewer that belong to fraternities, but for the vast majority of students it's a college like any other. None of my friends belonged to fraternities or came from wealthy families. Obviously there were students there that did ? if you've seen that movie The Social Network you've heard of the Winkelvii ? but I never met them, or any of the other wealthy students. I never comped for Final Clubs ("to comp" is Harvard-ese for "to compete" ? everything at Harvard is about competition). None of the women I met seemed particularly concerned about the wealth or social status or otherwise of any of us. We were mostly kids from middle or working-class homes, and many of us were the children of immigrants. We worked hard in school, maintained a great GPA, took lots of AP classes and did all the other things that got us selected to one of the best educational institutions in the world. Not that we liked it all that much once we got there. I mean, we knew we were lucky. Sure, we worked hard, but there's still something of a lottery aspect to getting selected to many Ivy League schools. It's not enough to have good grades, and write a great admissions essay: your essay has to be read by the admissions officer at the right time of day, hopefully on a good day, when they're feeling well disposed to nobodies from an underwhelming high school in Nebraska. Maybe they got laid that morning, or they had an especially good Danish with their soy moccaccino. Whatever. My friends and I all recognized our good fortune and we didn't think it made us better than people we knew who went to other colleges. If you're part of the great mass of people who know about Harvard from movies, you probably don't believe that, but it's true. We were mostly the geeks, the outcasts, the intellectuals. We weren't used to feeling superior to anyone. While we felt lucky, I don't know that any of us liked living in our respective Houses at Harvard that much. College can be a lonely place, until you find friends, and geeks and outcasts and intellectuals often find it difficult to do that. I'm digressing. A lot of this story might contain digressions. I hope you'll bear with me, because I'm not digressing to make excuses for what happened to me. I'm digressing to try to explain how I came to be in a certain place, at a certain time, and got offered a certain set of opportunities and problems that ? in hindsight ? I should have been smart enough to avoid because I'm smart. Everybody has always told me I'm smart. Except when I'm spectacularly stupid. Is there such a thing as an idiot-savant, but in reverse? Someone who's exceptional at everything except for one thing where they're extraordinarily defective? If so, I'm it: as functionally skilled as I choose to be at most intellectual things, with an inexplicable and profound deficit in the area of understanding relationships. On the subject of relationships, and Harvard, and avoiding digression; by 1996 none of the women in Cambridge, so far, had dated me. No girl had agreed to more than one date with me since Lisa Hemphill in the tenth grade, when we were both young and I guess I was a safer choice than some of the ugly goons at our school. Truth was, I wasn't really boyfriend material. At 5'6" I was three and a half inches under the national average height for men, more than one standard deviation from the norm (I'd looked it up), and I was wafer thin, like those kids who had sand kicked in their face in the old Charles Atlas comic book ads (did I mention some of us were 'Rocky Horror' tragics?). I wasn't just thin, I was really thin. I had a metabolism that worked five times harder than everyone else's. It was great for being able to pull all-nighters, but not much good for developing a manly physique. Thin arms, small hands and feet, thin torso. On top of everything else I had lousy eyesight. I couldn't see more than about five feet in front of me without glasses. Plus there was the fact I looked about ten years younger than my real age. It might have been due to excellent skin ? unlike other kids I never had any meaningful acne ? or it might have been my size. Whatever it was, I got carded absolutely everywhere. Everywhere. And most people who didn't know me well thought I was still about sixteen. Apart from all that (if you can dismiss "all that") I wasn't bad looking, so long as you weren't looking for someone built like Dwayne Johnson. A friend once described me as "exotic in an offbeat way". I was the product of a Jewish American father, improbably named Benjamin Jones, and a Japanese mother whose own parents were French and Japanese. Dad had been drafted into the Marines in the last year of the Vietnam War, and met Mom when he was stationed on Okinawa during his time in the Corps. He was tall and broad shouldered, she was the classic tiny Japanese girl. Even as a kid I thought they looked kind of funny together. I got my mother's DNA, because I had an Asian set of features, although my skin was quite pale. My thick dark brown hair made me look even paler. My friend and college roommate Pete once told me that if he'd had to guess where I was from he would have said Siberia, because I had that peculiar mix of features balanced between Caucasian and Asian often found there. My roommate Talia told me I should move to Japan and start a boy band. "You fit the classic profile for 'non-threatening boy'," she said. In her defense she was drunk at the time. The delicacy of my features had been a problem where my family lived in Nebraska, and despite having short hair from age fourteen, I had been called "Miss" a lot until around my seventeenth birthday, when I moved to go to college. It hadn't done wonders for my self-esteem, but fortunately it had ceased when I moved East. Perhaps people in Cambridge were more used to seeing foreigners, since both MIT and Harvard were both full of Asian kids. I'd become comfortable enough to let my hair grow almost to my shoulders, which saved on haircuts and fit in better with the geek crowd I ran with. At 23 I didn't get "Miss" any more from sales clerks, but I wasn't a babe magnet, even in Cambridge, and I was still inexperienced at sex. Of the seven women who had ever agreed to the one date, only two had ever gone so far as to "invite me in" afterward, and I think I had disappointed both. The result was that I had something of a fierce inferiority complex regarding my chances with women. So I was surprised one Saturday night when Alice Kim spent so much time talking to me at our friend Henry's birthday drinks. Alice was beautiful and smart, the daughter of Korean immigrants who'd worked their asses off and instilled in her the same drive to succeed. We knew each other, vaguely, through a mutual friend. She was an MIT graduate, doing postgrad work in something related to artificial intelligence at MIT. It was an expanding and exciting field. She could have been talking to any guy at the party, but she chose to spend most of the evening with me. I was, of course, entranced. When Alice began speaking to me, I first thought she was only interested in my connection to my best friend, Pete. She kept looking at him, across the room, where he was deep in conversation with our friends Dave and Michael. She even asked me how I knew him. So I was pretty sure, to begin with, that she was just gathering intelligence to make a play for him later. But our conversation quickly turned to other things: music, food, books. She drank water, and fruit juice. No alcohol. Her voice was sweet and musical and her eyes were clear and sparkling. Toward the end of the night she made her pitch, but subtly, so at first I didn't realize it was a pitch. After a few more hours of talking about study, travel, her family and relaxation, she asked me whether I knew anything about card counting. "Not a thing," I said. "I'm afraid I don't gamble much." "It's not really gambling," she said. "It's just math. You're good at math, right Alex?" I looked at Alice, one of the prettiest girls I'd ever met. I knew I was being sold something, but I couldn't resist hearing what that something would be. Truth be told, she could have read me a book on introductory macram? and I would have been fine just listening to her voice. But Alice got to the point a lot faster than I thought she would. "Do you want to come to Connecticut with me next Friday night to play some cards?" She asked. "There's a new casino there. You don't need to get off work early, we'll leave around six." I would have followed Alice past the gates of hell. I didn't know anything at all about playing cards, but I was sure I wanted to spend Friday night with her. # The week passed slowly. Work was a drag ? Dilbert squared ? and I was bored at home, too. I reorganized my CD collection, tidied my room for the umpteenth time, listened to music, tried to read, and did nothing. It meant I saw more of my roommate, Pete, than usual. At some point I must have said something to him about meeting Alice and her inviting me out. "Alice Kim?" he said, when I told him. "Dude." I blushed. Despite being Asian I blush obviously, on account of my pale skin. "Well, it's just going out with her and some friends." Nevertheless Pete was impressed. He knew Alice from classes, but had barely been able to bring himself to speak to her. "Alice" Pete said, unintentionally mangling both The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Say Anything, "has a brain the size of a planet in the body of a Korean game show hostess." Pete and I met when I was a freshman, in the first week I was in Cambridge. Both of us were living in Matthews, albeit in different rooms, but we were both trying to get involved in the student radio show called 'the record hospital' (yeah, they were precious about the lower-case thing back when Pete and I were involved) at WHRB, and we had shown up at a session where they were explaining the station to freshmen. WHRB, which was more or less the Harvard radio station, gave over the entire night shift to the record hospital, which had a very competitive selection and training process called "comp", somewhat like the "comp" process for Final Clubs. The comp directors were two guys who were basically assholes. They poured scorn on anything that fell outside their own indie punk credo. We clicked on that first night even if the comp directors were completely dismissive of our musical tastes, which ran too close to pop for their determinedly lo-fi tastes. I remember we had a really pretentious discussion with them about the decline of Bob Mould as a serious songwriter. It was a stupid conversation, but neither Pete nor I seemed to mind, and because we were dismissive instead of enthusiastic ? one- upping them in the disdain stakes ? we got to do a show, a very late show, together. We spent a lot of very long hours in the studio playing anything that was in the "heavy rotation/new" bin at the station, interspersed with random bits of Pixies, Alex Chilton, Iggy Pop and as much old pop and soul as the station would let us get away with. We were polar opposites looks wise: Pete Johanssen was your basic 6'4" blond blue-eyed Wisconsin boy genius, a former high school basketball star in Madison before he wrecked an ankle, and as confident and relaxed around people as I was shy. Why he didn't have three hundred girls chasing him at any given time was a mystery to me, and to him, too. He was co-founder of an online startup he'd begun with a Russian math geek friend when they were in their sophomore year. It had something to do with a kind of limited artificial intelligence through pattern recognition. I knew what it was about in the abstract, but we'd never discussed the key aspects of his business in detail. Since freshman year, Pete had become easily my closest male friend. One of the reasons I liked him so much was that, mostly, I never had to think about anything when we were together. He was completely low-maintenance, without being slack. The two of us just worked well together on some unconscious level, could make decisions about doing things without having to talk about them, and could finish each other's sentences. We liked the same music. We mostly liked the same food. We both felt completely lost at Harvard, and weren't afraid to admit it. I didn't need to act macho around him. We didn't have to try to impress each other. We could just be. Pete and I hit a local bar, listened to some music from a wannabe indie pop act, and bumped into his partner from their startup, a Russian named Vassily who looked almost like a parody of a young engineer, with thick- rimmed glasses and a bad haircut. He was a nice guy though, at least as far as I could tell from the few times I'd met him. He was with his wife that night, a pretty blonde named Yana who would have been model material if she'd had better dental care as a teenager. She was at least three inches taller than Vassily, closer to six foot. She danced with a friend for most of the evening. Pete, Vassily and I all did the white man's overbite thing grooving along with the music. When it was closing time we said farewell to our Russian friends and stumbled half drunk into the night afterward. # Up until I was about fifteen I didn't really notice girls. For that matter, I didn't notice guys much, either. I existed in my own little cocoon, in which sex wasn't an issue. Yes, I was a late bloomer, as far as those things go, and maybe it was my hormones, or lack of them, but I didn't get all totally distracted at every girl who looked at me, like most of my peers did. I was going to write "like most of my friends did" in that last sentence, except that I didn't have that many friends, and if they got distracted by girls it was always short-lived distraction. There was Carl Choi, one of the only other Asian kids at my school, and Hal Donovan, who lived just a few doors from me and had been my companion to and from school on many occasions, although we weren't exactly soulmates. Carl was smart, but he lived in his own little world of math and computing. I think these days he'd probably have been diagnosed with Aspergers, but at the time we put his obsession with math down to his driven parents. Not that I had anything against math ? Carl was my only competition in class ? but it wasn't my life the way that it was Carl's. He could make a math problem out of just walking down the street. He ended up at Cornell, in some kind of elite PhD fast-track, but I didn't know much about him since because we drifted apart in senior year of high school. Hal was a different kind of friend. The kind of friend you get from proximity instead of shared interests. We didn't have much in common, but he was an alright guy. Not smart like Carl, or even me, but not totally stupid. Even so, I could pretty much get him to do what I wanted, just by thinking a few steps ahead in any situation, and it seemed like Hal couldn't reciprocate. I sometimes felt guilty about that, but evidently not guilty enough to stop. Hal's Mom and my Mom were friends, and we spent a lot of time together when we were kids and our Moms were together, and I didn't dislike him, but I couldn't have said he was my best friend, either. I didn't really have a best friend. If this sounds like a familiar story, it is. For every popular kid at high school, there must be a dozen that have only a few friends, and there are always one or two kids in every class that have almost no friends at all. Such is the misery of the American high school experience. Does it happen that way in other countries, or is it some special variety of torture we cooked up all on our own? When I won the scholarship to Harvard, all of a sudden the years of torment seemed, if not negated, then at least greatly diminished. I had a ticket out. Of course, once I was at Harvard, surrounded by people who were ? quite obviously ? much smarter than me, I had to overcome different feelings of inadequacy. But Harvard, at least, was not the horror that high school had been. Odd then, that it was at Harvard that I had a breakdown. # Friday I washed my hair and packed a change of clothes and took them with me to work so I could meet Alice outside The Brattle. I didn't know what to expect, but I had dressed neatly in what passed for standard Harvard Square attire: ironic logo t-shirt, thrift store black jacket, and khakis, with my hair tied back in the standard geek ponytail. I looked like hundreds of grad students and junior faculty. A long white Toyota van pulled up and Alice slid the rear door open. "Get in." Obviously, Alice wasn't alone. Inside the van I recognized a few faces, all of Asian or Indian origin. My friend Henry Yang was driving. He'd been in my stairway at Matthews and, while we weren't close, he'd always seemed like a straight-up guy. It had been at his party a few days earlier that Alice had invited me to come. In the front passenger seat was an Indian guy I knew, and didn't like, Arun Kapoor. Great. If I'd known he was involved in Alice's adventure I'd never have come. Arun and I had fallen out a few years earlier when we were both in the chess club, and he was being a dick about some strategy. I had beaten him five times straight, and it was clear he was a very sore loser. It was no big deal, really, but he acted like I had impugned his honor or something, and for the remainder of the year he rode me on every single thing I ever said at the club. We almost had a fight one afternoon after Dan Koh, a mutual friend, complimented me on a game I had played the week before. Eventually I left the club, because the atmosphere at the club just wasn't fun any more. Now here he was again, four years later, as was Dan, in the back of the van sitting next to Alice. As I climbed into the back of the van Arun turned to introduce himself, it seemed as though he'd forgotten our history together, such as it was. "Arun," he said, offering his hand. I tried to shake it but since I was trying to balance as the van took off that was a little tricky. I wondered whether pretending not to know me was his way of trying to avoid unpleasantness. Apparently Arun suffered from Prosopagnosia, which is an inability to remember faces. It seemed that although he knew my name was Alex, he didn't remember my face, so he didn't know I was Alex Jones. I wondered how long it would take for him to make the rest of the connection. Alice introduced me to the rest of her friends. In the three seats in back were Lucy Huang, Emily Zhang, and James Gee, all MIT students I'd met through a computing club I'd belonged to when I was an undergrad. I smiled at Dan, who had been in Matthews my freshman year, and was also in my second year Astronomy class. I liked Dan. We'd never been especially close during our time in Matthews, but he was the one who was in chess club with me and who witnessed the almost-fight with Arun. He was quiet, like me, but the few times we'd got to talking I'd liked his extremely dry sense of humor. I was never entirely sure when he was joking, but his humor was never malicious. Unlike most of us, he was enormous, with a significant weight problem he put down to too many pizzas and too much Mountain Dew while coding. With his broad Han face he looked very Buddha-like whenever he was seated. He took up most of the seating in the second row of the van, and so Alice and I were scrunched together. I couldn't say I minded that at all. As we pulled up at the Mohegan Sun Casino a few hours later Arun turned to me before I got out of the van. "Enjoy yourself," he said, as he handed me a roll of bills. "You can talk to Alice but you don't know any of the rest of us. If you speak to any of us, we'll all be leaving." "Just watch and learn," said Henry as he got out of the van. I looked at the cash Arun had given me. It was around $5,000. I had never held that much cash in my hand in my life. I was immediately suspicious. Why would a guy who was such a dick hand me $5,000? Looking in his eyes I could tell he had remembered who I was, but Alice reached over and closed my hand around the money, and shoved it in my jacket pocket. I looked at her, surprised, and she shrugged and pushed me out of the van. The team members went into the casino in ones and twos. Alice and I entered before Arun. I tried to follow her lead without making it look like she was in control. "I wish you'd told me Arun was involved in this," I said quietly, as we moved through the slot machines to the blackjack tables. "I didn't know you knew Arun," Alice said. "What is it between you two?" "It's a long story," I said. "Put it this way: no love lost." She shrugged. "Whatever. You don't have to love him. He probably doesn't remember you, anyway." "He will." Alice motioned to me to get out the money Arun had given me. "How much cash should I change for chips?" I whispered to her. "All of it," she said calmly. "We're going to be playing the high stakes tables, and we're probably going to lose all of it. And don't whisper. Give me a kiss." Of course I kissed her. It wasn't my first kiss, nor my last, but I remember it very well. There wasn't anything particularly special about it, except that it was Alice Kim I was kissing, so there was an element of "I've won the lottery," and she was sweet smelling and sweeter tasting. I was glad I'd eaten a mint on the way down in the van. The kiss was done, though, and so together walked to a table. We had no sooner approached than a large man appeared beside us. "Evening, ladies. Sorry to bother you. Can I see some ID please?" I turned to face him and he did a small double-take and I think he suddenly realized his faux pas. "Sorry." He said. "From the side you, uh ..." "It's okay," I said, offering him my driver's license. I was embarrassed to have it happen in front of Alice, but I always had to show ID when Pete and I went out drinking, and I knew that making a fuss just made the embarrassment last longer. He examined our ID's, and after we got them back we played blackjack for a while. I forgot about Arun completely. We won some, we lost some, playing for the table minimum of $50. There were only two other people at the table, in the fifth and sixth positions, an older couple who looked like they might have been locals. After about a dozen hands I noticed Alice sit back, and then stretch her arms above her head. Then she went back to the game. Less than a minute later Henry came and sat immediately to her right, and got ten thousand dollars worth of chips from the dealer. I remembered we weren't supposed to know one another, but like everyone else at the table, I stared. "How is everyone?" Henry said to the table in general, laying a thousand dollars worth of chips, half the table maximum, out front before his first card. "I'm not kicking any goals here or anything," Alice said. I was puzzled. I'd never heard Alice talk about football before, and the comment seemed out of context. Henry immediately split the two aces he was dealt. And then, in the next ten hands, I watched Henry win tens of thousands of dollars. While we were playing I kept stealing glances at Alice. Apart from being gorgeous, she was an extremely graceful woman. I could have watched her hands gliding across the felt and around her face and hair all night. Her neck and wrists were impossibly slender, almost like a child's, but her movements were confident, poised, anything but childlike. In her simple black shift dress she looked as elegant as a young Audrey Hepburn. I was entranced. Alice and I stayed at the table for about three hours, and lost about fifteen hundred dollars. Henry stayed 16 hands, won at least twenty thousand, and left the table as soon as the dealer reshuffled the cards and began to deal a new shoe. After another hour or so Alice did her stretching routine again, and this time Arun came to the table. I almost didn't recognize him. He'd changed into a dark blue silk shirt and white jeans, and had slicked his hair back. He looked every inch like a Bollywood movie star. "I'm bushed," Alice said to me as he sat down, more loudly than I thought was necessary, and Arun immediately moved a large pile of chips out front. Like Henry, Arun won, and won big. He walked from the table with tens of thousands of chips. I noticed him a half hour later with a gorgeous blonde woman at his side, as he was cleaning up at another table. He was a very handsome young man, impeccably groomed and better dressed than the rest of us, and as he was scooping up chips he looked every inch like the son of a very rich man. I loathed him, but I had to admit he had style. We didn't stay in Connecticut that night. We left around 4am, and Dan drove the van back. Alice, who was exhausted, fell asleep resting on my shoulder. I loved the drive back. The moon was out, the blue moonlight coated the Mystic River as we headed back up I-95, and I had a beautiful woman resting on my shoulder. I wasn't completely sure what the night had been about, but I had seen Arun and Henry pass Bob bundles of cash at the end of the night ? more cash than I had ever seen. I hadn't seen Alice counting the cards. I had tried counting, but I gave up, because it was too hard. I didn't know how Arun and Henry had won the way they had won, but I knew I had seen something extraordinary. CHAPTER 2. HERE COMES YOUR MAN I think crime pays. The hours are good, you meet a lot of interesting people, you travel a lot. ? Woody Allen # Arun waited for a couple of days to follow up on the weekend, and when he did it was through Alice, again. She invited me to meet at a coffee shop just off Harvard Square, and when I got there Arun and Henry were with her. We made a bit of small talk, during which it was clear he now remembered our past history. He seemed as though he had grown up since our time in chess club, and in fact he was quite gracious. Since I was interested in Alice, and in what had happened at the Mohegan Sun, I tried to be gracious in return. After we'd exchanged a little more small talk, Arun got to the point. His team ? I was only just beginning to realize it was his team ? had been around for about three years. That made them newcomers by MIT standards. There were at least two other teams in operation, and another that had been in business long enough to actually retire. Like the other teams, Arun's was composed entirely of first or second-generation Asians or Indian immigrants. My grandmother's genes allowed me entry into the group, because I looked Asian enough. "One of us, one of us, one of us," chanted Henry. I thought he was kind of deranged for a few moments, but it turned out to be a reference to an old movie called "Freaks," which was fitting given the kinds of things that had been said about people like us ? nerds and geeks ? during high school. As for choosing Asians and Indians, I found out later it was because the casinos thought most card counters were middle-aged white guys, and in fact it's true that the typical card counter does fit that profile. Of course a typical card counter is no threat to a casino, but the casinos didn't manage risk that way in the 1990's ? they were focused on threats that were so minor they didn't see the really big ones coming. One of the other benefits of using Asians in the teams was to take advantage of the innate racism of many white Americans, who think ? or used at least to say, in an earlier time ? that "they all look alike to me." "So what do you think?" Arun asked. "I don't know anything about card counting," I said. "I still don't know how you won the other night." "Good," said Henry, pleased. "You do know about counting, though," said Arun. "And Alice and Dan say you have the patience for it." "Isn't it illegal?" Arun ordered another coffee. "No, Alex. It's not even gambling." I must have looked perplexed. "A lot of people think card counting is gambling, or that it's somehow cheating at cards," Arun said. "It's neither. It's the simple application of mathematics to a popular game, and it's perfectly legal." "I'm not sure I believe you, but go on." "The first thing you need to know, in order to understand why blackjack can be managed with card counting, is that blackjack, unlike poker, is a game in which each new hand dealt is affected by the hands that were dealt before it. As cards are dealt from a deck ? " " ? Those cards can not show up again until the deck is reshuffled," I nodded. What he was saying was easy to understand. "And the value of cards remaining influences the odds of the game." "So you get it." He looked pleased. "This makes the game different from other casino games such as roulette, where the chance of the number 20 coming up on any spin of the wheel never changes, or to poker, where the deck is shuffled between hands." "And the skill of your opponent is often a bigger factor than the cards you have in your hand." I said. "I get it. It's still gambling." "Technically, yes, but it's so easy to work out that there's very little risk involved. Look, crossing the road has risk involved. But you don't think of it as gambling, do you?" He paused for effect. I could see Alice and Henry had heard this spiel before, but they were intent on my reactions. Arun continued. "For example, if you see three tens come up in one round of blackjack in a single deck game, you know there is only one ten left, and so the probability of someone being dealt a ten in the remaining hands before the shuffle is lower. If you are good at counting, you can remember this." His eyes flicked to Alice before coming back to me. "You're good at counting." He bent closer across the table, probably sensing he was winning me over. "The other key thing to understand about Blackjack is ? and this is where most amateur players, especially those trained on other card games like poker, come unstuck ? you don't have to have a good hand in order to win. You simply have to have a better hand than the dealer. You can sit on any combination of cards that adds up to more than 12, and if the dealer busts, you will win." He smiled. "In your favor is the fact that the dealer can't sit on less than 16." Arun produced a deck of cards from his pocket and began to shuffle the cards while he talked. "Of course the casinos are not run by dummies. They don't run 6 or 8 decks of cards together for convenience sake. They do it to make it hard to count how many tens, or aces, or nines, or whatever, are left in the deck." He held up the deck he was using. "They use multiple decks. It makes counting that much harder. Even Stephen Hawking would find it hard to keep track of 24 aces, 24 tens, 24 nines, 24 eights, 24 sevens and 72 face cards, let alone the low cards, amid all the distractions, and there are many, in a casino." "So? I sure won't be able to." I said. "I tried it when I was playing the other night. How do you?" That was what interested me. Not the idea of winning. I've never been particularly drawn to competition. What drew me in was the mechanism of the system. I loathed Arun, and although I liked Henry and Dan, and was infatuated with Alice, I didn't much enjoy the thought of being on his team. What intrigued me wasn't Arun ? I wanted to understand how the system worked. "Card counting isn't about counting the number of twos or aces. Instead, it involves keeping track of how many high cards or low cards are in the deck. In the simplest system, called 'Hi-Lo,' cards are assigned very simple numerical values instead. Cards from 2 to 6 are scored minus 1. Cards 7 to 9 don't count at all. Cards 10 and above, including aces, are scored plus 1." He sat back and smiled. "What does that mean?" I had followed his logic. "It means a single deck of 52 cards has a total count of zero, because all of the high and low cards cancel each other out." "Exactly," Arun said. "Exactly." As I later found out, the 'Hi-Lo' system was originally invented at MIT by a lecturer named Edward O. Thorpe, who subsequently wrote a book on it. If you're really bored, you can go look up his Wikipedia entry. The methods used in the 1990s ? the ones Arun described ? are no longer possible, because the casinos changed one rule, and that made it much harder to beat the house. But in 1995 the system was beatable. As Arun described it, in its simplest forms what card counting is really about is keeping track of the relative weighting of the remainder of the deck. A counter subtracts for the low cards, and adds for the high cards. The count goes up and down, card by card, until the deck leans one way or another, as either high or low cards come out early. If the count indicates a lot of low cards have already been dealt then ? by simple math ? the remaining cards must be high value cards. The more high cards within the deck, the better the player's chance of hitting blackjack, or at least of beating the dealer, who will likely bust out because ? unlike the player ? they can't sit on 16 or less. "It's all just math," Arun said. "Provided you never lose track of the count. Since most casinos use 6 or 8 decks at a time, it's a lot of counting. But the entire system is based upon probabilities, and if you can maintain the count over time, then you have a chance of beating the house. It's not gambling. It's math." "Again, casinos aren't run by dummies," Arun said. "If they so much as suspect you are counting cards, they'll bar you. Contrary to popular belief, card counting isn't illegal, unless you use some form of aid, mechanical, electronic or whatever. But obviously the casinos don't want that widely known." He shrugged his shoulders. "In any case casinos are private property, so they can bar effective counters from playing simply by refusing them access to the premises." "If it's so easy, why doesn't everyone do it?" I asked. "Unfortunately," Arun said, "even if you're an expert counter, the most you can hope to gain from counting is about a 2 percent advantage over the house. In order to count, you have to be in the game, and in the early hands after a shuffle, before the count can be meaningful, you're likely to lose, because you have no way of calculating what cards are likely to come next." "So ... There's something I'm not getting. How did you do it?" "If you're a solo player, you have to have a big bankroll, and be prepared for a small return on your risk, relative to the money you're staking. For a 2 percent return per night, you're probably better off playing the short term money market, or stocks. Making only one mistake per hour eliminates your statistical advantage, and making two in an hour puts you further behind than not counting at all, so it requires discipline and nerve." "It's why most card counters are lonely single white men," Alice said, smiling, "With delusions about their abilities and lots of free time." "I saw what you won at the Mohegan Sun. That had to be better than 2 percent." "You have no idea how much better." Arun leant back, obviously pleased with himself. "That," he beamed, "is where our scheme comes in. Come for a walk. We'll talk about how you can fit into all this. That is, if you're interested." I looked at Alice. Of course I was interested. I didn't like Arun, but I was three quarters in love with Alice, and I was beginning to understand how they did it. It was the use of a team, and the way that Henry had been able to come to the table at the right time, instead of losing in those early hands. Apart from being able to hang out with Alice, the thoroughness of Arun's argument appealed to me. It was elegant. "Okay, I'm interested." Arun smiled at Alice as if to congratulate her. "Thought you would be." "But why me?" "Pardon?" "Why me? It's not like we've ever been friends." Arun hesitated before responding, and dropped his eyes briefly, and I reflected that it was the first time he'd acknowledged any bad blood between us. "Alice speaks well of you," he said. "So do Henry, and Dan. And I never let personal feelings get in the way of business." He looked me directly in the eye, as though he was waiting for me to dredge up the past. Coward that I am, I looked away and said nothing. "But let's not discuss the details here," he continued, turning back to a more positive tone. "If you're going to be in, we have a lot of training to do." Of course, before we walked, he made me swear to secrecy. So we walked back to Henry's apartment on Highland Avenue. Henry opened a bottle of Bordeaux and Arun outlined the way the system could be beaten. He hadn't invented the plan to use a team. It had been developed by Ken Uston, a Harvard grad, more than twenty years earlier. His idea was to use teams of players, with different roles, who always appeared to be independent of one another. Various teams from MIT and Harvard had been playing in teams ever since, refining their techniques. In Arun's team, the grunt work was done by the smurfs, whose job was to place table minimum bets all night while maintaining the count at their table. Alice had been a smurf that night at the Mohegan Sun. Smurfs play, count, and try to attract as little attention as possible. In Arun's team, they were supplemented by the elves (these guys were geeks, okay?), who were erratic in their play, making random bets and flitting from table to table, to provide distraction to the dealers and the pit bosses. Elves talked a lot, made sure to lose enough never to seem like a threat, and kept watch for security guards, pit bosses, and anyone else who might be a threat to the team. They never counted. Never. Their job was simply to come and go in the same way the real key players in the scheme did, but winning and losing so randomly they wouldn't pose a threat to the casino. Acting like tourists or even honeymooners, they paid very little attention to the actual gambling. They never gave any intimation that they even knew the smurfs. Each team also had one or two wizards, whose role was to bet big, coming to a table only when surreptitiously signaled by a smurf that the count was favorable and the dealer was at a disadvantage. Like the elves, their job involved no counting. Wizards would often act as though they were drunk to disguise their extravagant bets, and they dressed in a manner that was designed to attract attention. The look wizards usually went for was 'spoiled child of foreign business mogul'. Even though they were the big winners, their flamboyance, couple with the comings and goings of the elves, meant that the smurfs, who did the hard work of maintaining the count, were almost never noticed. But it was wizards who could bet five or even ten thousand on a hand, without seeming out of character, and make up for any of the losses by smurfs and elves in just one or two seemingly lucky hands. In six or seven hands, they could make tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars, before the team relocated, in ones and twos, to another casino to play for a few more hours. Our team didn't just play straight hi-lo. We also used an algorithm that tracked where the count was in the six-shoe deck. If it went positive very early, it was still good for play, but there was more risk. But since all of us were good with numbers ? it was pretty much the reason we were involved ? it wasn't too hard to do some division and multiplication on top of counting. It was still, when all was said and done, counting. And a bit of math. In a good night, at a big casino where they could spread a lot of money around a lot of tables, Arun claimed the team could clear $150,000. In 1995, that was about the price of a good apartment in the inner Cambridge/Boston area. And that was, give or take a thousand, what they had taken from the tables at the Mohegan Sun on a single night on the Casino's second weekend of operations. # The training process, as Arun called it, consisted of practicing endlessly with decks of cards, multiple decks, until I was familiar with the idea of adding or subtracting 1 for each appropriately high or low card, and could apply our algorithm on top of the count. Counting is surprisingly difficult to do, when there are hundreds of cards involved. If you miss even a single card your count can be off. The trick is to be so practiced that the casinos can't tell you're counting, and that means never being seen to pay that much attention. But if you're not paying attention, you can be distracted. In addition to the card counting, I had to learn the signals the team used, and the peculiar language to describe the state of the deck at any time: "Revolution" meant 9, from the Beatles song "Dime" meant 10, for obvious reasons. "Goals" meant 11 ? two sticks standing up. "Monkeys" meant 12, from Twelve Monkeys, a movie the team had all seen and liked. "Bush" meant 13 ? the number of the Vannevar Bush building at MIT. There were a bunch more, including the signals to come in to a hot hand, the signals the hand was cooling, or cold, the emergency signals, and the signal to call it a night. It took me a while to get the codes right, but the actual card counting was easy. Hiding the fact I was counting was even easier. Fortunately, I've always been good at multi-tasking. My sister Susan used to joke, before the joke wasn't funny any more, that I must have been bathed in the wrong hormones in the womb, because I was the only guy she knew who could do several different things at the same time. At that time ? the time I started with Arun's team ? Susan was the person I was closest to in the whole world. She's a year older than I am and probably smarter than me. As our lives have proven, she has a heck of a lot more common sense. She was valedictorian when she graduated from Brown, and she has a job she likes at the Museum of Fine Arts, something to do with art restoration. It was a total coincidence we both wound up living in Boston. We shared most things, our foibles, failures, fears, triumphs and joys, but since I had graduated I had seen her less, even though I had more time. We were both busy with work, and we lived on opposite sides of town, and I knew she had met a guy she really liked, Tom, a lawyer, who seemed to be taking up all her free time. I hadn't met him yet. I decided I needed to see Susan to share the details of Arun's scheme ? secrecy be damned. I'd never successfully kept anything from Susan and I knew if I didn't at least consult her up front I'd do irreparable damage to our relationship later. Coincidentally, Susan phoned me, the day after the meeting with Arun, to ask me whether I wanted to come to dinner at her place. "A chance to meet Tom," she said, and how could I refuse that? Tom wasn't what I expected. I'm not sure exactly what it was that I expected, but I remember thinking as I first saw Tom, 'you're not what I expected'. Maybe I'd expected a lawyer to look more refined, or more buttoned-down, or at least more Ivy League, but Tom was none of those things. He was very tall and solid, probably big enough to have been a pro footballer if he'd had any speed, but he had a severely receding hairline that made him look a lot older than he actually was, and a lot older than Susan. That, with the moustache he sported and the scarring from acne he'd obviously had as a teenager, made him look a little like one of the bad guys in a crime thriller. Maybe like a younger, heftier, James Gandolfini. He certainly looked more like a mobster than a lawyer, and while I could see the chemistry between he and Susan as I watched them together he just didn't look like the kind of guy who would snare my sister. Obviously I wasn't a good judge of character. Dinner was pleasant all the same. Tom looked like the kind of guy who would kill me as soon as shake my hand, but when he smiled it was obviously genuine, and it turned out he had a wicked sense of humor. And I could tell, just from the body language between them that he and Susan had definitely clicked. While dinner was good, the fact that Tom was there made me reluctant to approach Susan for her advice about the team, and Arun's proposal. Despite Arun's assertions that there was nothing illegal in what the team was doing, I definitely didn't want to discuss something like that in front of a lawyer. When I called her the next day to ask whether we could have coffee, she was pleased, but suspicious. "What is it you want to discuss?" Because I had to try twice to explain it to her, it was a hard sell. She wasn't buying several aspects of Arun's proposal: that it wasn't cheating; that it wasn't dangerous; and that it was in any way necessary. "You have enough money," she said. "You're not rich, but you're certainly not poor." I had never gone against Susan's advice before. But I hadn't told her the whole truth this time. The ingredient in the proposal I had left out was the chance to get closer to Alice Kim. For some reason I couldn't tell Susan that. But it was a powerful ingredient. Well, that, and the money. The money was attractive. And so was the idea of winning with math, after years of being tormented for being good at it. It was all attractive. So long as it didn't turn dangerous, what was there to lose? # Two weeks after we had met for coffee, I accepted Arun's offer. He once again stressed the need for secrecy ? everything the team did had to stay with the team. "One other thing," he said after I agreed to join. "You think you could get contacts? Your glasses are distinctive. We try to make sure smurfs are not distinctive if we can help it." At first I was pissed at him. Typical of him to be a dick. But on reflection it didn't seem like a big deal. I'd been half thinking about it anyway over the preceding year. Only memories of some unpleasant incidents from my high school years had held me back. I said I'd consider it. Arun told me I would be working with the team the following weekend. We were going to Vegas, on the 4pm flight on Friday. I had to make excuses at work, but I managed to swing it. Arun even offered to pick me up from work and take me to the airport. Arun had sprung for a car service. In the back of the car on the way to the airport he handed me a plastic shopping bag. I opened it, and saw it was full of hundred dollar bills, neatly bundled. I almost said something, but mindful of the driver I simply raised my eyebrows. "You have some, I have some, Henry and Alice and James and Dan have some," Arun said. "It minimizes risk." "Risk?" He looked at me like I was an idiot, then looked at the driver before deciding to speak anyway. "If you were manning an X-Ray machine at the airport and saw that, say five times that, in someone's hand luggage, wouldn't you say something about it?" "Won't they say something about it anyway?" "Yeah, but small amounts are not unprecedented for one person on the way to Vegas. This is unusual for someone your age, but it's not going to be a problem." It turned out not to be a problem at all. In those pre-911 days, airport security was still very lax. I stuffed most of the money in my carryon, and put a few bundles in my jacket and pants. Nobody at security gave me a second thought. I did think, as we boarded the flight and all sat in separate rows, that Arun was mighty trusting giving me what looked like a hundred thousand dollars in cash. He didn't even like me. Once we were in Vegas, we met at the MGM Grand. We were going to be playing a range of casinos over the weekend. The Grand was where we'd be holing up, which meant we wouldn't be playing there. In addition to the team I'd met that night at the Mohegan Sun, there were a number of other members. Ziyen Cai and Bob Kwak were both MIT students, recruited by Arun recently. Eliza Hong was a friend of Lucy's from Radcliffe, and the third woman on the team after Alice and Lucy. Apart from Ziyen, who would be doing security, all of them had been assigned to smurf rank like me. Since the team was expanding so much, it meant we didn't all need to work every single weekend. It also meant Dan could move up to elf rank. # Looking back on all this now, I think I always had more than one objective when I signed up with Arun. At the time, I rationalized to myself that I was accepting because of the challenge, and because of the lure of getting closer to Alice Kim. In retrospect, I think that's not it, entirely. Even then I didn't really believe I had a chance with Alice, but like the moth and the flame I liked the proximity to her brightness, even though I distrusted it and knew it might be my undoing. And sure, there was the math challenge ? it's not often you get to foreground calculations on Expected Value in daily life. The main thing, though, was what had driven me mad that sophomore year. The truth was, I didn't like myself much. I had been handed a great life on a plate, but it didn't feel in the slightest bit authentic. Every day, in countless little ways, I somehow felt like an impostor. Maybe it was the Asian-American thing. Maybe I was making excuses. While the evidence suggested otherwise, I felt like I hadn't really deserved to go to Harvard. I thought I hadn't really deserved the friends I had. I believed I didn't really deserve the life I was leading. There was no obvious reason for any of these feelings, other than a feeling of disconnection from the world, and a solipsistic worldview that came from being wrapped up too much in my own mind and not enough in the cares of others. I had tried other things to overcome this: volunteering at the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter throughout my senior year and then continuing on after I had graduated. But while I felt better about 'giving back,' I still didn't feel like I was part of the Shelter Team. That was no reflection on them ? the volunteers were all lovely people. It was something wrong with me. When I joined the Blackjack team, I distrusted Arun but I got to feel like part of a team in a more meaningful way than I had ever felt before. I had never played team sports, apart from cross country which doesn't really count as a collaborative team sport, and I never felt completely accepted at the record hospital or any of the other campus groups. But I could do Math, like few people could. Through Alice, and Arun, I got to feel like a part of something. I was looking for acceptance. I was looking, although I didn't know it at the time, for an authentic, real existence. It's more than a trifle ironic that I found it by pretending to be someone else. # The first time I entered a casino as a full member of the team, I was really nervous. The first time at the Mohegan Sun, I'd had no idea what we were doing, so it had all seemed like fun, especially with Alice leading the way. But Arun's pre-game briefing had been brusque and to the point. He had especially stressed the need for our lookout team of Lucy and Ziyen to ensure we were warned if security looked like they were about to approach one of our players. In the remote chance that one of us was accosted, we were to leave immediately. Under no circumstances, Arun said, should we agree to "talk somewhere private," which was casino code for back office treatment, usually including a physical work over. Ziyen and Lucy would be circulating within eyesight of each of the teams, and if they folded their arms at any point, we were to get up, take our chips, and head for the exits without cashing in. Arun stressed again we were to leave immediately. I understood that Arun's briefing was just part of the discipline of running the team, but I'd begun to worry exactly what it was that I was getting into. I still didn't trust him. Fortunately Arun had assigned Dan as an elf to take care of me that first night. Dan was really the oddest choice for a card counter. Huge, he made an impression wherever he went. While he'd done time as a smurf, he was so recognizable it made a lot more sense for him to work as an elf, since only by betting wildly, without any pattern, could he hope to escape suspicion. He would never make a wizard, since he lacked the 'glam' factor necessary to pose as one of the rich and famous, but his skill and knowledge of casino operations made him perfect as a lookout. Just having him around made me feel safer. Even if he wasn't willing to hit anyone, his sheer bulk would be enough to block any security guard and give me time to get away. I liked Dan enormously. We had a shared interest in computing, although I was better at chess and he was better at coding. He got into trouble while we were at Harvard for hacking into an administration server "just for fun." It was a mark of Dan's integrity that he didn't actually change his own grades while he had access. At least I assumed that was why he wasn't actually expelled from Harvard. Mostly, he was just a big, calm, soothing presence whenever I was with him. He once told me, when we were both drunk one night after seeing Pixies play, that he thought of the two of us as the elephant and the mouse. "You scare me, dude," he had said. "I always want to, like, feed you or something." As we entered the Luxor I smiled. It was so over-the-top. It had only been open for a few years, and was still quite the draw for tourists, but since the old Hacienda next door had lain dormant there was still a lot of traffic that didn't make it to this end of the strip. We had taken rooms at the MGM Grand further down the strip, and as we entered in ones and twos we each had the time to measure up our surrounds. The atrium was huge, but the faux-Egyptian theme made the whole building seem very silly. Disneyland for grownups who hadn't really grown up. As I made my way to the high-stakes section I easily spotted Alice and Ziyen at one table, and Henry and Bob at another. I couldn't see Lucy and Eliza but they were around somewhere. I made my way over to a table with a few vacant seats and purchased some chips. The table minimum was $50, and the maximum was $10,000 per hand. After a couple of hands Dan came to join me, but I showed no sign that I knew him. After only 40 minutes I was beginning to think it was going to be a long night. The dealer was inexperienced, and was cutting near the bottom of the deck, but the count still wasn't going much over +4 at any time ? nowhere near high enough to call one of the wizards in. I tried not to think of the team and just play. Sure enough, in the second hour of my play, after I'd had a drink of lime and soda, the count started to rise. When it hit 11 I yawned and stretched my hands over my head ? the prearranged signal. Within moments Henry had settled at the table in the number 2 position and had placed what looked like $40,000 in chips on the felt. "How's it going?" Henry asked the table in general. Dan grunted, with a look of disgust, and stepped back from the table to watch rather than play. The thin guy with the string tie next to me muttered, and I said, as casually as I could, "This dealer is making a monkey out of me, but otherwise it's all good." If I'd done my work correctly, the count was +12. That was a big 'if'. Even if my count was correct, there was still the possibility the cards could come out badly for Henry, or at least worse for him than the dealer. Fortunately, over the next dozen or so hands, Henry cleaned the table like he was using a dustbuster. He drew two aces which he split, and got blackjack on one and twenty on the other, for $12,500 on a single hand. By the time he'd walked away he was at least $45,000 up, and the table was getting cold, with a +5 count. From the corner of my eye I saw Bob signal him, and Henry meandered over to his table, getting a drink along the way. The rest of the night went quickly. We moved down the strip, to Ceasars Palace, before calling it a night just after dawn and retreating back to the Grand. As Arun and Henry assessed the totals ? up $210,000 for the night ? I felt elated. We'd worked as a team, as a well-drilled and efficient unit, without ego. Each of us had done their job ? and how hard had it been for any of us? $210,000 profit! I slept like a baby. CHAPTER 3. NUMBER 13 BABY If a man smiles all the time, he's probably selling something that doesn't work. ? George Carlin # After almost a year of playing regularly in Vegas, the team was working well. We were cautious. We never hit the same casino twice in a month, and most times we never stayed in one place more than a few hours. Because another MIT team had learned it wasn't safe to stay in the same casino you bet in (in case security got suspicious), we spread ourselves around, and paid for our rooms rather than take advantage of the "high roller" perks our Wizards could have obtained from the casinos. Arun was the consummate card counter, calculating risk at every turn, and he never took risks he didn't need to. Arun had been an effective team leader. Over time he overcame most of my reservations about him. I didn't think I'd ever actually be friends with him, but we had moved on from wanting to scream at one another. I'd finally gotten a prescription for contacts, but I wasn't a regular user. No matter how often I tried, there was always something about the act of putting something in my eye that totally squicked me. I got to where I could do it, and play cards for up to 12 hours before the contacts started to irritate, but each and every time I went to put them in was a small challenge. My sister Susan thought I was nuts, especially after the first few weeks. "How hard can this be?" she said. "You wanted contacts, you got contacts. You were expecting LASIK surgery in a can?" There were times when I thought Susan got all the Jewish genes and I got all the Japanese ones. There was one additional deterrent to wearing contacts, apart from the squick factor, that I never mentioned to Susan that time, which was that I'd noticed ? during the few weeks I'd had them ? that whenever I went without glasses there was a possibility, every now and again, that the "Miss" problem I'd had a few years earlier would recur. It wasn't frequent, but it was enough to send me back to my glasses whenever we weren't playing the casinos. In fact I felt like investing in a pair of old-school Buddy-Holly glasses, except that it would have seemed too post-ironically hip and I couldn't have stood the teasing from my friends. Meanwhile I was no closer to a relationship with Alice. If anything, we'd become firm friends, rather than advancing to boyfriend/girlfriend status as I'd originally hoped. We hung out together a lot, going to movies and having dinner regularly, but I was too cowardly ever to try to turn it into anything more, and Alice never gave any indication of being sexually interested in me. From time to time she hinted at a guy she was seeing, which was a pretty big sign she wasn't interested in making moves on me, or having me make moves on her, but she kept the identity of the guy secret. She never mentioned him by name, but I got the impression the two of them were very close, and saw each other a couple of times a week. I was mildly curious about who it was, and why she wouldn't talk about him in detail, but I figured it wasn't any of my business and she'd tell me when she was ready. In my heart of hearts I clung to the fantasy that she wasn't talking about him because she didn't want me to feel jealous, as though there was a possibility I might have some claim on her affections if things didn't work out with him. Anyway, the two of us spent a lot of time talking about our respective families, and about the pressure to succeed at our studies, and just generally gossiping about life in Cambridge and the extended social circle of the Harvard and MIT geeks we knew. Looking back on it, it seems like we talked mostly about the kinds of things she talked about with her female friends. Along the way I'd invested in some stocks, got in on a couple of IPOs. All things considered, I was one of the richest 24 year olds I knew. I had paid off my student loans and credit cards, had about $15,000 in the bank, and more than $35,000 in bundles of cash taped to the back of the refrigerator in my apartment. I owned almost $50,000 in stock investments in companies that had great growth