Reborn As The King Of Wealth

One Dollar to Bark

"Here, boy. Sit." Dimas dangled a crumpled dollar bill between two fingers, waving it just above William's head the way a man might tease a dog with a scrap of meat. Around them, half the dormitory lounge had gathered, phones already raised, already recording, the fluorescent lights overhead buzzing faintly against the low murmur of anticipation.

William stood frozen by the vending machine, arms full of soda cans he'd been sent to fetch twenty minutes ago on Dimas's orders, his feet rooted to the tile floor by something heavier than fear — a bone-deep, familiar humiliation that no longer even surprised him. He could feel the cold aluminum of the cans pressing into his chest, the condensation soaking through his shirt, and somewhere underneath it all, a small, tired voice reminding him that this, too, would end eventually, the way it always did.

"I said sit," Dimas repeated, voice syrupy with mock patience. "Come on. One dollar. That's more than your scholarship's worth, right? Free money for a guy who can't even afford real shoes." Laughter rippled through the crowd. Rani leaned against the wall, filming with lazy interest, like this was nothing more than a mildly entertaining rerun of a show she'd already seen a dozen times.

"Do it," she called out. "Or we'll tell the department you stole from the lab fund again. You remember how well that worked out last time.

" William's stomach dropped. He remembered. Of course he remembered — the accusation that had never been true, the whispers that followed him into every classroom for a month, the way even professors who liked him had started watching him with new suspicion, the way his own advisor had quietly suggested he "keep a lower profile" for a while, as though lying low could somehow erase a lie that had already spread.

Slowly, the cans still clutched against his chest, he lowered himself to his knees on the cold tile.

"Bark," Dimas said.

Something in William's chest folded in on itself, quiet and total, like a building giving way floor by floor with no sound at all. He opened his mouth.

"Woof," he said, so softly it barely qualified as the word.

"Louder. I can't hear you over how pathetic you look."

"Woof," he said again, louder this time, and the sound of it in his own ears was worse than any bruise the football had left behind — because bruises healed, but this, this he would remember every single day for the rest of his life, this moment of himself on his knees on dirty tile making animal noises for a dollar he didn't even want.

"Wow," someone in the crowd said, half-laughing, half-disgusted, the way people laugh at things they don't want to admit disturb them. "He actually did it."

"Of course he did it," Dimas said, dropping the bill on the floor in front of him, not into his hand — on the floor, so William would have to bend down further to pick it up, so the whole room could watch him do it. "He's a dog. Dogs do tricks."

He did it. He always did it. He bent low over the crumpled bill, fingers closing around it, and felt something inside him quietly, permanently break — not loudly, not dramatically, just a small final snap, like a bone that had been fractured for so long it finally gave way completely.

Somewhere near the back of the crowd, Natasya stood with her jaw clenched so hard it ached, her fingernails cutting crescents into her own palms, saying nothing, because the last time she'd spoken up for him, three of Dimas's friends had cornered her in the stairwell for an hour and made sure she understood exactly what silence bought her — and what defiance cost. She had walked out of that stairwell with a bruise on her jaw and a lesson she hated herself for learning.

She hated herself a little more every time she said nothing. She hated the world more.

He shoved the bill into his pocket without looking at it, and turned to gather the soda cans that had scattered across the tile when his knees had given out beneath him. His hands were shaking so badly that one of the cans slipped and rolled under a nearby couch, and the sound of Dimas's friends laughing at that too — at the absurd, pathetic sight of him scrambling on his hands and knees to retrieve it — was almost worse than the barking had been.

"Leave it," Dimas said, waving a hand lazily.

"We're bored now anyway." The crowd began to disperse, phones lowering, conversations shifting back to ordinary things — homework, weekend plans, whose turn it was to buy the next round of drinks — as though nothing at all had happened, as though a boy hadn't just knelt on the floor and made himself into a joke for their entertainment.

That was the part William never got used to. Not the cruelty itself, but the speed with which it was forgotten by everyone except him.

He carried the cans back to Dimas's room in silence, set them on the desk without a word, and left before anyone could think of a reason to call him back.

That night, in the empty stairwell where nobody else went after curfew, she found William sitting alone on the concrete steps, the dollar bill still crumpled in his fist like he couldn't bring himself to let it go or spend it, as though spending it would make the whole thing real in a way he wasn't ready to accept.

"You don't have to say anything," she said, sitting beside him without asking. She unwrapped a granola bar and pressed it into his other hand. "Just eat. You didn't eat today, did you."

William stared at the bar for a long moment, turning it over once in his fingers before finally opening the wrapper. "Why does it feel worse every time," he whispered, "instead of easier?"

Natasya didn't have an answer for that. She simply sat with him in the dark, shoulder against his shoulder, the two of them the only proof left in the building that decency hadn't gone entirely extinct.

"I used to think," William said quietly, after a long silence, "that if I was just good enough — helped the professors enough, stayed quiet enough — it would stop eventually. That there'd be some point where they'd just get bored and move on."

"And now?"

"Now I don't think it was ever about me at all." His voice was flat, almost clinical, as though he were describing someone else's life. "I think they just needed someone. And I happened to be the easiest one to pick."

Natasya said nothing, because there was nothing to say that wouldn't sound hollow against a truth that plain.

Neither of them noticed the small motion-sensor light blinking faintly above the stairwell camera, or the fact that its feed, for reasons no student would ever have guessed, was no longer going to campus security at all — that somewhere, in a room neither of them would ever see, someone was watching this exact moment with the cold, patient interest of a scientist observing a controlled variable finally approaching its breaking point.