Return Of The Crypto Billionaire

5.The Call

Chris hadn't moved from the edge of the bed.

The phone was still in his hand, the Binance app still open, the number still sitting there with the same impossible patience it had shown since he'd first found it. He'd been staring at it for the better part of an hour, not scrolling

The phone vibrated in his hand.

He startled and looked at the screen.

Unknown Number.

His first thought was Tyler. Some new humiliation, or one of the group chat's four hundred members who had found his number somewhere and was calling to humiliate him more. He almost let it ring out.

He answered.

"Hello?"

There was Silence. Then breathing. Then a sound of someone crying.

"James?" Chris called out.

There was a sharp intake of breath on the other end.

"Chris." The voice was small and young.

"Chris, something happened."

"Talk to me. What happened? Are you hurt?" Chris asked him

"No, I am okay. I am not hurt."

Chris could picture him exactly, fifteen years old, sitting somewhere private at St Matthias Junior Academy the way he always found somewhere private when things got bad, a corner of the dormitory or a bathroom stall, anywhere he could have the feeling without people looking at him.

Their father had been the same way. Their mother too, apparently, though Chris only knew that from photographs and the things their father had told him in the years before the accident. James had got that from both of them.

"James, tell me."

"Mr Coleman came to the dormitory tonight." Mr Coleman was the principal of St Matthias.

"He called me to his office." James paused again.

"He said they received notification from the Virell scholarship board tonight. He said your scholarship had been revoked, and because of that, the extension clause was automatically cancelled. He said I have to go home tomorrow, Chris. He said I can't come back." James said

Chris closed his eyes.

His fifteen-year-old brother was called to the principal's office at night and told to pack his things.

James, who had never done anything to anyone, who kept his head down and his grades up and who had inherited Chris's same stubborn belief that if you worked hard enough and stayed honest enough, the world would eventually have the decency to meet you halfway.

Tyler Brooks had done this too. Maybe not intentionally; maybe James was simply collateral damage. But the result was the same.

"Okay." Chris opened his eyes.

He was surprised by how steady his voice was.

"Okay, James. Listen to me."

"The scholarship, Chris. Both of us..." James sobbed

"I know. Listen to me." He kept his voice even and warm and completely certain

"I need you to go back to your room tonight and pack your things calmly. Get everything. Don't leave anything behind."

"Where are we going to go?" James's voice was very small.

"The apartment "

"Come home tomorrow. Take the number 14 bus from the main junction, you have your bus pass, right?"

"Yes."

"Use it. Come straight here. Don't talk to anyone about what happened, don't explain anything to anyone, just come home," Chris told his brother

"You promise it's going to be okay?" James asked. He was fifteen. He was allowed to ask that.

Chris looked across the small room at the cracked plaster on the far wall, the backpack by the door with everything he owned stuffed inside it, then at the phone in his hand with the Binance app still running in the background, the number still sitting there with its impossible patience.

"I promise," he said.

"I am going to go back to school, James. Both of us are going back to school. I need you to trust me."

Another silence.

"Okay," James said quietly.

"Get some sleep. I will see you tomorrow."

He stayed on the line until he heard James's breathing settle, until the call ended with a soft click.

….

Their mother had died giving birth to James. She had haemorrhaged during labour, something unexpected and fast-moving, and by the time the doctors understood what was happening, there was only enough left of her to save one of them.

His father had held Chris's hand in the hospital corridor while the decision was still being made and had not cried until it was over.

Chris was three years old at the time it happened.

Their father had lasted fourteen more years. Then a rainy Tuesday, at an intersection, a truck driver who was drunk driving ended his life on the curb.

He was seventeen. James had been fourteen.

The apartment was the last resort their father had owned, a single room in a building that was mostly occupied by people who were also using it as a last resort.

Chris had deferred his grief and enrolled James in St Matthias on the scholarship extension and gone to Virell Academy and told himself he was building something. For James as much as for himself.

And Tyler Brooks had taken four weeks to dismantle all of it.

He sat back down on the bed. He looked at the phone. He opened Binance again.

The number was still there.

Two million Bitcoin. No owner. No name. No history.

He thought about James packing his dormitory bag tonight. He thought about the rent ending in three weeks. He thought about sixty dollars and a portable stove that worked twice a week.

And then he thought about what four hundred billion dollars actually meant.

He could pay rent for a century.

He could pay for James's school. His own school. Any school. Every school.

He stopped.

A thought had arrived.

He could pay for Virell.

Not the fees. Not the enrollment. Something larger than that. Something Tyler Brooks and his father and Principal Hargrove and the entire scholarship board had never once considered possible from a boy with sixty dollars and a backpack, because it had never once been possible before tonight.

He sat very still with that thought for a long time.

His phone screen dimmed. He tapped it awake.

The number looked back at him.

He was going back to Virell Academy.

He had decided that in the same breath he had told James to trust him, and he had meant it the same way he always meant things

But he was not going back the same way he had left.

He was going back as something Tyler Brooks had never encountered in his entire cushioned, insulated, consequence-free life.

He was going back as the most dangerous thing in any room.

He stood up, set the phone face-down on the table, and began to think