Side swiped

I'd mostly dated poor boys in high school and college. In fact, if I had a type it was the boy who excelled at school while holding an after school job, plus dealing with a dysfunctional family. I liked scrappy boys who had a chip on their shoulder and something to prove. It was stimulating because I never quite felt that way myself. I didn't know what I wanted so being near someone who did made me feel like all that passion would soon rub onto me.Then there was Marcus. We met each other during senior year of college, when I was smarting from a recent break up with another poor boy who'd been too busy proving himself to spend time with me.Marcus was different. If we'd lived in a different age, I'd have called him a dandy, since he loved nice clothing, travel and good food, and name dropping minor celebrities he knew through family connections. He'd grown up in Singapore and had many stories of the intense competition between the ruling class families, who groomed their children to dominate the world. So Marcus had a chip on his shoulder about not getting into Harvard like his private school classmates, and was determined to show them how much smarter he was than them in other ways. He was only boyfriend I ever had who talked about stocks and investments in a way that made me interested, like it was all a big soap opera of people and desires. His special area of interest, biotechs, which were full of drama of clinical trials gone wrong, millions lost overnight, miracle cure molecules that saved lives and made piles of dough for early investors. As a biology major, I could almost see myself entering this world, getting excited about all the high stakes.We did not last long as a couple. I resented his entitled, rich boy attitude to what he called the 'proles', the waiters who served us at fancy restaurants, the cashiers who sold him his designer clothing. I hid the fact that my single mother had spent decades scraping us along on retail jobs. I hid so much about my background that it became clear we couldn't last since I was so intent on keeping my impoverished background secret. It was only towards the end that he revealed he'd known all along how poor I was, that he'd been excited to 'lift me up' to some better echelon of society. That, in fact, was the final straw. That he regarded me as some sort of Eliza Doolittle who needed remodeling and education to give me enough polish to enter his rarefied world. For a joke, or maybe not, Marcus bought me 5 shares in a small biotech he predicted would go big. After we broke up I treated these stocks like a crystal ball of what our life could've been like if we'd stayed together. Would these stocks grow and divide, indicating he truly was someone who could dominate the world. Or would they lose all value and become worthless paper, all flash and no substance? For a long time the stocks' price stayed the same. At the time I hadn't realized how slow biotech research, and thus profits, could be, often hinging on one clinical trial that took five years or more years to complete. I'd put the certificate in a box and forgotten about it. Years later I found the certificate and quickly googled the current price: the stocks had quadrupled then tripled in value after a clinical trial showed positive results. The certificate, which was originally valued at a couple hundred dollars, was now the same price as a new car. Then I googled Marcus' name and saw that he was the VP of a pharma company, clearly a millionaire who had the best of everything.In my impoverished state as a social worker scraping by on less than forty thousand dollars a year, this was maddening.Briefly I thought about buying a car, and maybe even writing to tell him about it. Maybe we could even spark something up. His profile indicated he wasn't married.Instead I put the certificate away. Until one day, a year later, I found myself desperate for money, having gotten behind on rent and quite a few other things. I dug the certificate out and googled the current stock price. The company had folded in the last month, when their faked clinical trial results were revealed as a long con fraud instigated by their board of directors. Which had been chaired by Marcus.

— Von