Let It Ride

Let It Ride

(1)

I pay attention in class more often than other people think. I try to look just awake enough that I'm not tempting the professor to catch me sleeping. But if I look like I'm thinking really hard, the prof has good reason to expect that if I'm called on, I'll give a deliberately dumb answer, or a complicated answer with way too much irrelevant detail, and throw off the lesson plan. It's a delicate balance.

So Dr. Hardesty probably figured nobody was listening to him drone on about probabilities, but

I

was.

"People sometimes keep going with a bad bet because they have already invested so much time or money, they don't want it to 'go to waste.' But if you realize that you're not going to win anyway, you might as well fold and move on to the next game. Your sunk costs are really sunk. They're gone. And continuing to throw good money after bad doesn't lead to winning. You don't keep losing in order to win."

One of the girls down front comments, fairly loudly, "That's just stupid."

Only to me she's not just "one of the girls down front." She's Bette, pronounced Betty like Davis, not Bet like Midler. She's almost as smart as I am, only she allows herself to get good grades so it shows in all her classes. She also has this thing about slowly unbuttoning her shirt throughout the day. She's all buttoned up when she arrives on campus, but by the end of the day, guys are all craning their necks to see if, down there in her cleavage, she is or is not wearing a bra.

I happen to know that she's not.

Anyway, her cleavage stunt completely takes guys' minds off how smart she is. They can only think about checking to make sure her boob count is still holding at two.

When she says, "That's just stupid," Dr. Hardesty can't let it pass. Also, she's about two-thirds of the way through the day, so she's three buttons down. She's sitting on the front row, and Hardesty is standing up. I watch his eyes keep darting down and back up. I want to raise my hand and say, "She isn't wearing a brassiere, sir." Only I'd pronounce "brassiere" in a really thick French accent. Everybody except Hardesty and Bette would laugh, but the laughers wouldn't believe that I actually had practical knowledge of her bralessness.

Knowing Hardesty, he wouldn't think to ask, "How would you know?" Nor would he be such a fool as to deny looking down her shirt, since everybody knew that everybody looked. But I didn't want to flunk my next few tests because he has decided to punish me for ... what, for knowing if she wears a bra or not? Yeah, that's probably it.

"It

sounds

stupid, right?" said Hardesty. "But if you think about it, you'll realize that to minimize losses, you've got to stop losing."

"You mean quit playing the game?" asked Bette.

I understood his point. I knew that the textbook said the same thing. (I had been reading ahead.)

So I told myself, Everybody probably knows this — I mean, all the professional card players. Therefore, if I make it a point to fold early in several hands, they'll tag me as a timid player. Then I get a mediocre hand — King high, nothing else, because we don't play with low cards — and I go all in. It's a bluff, but they think I'm cautious, so would I bet so much on a bluff?

They're all trying to figure it out, except that Bette is at the table and it's ten at night, so only the bottom button on the shirt remains fastened and so every time she moves her arms, the other players look at her breasts moving in the wide gap of her shirt.

The other players, like hell. I look too, of course I do. But I already know what cards are in my hand, so I don't bother studying

any

of their faces. I just study Bette's seismic breastage as it quivers and quakes, and think back to the last year of high school when I had a kind of access. Sort of. Through a window. Never to be talked about.

My secret source of knowledge was to sit at my bedroom window like young Clark Kent in

Smallville

, training my telescope on her bedroom window, which at night, with her light on, gave me an unobstructed view as she stripped off everything and then put on the prettiest little transparent sleeping bra, which still showed her nipples. The whole time facing her window.

For weeks I thought, she knows I'm here, she knows I'm watching. She wants me to look. She's

showing

me.

Remember, she was eighteen. Me too, in the last year of high school. After graduation she was probably going to go to some Ivy League school or Stanford or USC. I probably wasn't going to get into a college at all. I didn't have the grades for it, and I couldn't afford to do it without working at least a half-time job, which would make it pointless for me even to try. Work, save, build up the money I'll need to get to

some

college.

And let's be honest, I knew all senior year that I'd be going to the local trade-tech because kids with no academic record were not going to be routed into the schools that gave you a serious degree. But that's what I could afford, because that's what my mom could afford, and my dad was so far out of the picture that I couldn't remember his face, not from childhood, and certainly not from one Zoom call during Covid. Mom needed me to help make the rent for

both

of us, not just for me at college.

So I could look at Bette's window all I wanted, even when her dad was home and she kept the curtains closed because there was a silhouette that was still pretty fascinating to watch. I knew she was smart, and I knew there weren't many guys at Humbert Humbert High (no, they didn't name the school after the lech in

Lolita,

but it was fun to imagine that they had) who could match her academically, but I thought maybe I could talk to her like an equal, neither of us trying to prove anything to each other, just becoming friends.

But it never happened because I just didn't move in her circles. She didn't hang out with smart kids, except a few. She hung out with chess club, book club, and — I'm not kidding — the A.V. club, which used to wheel movie projectors around on carts back when my grandparents were in school, but were now the biggest computer nerds in town. Between wires and wi-fi and bluetooth they had every classroom wired for computer displays that any teacher could use just by turning on a laptop with their PowerPoint ready to go and voila, up on the screen, and

that

was who Bette hobnobbed with after school. I was not known to have skills at any of that stuff. Because showing I could program and solder and replace batteries and chips and all that would take me out of my pleasant role as an invisible slacker hermit. People would expect me to

do

things.

I was invisible to everybody. Invisible to her. Those geeks got to spend all evening looking at her cleavage under classroom lights and sitting across a table from her. And let me tell you, it's not that her breasts were huge. They were large enough to see, large enough to move when she moved, but her cleavage wasn't a straight line where her breasts were pressed together. Instead, there was about an inch of separation between them, an inch of chest that was breastwork and then those two golden —

Yeah, OK, that's what "eating your heart out" sounds like. She was the kind of girl — the kind of woman — that I thought would be worth making friends with, but my plan of casually insinuating myself into her life and just accidentally hanging out a lot until we both realized we were boyfriend and girlfriend and started kissing, that wasn't going to happen. We were both old enough, weren't we? But I had played halfwit slacker boy so effectively in high school that there was

nothing

about me that could possibly interest her. There was nothing about me that interested

me.

So I saw whatever I could see through that used telescope I bought for nine bucks on the Internet — nine bucks I skipped two lunches to save up — and I looked at those breasts every day at school and I longed for her. Yearned. Faunched, fantasized over her and did absolutely nothing.

She was a new move-in. Must have been lonely, coming to a new school for senior year. I figured that's what the unbuttoning routine was really about. It certainly worked, she was famous in school the first week. I could have walked right up to her that first week and said, "Hi, our back yards butt into each other and I was hoping we could become friends. Or cheerful acquaintances. I'm easy, I've got no firm agenda, because my agenda has only one entry on it. 'Get to know Bette.'"

And she'd say, "I've seen you peeking down my shirt," and I'd say, "You get it so wide open by the end of the day that I don't have to

peek

to see down into your cleavage and know for positive that even with your splendid but moderately sized breasts, you don't wear a brassiere at all. But since everybody gets to see that every day, that's not what I'm looking for. I've heard you talk in class, I know you're way smarter than I am, but I'm not as much of a slacker as people think."

And she'd laugh and unbutton one more button of her shirt and walk away from me because even before she moved in right through the block and down a slight hill from me, with no fence between our back yards, I had already cooked my own goose. She would never look at me. And I could never stop looking at her.

You know what I did? I cleaned up my act for her. I stopped making snide cracks in all my classes. I started getting some As and B-pluses, and by mid-year I was on the honor roll. This nearly made the principal lose his cookies, to see me actually caring about tests. And my SAT scores made him get on the phone and talk somebody here at Sacred Heart into admitting me into a four-year program. And because my mom was a secretary at an elementary school, he knew she couldn't afford to pay tuition for me, so he got me a full scholarship at Sacret Heart. No trade tech. A real college.

And Bette didn't go off to some fancy school. For some reason she was staying in town and coming to Sacred Heart and of course I hacked into the course schedules and made sure she and I had a couple of classes together. Not too many — I didn't want her to think I was stalking her, because I wasn't, not in some sick serial killer way. I just wanted to be near her. Because we weren't in high school anymore. And I wasn't a total slacker anymore.

Until, at Christmas break, I took a good hard look at myself and said — because I try to be brutally honest with me, even when I resent it — Kid, she's never going to see you. You're still invisible from high school.

And she had started closing her curtains every night. So whatever I got at school was all I was going to get.

She had never been stripping for me, I know that now. I think maybe she was stripping for somebody. And including mine, there are four houses up the slope from her house, all of which offer an unobstructed view. There must have been somebody else, not a schoolboy like me. Probably Ted Wanker, the twenty-five-year-old construction worker who lives with his mom two houses down from me. She was showing

him,

inviting

him

to watch.

Did

he watch? Maybe he left the light on in his room so she could see him as he, too, stripped. Or maybe not, maybe he just whipped it out and stroked it carefully in the dark as she stripped, getting faster and faster, until he came, at which time she would put on her sleeping bra — the only time she ever wore a bra, as far as I could tell — lie down on her bed, and snap off the light.

Ted was so old it was like a love affair with an underage girl, only she already wasn't underage when she moved here, so Ted Wanker — actually Ted Wanamaker — could start emailing her or sexting her, working his way up to a rendezvous, a tryst, or even a date, if Bette's father would allow her to date an "older man."

And with Ted in play, why would she even respond to a text — not a sext, I've got some class, you don't

start

with a dick pic or a horny poem — from an eighteen-year-old classmate who she has

never

talked to, except once in the grocery store, when she paused only long enough to say, "Don't squeeze the avocados, you're bruising them."

Which made me realize that knowing she was approaching with her grocery cart had made me squeeze way too hard, because I was imagining squeezing something else. Only it occurred to me that maybe she was telling me how she liked to have her breasts fondled. Gently, strokingly, not squeezing them like I was trying to make them pop.

Bullshit. Thinking that way only made my life more frustrating. High school ended without our even greeting each other in the halls or at the wall of lockers or even in the classes we had together. High school was a desert for me, and she was the only oasis. Except the mirage kept receding the closer I got. I knew it wasn't an illusion, she was really

there

, but I was never going to be able to reach her.

Back when she was still doing her bedtime strip act I imagined that she was hoping some guy in her "audience" would act on the provocation, make a move, and then she'd laugh at me and say, "These aren't for you, Dobie."

My name isn't Dobie. But when she puts me down, I'll feel like a world-class Dobie. Girls like her aren't for slacker brainiacs like me.

I could invite her to join my academic bowl team. Only I'd have to actually join one first. And why would I imagine that she'd want to?

Now we were at Sacred Heart, both frosh, both in intro general ed classes that were mandatory but also way below our level. I had already read the whole textbook for Stat and was getting good grades on quizzes, but I'm kind of an introvert and in college I didn't feel free to clown it up the way I did in high school. So I stayed invisible, mostly. To Dr. Hardesty, I was another slacker who still thought he was in high school. Except when he graded my tests.

Then

he had a better idea of who I was.

None of this had to go through my mind while I was listening to Hardesty lecture, because this stuff about Bette was

constantly

on my mind. Along with a mantra that said, She's going to get a scholarship to a better school and transfer out of here at the end of the year and I will have never spoken to her or made any effort and she lives just across a lawn from me.

I'm not ugly, not repulsive, I don't go around with a green snot bubble coming out of one nostril like Telly Ball-less back in seventh grade, I'm not the smelly kid, I'm not the filthy kid. But I'm also not Chris Pine or Brad Pitt or Timothée Chalamet. I'm thin but not skinny, tall but not basketball-ready. I run a lot, but not for any team, thanks, and while I'm not particularly fast and don't even try to be, I've got endurance, and once a month I do my own personal marathon course, twenty-six miles or so, making better time and finishing less exhausted with every solo race.

She couldn't possibly know that, and even if she did why would she care? We aren't even acquaintances, and all my conversations with her are completely imaginary. I'm pretty charming in my dreams, or at least I can pretend that

she

thinks so, and I win her over most of the time. But in reality, I can hardly breathe around her ... and instead of meeting her gaze, I keep trying not to stare at her canyon of cleavage.

She knows everybody looks. She

wants

everybody to look. But she doesn't want me

in particular

to look. I'm just another one of the males she keeps constantly distracted with no extra blood in our brains because it's busy elsewhere.

Hardesty was still making his point,

hammering

at his point. "In Vegas, they encourage people to believe they're on a streak if they win a few in a row, or even if they don't lose as badly as usual. Say I'm on a streak, I've got to keep going. The roulette wheel spins, my money doubles, and instead of putting it in my pocket and walking away, I say the stupidest words a gambler ever says: 'Let it ride.' Leave it all in the game, ready for me to lose it the next time, or the next. That's the voice of an idiot, the voice saying, I'm on a streak, I can't walk away now, I have to ride this out."

Hardesty was now standing right at Bette's desk. He was directing this discourse at her, ostensibly because of her scoffing attitude. Was this her plan? To provoke Hardesty to get

this

close to her, so that other kids would think he was looking down at her bright and pretty upturned face, and not at her lovely, lovely unencumbered breasts?

She spoke now, her voice soft because he was right at her desk, but still audible in every corner of the room. "Mr. Hardesty," she said, "if you really

are

on a streak, why not play it out?"

Hardesty took two steps back from her desk. Yeah, that's why he wears loose pants and tight underwear, I thought. Of course I only

knew

about the loose pants. But was there a bulge behind the zipper? Couldn't tell, but there had to be.

"Can anyone tell Bette why letting it ride is stupid?"

A few hands went up. But emboldened and desperate, I sat up straight and answered without being called on. "First, there's no such thing as a winning streak. Second, by letting the whole thing ride on the next spin and the next until she loses, she'll only find out when her winning streak is over by losing

all

her money."

"What should she do, then?" asked Hardesty, showing some surprise at my having ended my recent boycott on answering questions in his class.

"You never let it ride," I said. "First time you win, you divide your winnings in half and only bet

half

of it on the next spin. That way even if you lose your entire bet, you still have half of what you won before. And after that you never bet more than half of the money you have."

"Oh," said Hardesty, "is

that

what she ought to do." He sounded condescending, as if what I said was ridiculous.

"To protect her winnings but still keep pressing her luck as long as it lasts, yes," I said. "She could still win big because she's still playing. As somebody once said, How can you win if you don't play?"

Bette stood up and turned around and

faced

me. Of course, she was also facing all the other guys in class, a universally appreciated move. But it was

me

she was talking to. "No," she said. "That's not at all what she 'ought' to do."

"What, then?" I asked.

"Can't you guess it? It's pretty obvious."

It was, of course. "Never place a bet at all," I said. "Hold onto your money. Don't go to the casino, don't play roulette, don't play cards, don't pull on the slot-machine handles, don't go to bookies or off-track betting, just save your money in a bank at a reasonable rate of interest so it grows naturally and safely."

"You think banks are safe?" asked Hardesty.

"They're insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation," said Bette.

"So when you were heckling Mr. Hardesty," I said, kind of annoyed, "you already knew that he was right."

"Right?" she asked. "Everybody makes their own decisions."

"You wouldn't play at all?" I asked.

"I never said that," she said. "I only said that was the

smart

thing to do." She turned around and sat down with her back to me. She leaned forward so that I knew exactly what Mr. Hardesty was seeing. Her shirt was loose and I was betting she had opened another button as she turned around and sat. Leaning forward with her shirt that loose, it was likely that Hardesty could see one or both nipples. He stood there transfixed, looking down at her.

She's controlling him, I realized. That's her game — controlling guys, from middle-aged teachers to lonely high school boys.

Her arms moved, and even from behind I knew she was refastening the most recently opened button on her shirt. Maybe giving a tiny fake moué of surprise, as if she hadn't known it was open. Hardesty probably wasn't

fooled

by that, but he could pretend to believe it was an accident because if he actually tried to act on her obvious invitation, she would shut him down and if she was in an ugly mood she could get him fired for sexual harassment.