At Any Price(2)

“I’ve already got e-mails in to the top bidders.”

My brows shot up. That was quick. It wasn’t really like him to be so Johnny-on-the-spot like this. Heath—my best friend since the eighth grade and a surrogate older brother even if only by six months—was always this protective. When I’d showed him the Virgin Manifesto post about to go up on my blog, he’d freaked.

Fortunately, he calmed down and demanded to have control over the result. It was the compromise I had to put up with in exchange for his help and I knew I could trust him. Heath was the only man on this planet whom I did trust, actually.

We said good-bye and I closed my browser with a decisive click. I was sure my blog readers would demand a recap of the auction results tomorrow. This whole thing had gone semi-viral within the online community of gamers, and even beyond—Huffington Post, Jezebel, even Twitter. I squeezed my eyes closed, dreading the thought of writing that post. The readers would want answers and I didn’t have any. Not yet, anyway.

Regardless, there’d been complaints for the past few weeks that the auction had interfered with my regular posts. After all, it was a gaming blog, for God’s sake!

During the auction hoopla, most of my male readers had apparently come to the consensus that I rated an eight or higher. My opinion was probably closer to a solid six. But gamer dudes weren’t usually too picky when it came to women in our community. The main requirements were that a woman was breathing and had reasonably-sized breasts. As a girl gamer, if you stuck your nametag across your cleavage at Comic-Con, you were likely to never have them meet your gaze.

With shaky hands, I went about the next few hours in a haze. I made some tea from the small box of expensive Orange Pekoe—my favorite. I allowed myself the treat because it was a special occasion and I vowed to reuse the bag for breakfast in the morning. Nowadays, I had to enact cost measures like that. My scholarship money had dwindled and expenses were barely being covered by the ads on my blog and my part-time orderly job at the hospital.

The auction idea had spawned from that necessity, despite the “high ideals” of the Virginity Manifesto. I honestly had posted it to open the conversation on reclaiming the age-old tradition of profiting from a woman’s purity. And yes, I’d wanted to make a statement about the value of my virginity being used for my own gain. I firmly believed in those ideals but my number one motivation was money, security. After using most of my loan money to help Mom with her medical bills, I had nothing saved up for medical school.

My only option was to hock my future completely by weighing it down under the burden of impossibly huge student loans. Did I really want to graduate medical school and go into three years of residency and throw in an oncology fellowship on top of that?

I slipped an ice cube into the piping hot cup of tea and sipped at it while I broke out my study guides for the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) with that same sinking feeling that accompanied my study sessions of late. I’d started out this year so hopeful that, with a retake, I could improve my abysmal score of the previous year. But as time had passed, it grew harder and harder to be optimistic.

The test was a little over three months away and there was still so much to review. With a deep breath I dug in and went over the topics for this week: hydrocarbons and oxygen-containing compounds. I checked the clock. I was due to meet Jon at the library for still more studying this evening. The group study would be the next day and, as always, I wanted to be ahead. If I didn’t walk in to that session extra-prepared, I always felt as if I was making a fool out of myself.

So I got to work.

***

That night, I met Jon at the university library at our usual study carrel. And truthfully, I was grateful for the distraction from my mind’s unswerving preoccupation with the auction.

“So?” Jon said as I settled into my usual chair.

I scrunched my brows at him. “What?”

“Can you come?” He looked at me with his pleading baby blues.

Jon and I had met during the previous year of premed at Chapman University. He’d transferred from one of the high-and-mighty Ivy Leagues. I never did get the full story on what happened there. It wasn’t like he was saving money by going to Chapman, a private university with a steep price tag.

My undergraduate tuition had been covered by my academic scholarship and I had worked extra hard to finish the requirements for graduation in three and a half years instead of the usual four, so this last semester was dedicated to work and study. If I didn’t improve my MCAT score, this would all be for naught and I’d be looking for something else to do with my BS in biology.