Infinite Cashback System

Jordan watched Kumiko give away the thirty-nine-dollar plush she’d purchased an hour ago and named and photographed from nine angles without a single microsecond of hesitation. The girl who maintained spreadsheets tracking the emotional attachment value of her stuffed animals had just surrendered one to a stranger’s kid because the kid needed it more than she did. Kumiko’s eyes glistened but she held the tears back through what appeared to be a combination of pride and jaw-clenching force.

The woman shifted Sofia to one hip, the kind of one-armed carry that suggested years of practice doing everything in life with a small human attached. “I need to properly thank you. All of you. Please let me—I can buy you dinner, or drinks, or whatever you want, anything on the menu anywhere in the park. I have the dining plan and it covers basically everything.”

“You really don’t have to—” Jordan started.

“I do.” The woman’s voice dropped to that lower register and acquired an edge that wasn’t anger but was definitely a refusal to accept a polite decline. “You found my daughter sitting alone by a statue in a park with sixty thousand people and you stayed with her and fed her snacks and called security and gave her a stuffed animal. You could have walked past. Most people did walk past. I saw them.” Her jaw worked on something she didn’t say, something that lived in the space between gratitude and the rage a parent feels at every stranger who saw a crying child and kept moving. “So you’re letting me buy you dinner. That’s not a request.”

Chloe raised one eyebrow by a quarter-inch, which in Chloe’s emotional vocabulary constituted a standing ovation. “She sounds like you,” Chloe murmured to Jordan.

The woman overheard this and her expression shifted into something curious and warm. “I’m sorry, I haven’t even introduced myself. I’m Isabella. Isabella Rossi.”

The name hit Jordan’s brain like a body shot from Maya, unexpected and right in the soft part below the ribs.

Isabella Rossi. The sociology TA. Professor Delgado’s TA. The woman who ran discussion sections for Sociology 1 in Humanities Building 120 on Monday and Wednesday afternoons at two o’clock, whom Jordan had never actually attended a section with because he’d been too busy cleaning his apartment, getting his hair fixed, losing his virginity, starting a business, acquiring a hot springs resort through a magical phone app, and generally attempting to become a functional human being.

But he’d seen the name on the syllabus. He’d heard students in the hallway outside Delgado’s class talking about the cool TA, the one who explained Durkheim through Dragon Ball Z references and held office hours at random coffee shops. The one multiple guys in the class had described using the word “hot” with such frequency that it had essentially become her unofficial title. Hot TA Rossi.

Jordan had exactly zero memory of ever seeing her in person because he’d never attended her section, but the name Isabella Rossi lived in the same mental filing cabinet as other academic obligations he’d neglected and planned to address eventually.

Now she stood in front of him at Disneyland holding a four-year-old in a Belle dress and looking at him with dark, intelligent eyes that contained both gratitude and something else, something that made Jordan feel like a specimen under glass being examined by someone who found specimens genuinely interesting.

“Wait,” Jordan said. “Isabella Rossi as in the TA for Sociology 1?”

Her face changed. The gratitude remained but surprise layered over it, followed by recognition as her eyes moved across his face with a focus that intensified rather than dimmed. “You’re in Delgado’s section.”

“Monday, Wednesday, Friday at one.”

“You’ve never come to my discussion.” She said this as a statement of fact rather than an accusation, the way a scientist would note a data point.

“I’ve been busy.”

“Doing what?”

“Becoming a person.”

Isabella Rossi laughed. The sound came from deep in her chest and rolled through the evening air with genuine delight, not polite amusement or social performance but the actual laugh of someone who found something authentically funny. Sofia squirmed against her mother’s side and asked why Mama was laughing, and Isabella bounced her daughter once on her hip before refocusing on Jordan with eyes that sparkled with restless curiosity.

“Becoming a person,” Isabella repeated. “That might be the most honest answer any of my students has ever given me for skipping section.”

Kumiko had risen from the ground and now stood beside Jordan, brushing off the back of her sundress. “Jordan-kun is very honest. Sometimes too honest. It’s a problem but also very attractive and I’ve documented approximately fourteen examples in my—” She caught herself mid-sentence, her face cycling through three shades of pink. “In my, um, memory. Normal human memory that everyone has.”

Chloe sighed from two feet away. “Her notebook.”

“CHLOE-CHAN.”

Isabella watched this exchange with the expression of someone who had just discovered a fascinating new social dynamic occurring in real time and was already composing field notes. Her gaze tracked between Kumiko’s mortified blush, Chloe’s dry half-smile, and Jordan’s position at the center of their orbit.

“So you’re all together,” Isabella said. Not a question.

Jordan considered his options. Lying served no purpose. The truth was either going to land or it wasn’t. “Yeah.”

“All three of you.”

“Yeah.”

Isabella’s eyebrows rose, but the reaction wasn’t shock or judgment. It was the specific expression of an academic encountering a data set that contradicted her existing models. “That’s fascinating.”

“People keep telling me that.”

Sofia interrupted the adult conversation by tugging at her mother’s collar with urgent four-year-old energy. “Mama, the big boy fixed my crown. And the pony girl gave me Blueberry. And the blue-hair lady called somebody on the phone and she was very calm and I think she’s a doctor.”

“I’m not a doctor,” Chloe said.

“You sound like a doctor,” Sofia insisted.

“Thank you. I’ll put that on my resume.”