They'd been walking for about fifteen minutes when Jake finally figured out where they were.
"The farmers market?" He looked around at the stalls and produce stands and folding tables with genuine confusion. "This is your big meaningful errand? There's a farmers market hidden back here?"
"It's been here for years."
"I've literally never known about this." Jake turned in a slow circle, taking it in — the vegetable stalls, the fruit stands, a lady selling homemade jam, an old guy with about forty types of dried beans. "This is actually kind of cool."
"Focus."
"I'm just saying — hidden in plain sight. You'd never know from the street." Jake caught up to Ethan's pace. "Okay but seriously what are we getting."
Ethan didn't answer, just kept walking until he found the fruit stand he was looking for — a big one near the back with good stock, run by a guy who clearly took his citrus seriously.
"Twenty lemons," Ethan said. "And two pounds of those small limes."
The guy started bagging without blinking.
Jake stood next to Ethan with his arms crossed. "Lemons."
"Yep."
"This is the meaningful errand."
"Part of it."
They moved to the tea stall next door — a small setup with probably thirty different varieties in labeled bins. Ethan looked for about ten seconds and pointed.
"Three pounds of black tea. New stock, not last season's."
The woman behind the table nodded and started weighing it out.
Jake leaned against the stall post. "Lemon and black tea."
"Mm."
"Ethan."
"What."
"What are you making."
"You'll see."
"Is this a bit? Are you doing a bit right now?"
"Jake."
"Because if you dragged me to a farmers market during lunch to buy lemons and tea as a bit I'm going to be genuinely upset—"
"It's not a bit."
"Then what—"
"You'll. See." Ethan paid, picked up the bags, and started walking back toward the exit.
Jake stared at the bags. Stared at Ethan. Stared at the bags again.
Then he grabbed two of them without being asked and followed.
Coming back out onto the street, Ethan cracked open the Coke he'd grabbed from the market and took about half of it in one go.
"Okay so I spent basically everything I had on me," he said, mostly to himself, doing the mental accounting. "Lemons, limes, black tea, plastic cups, straws, couple bottles of Coke for mixing." He glanced at the bags. "That's the raw materials sorted."
Jake was quiet for about a block. Then: "You're going to make lemon tea and sell it."
"Yeah."
"...At school."
"Before school. Lunch. Maybe after school too depending on demand."
Another half block of silence.
"How much are you charging," Jake said.
"Three dollars a cup. Maybe three fifty if I do a larger size."
Jake did the math walking. His eyebrows went up. "If you sell like fifty cups that's—"
"A hundred and fifty bucks. Yeah." Ethan switched the bag to his other hand. "I can make fifty cups easy with this stock. Probably more."
"Per day?"
"Per day."
Jake stopped walking.
Ethan kept going.
Jake caught up. "You're going to run a drink stand at Jefferson High."
"Not a stand exactly. More like a quiet word-of-mouth situation. Keep it low-key, not too visible." He thought about it. "Actually you're going to help me."
"Oh I absolutely am not—"
"Free lemon tea for the rest of the year."
Jake opened his mouth. Closed it. "...How many cups a day."
"Unlimited."
"I'm in."
They got back to Jefferson just as the lunch bell was winding down, slipping in through the side entrance with the bags. Ethan tucked everything under his desk when they got to the classroom — the quiet end of lunch, most people either napping or doing last-minute cramming, the low hum of a room full of tired seniors.
Sophie and Mia were at their seats going over something together, heads close, voices low. Sophie looked up when Ethan came in.
"What's in the bags."
"Supplies."
"For what."
"Side project."
She gave him the look she'd been developing over the past week — the one that meant I know you're doing something and I'm going to find out eventually. "You're very mysterious for a high school student."
"I've been told."
Mia looked up too. "Is it the tutoring thing?"
"Different thing."
"How many things do you have going on right now."
Ethan sat down and pulled out his English textbook. "Enough."
Mia and Sophie exchanged a glance that said quite a lot without any words.
Afternoon English.
Ms. Kim walked in at exactly the bell, dark blazer, heels clicking on the linoleum, stack of marked papers under one arm. She dropped them on the desk and turned to face the room with the energy of someone who had genuinely prepared for this class and expected the same from everyone else.
"We're going over the essay section from Monday's mock," she said, writing a structure outline on the board. "Most of you made the same three mistakes. We're going to fix them today."
The boys in the front two rows immediately became extremely attentive.
The girls in the front two rows noticed the boys becoming extremely attentive and collectively rolled their eyes.
Ethan opened his notebook to a fresh page and actually listened — not just appeared to listen, but genuinely paid attention, because Ms. Kim was good at this and the essay feedback was stuff he needed. Henderson had mentioned his composition needed work and he'd been turning that over since the morning.
In his previous life his writing style had been — direct, was the polite word. Punchy sentences, confident claims, the kind of thing that worked well in a boardroom presentation or an investor memo. Not always what a standardized essay wanted.
He'd also gone through a phase in his late twenties where he'd tried too hard in the opposite direction — overwrought sentences that were technically impressive and completely exhausting to read.
The sweet spot was somewhere in the middle. Clear, grounded, with one or two genuinely sharp lines that landed without showing off.
He wrote that down in the margin of his notebook as a reminder.
One good line per paragraph. Not ten. One.
Ms. Kim moved through the essay breakdown at a good pace — structure first, then argument quality, then sentence-level stuff. Ethan took real notes, the kind he'd actually go back to, not the performative kind.
He glanced over at Jake halfway through.
Jake was also taking real notes, which was — honestly kind of remarkable. A week ago Jake would have been doodling soccer formations in the margin.
The flashcards were working. Or something was working.
After school the four of them reconvened in the study room, same table, same window.
Jake produced snacks again — this time a bag of pretzels and a pack of gummy bears, which Mia accepted without comment, so apparently that was just how this worked now.
Ethan set Zhao — Jake — up with a new set of practice problems, the ones targeting the specific patterns he'd been losing points on. Jake looked at them, looked at Ethan, looked back at them, and started working with the focused frown of someone who had decided to take something seriously.
Sophie was deep in her physics. Mia was doing practice essays. The study room had that good productive energy it sometimes got — everyone actually working, no one performing.
Ethan went through his essay notes from Ms. Kim's class and started applying them to a practice prompt. He wrote a paragraph, read it back, cut two sentences that were trying too hard, replaced them with one cleaner one.
Better.
He worked through it for forty minutes, then sat back and looked at the bags under the table.
Tomorrow morning he was going to get to school forty-five minutes early, set up near the side entrance where the foot traffic was good, and start moving cups of lemon tea before first bell. Three dollars each. Word of mouth only — no signs, no announcements, just a quiet mention to the right people today so the right people showed up tomorrow.
He looked around the table.
"Hey," he said, keeping his voice low. "I need you three to tell five people each tonight that there's good homemade lemon tea available tomorrow morning by the side entrance. Three bucks a cup."
Sophie looked up. "You're selling lemon tea."
"Yeah."
"At school."
"Before school."
She considered this for approximately two seconds. "I'll tell people."
Mia was already typing on her phone. "Done. I just texted my entire AP group chat."
Jake didn't look up from his practice problems. "I told four people at lunch already."
Ethan looked at him. "I didn't ask you at lunch."
"I figured it out from the lemons." Jake turned a page. "Also I told them three fifty, not three. You're underselling."
Ethan thought about it. "Three fifty."
"Three fifty," Jake confirmed.
They packed up around seven. Outside the school the evening was warm and smelled like cut grass and someone's barbecue a few streets over. The sky was doing that thing it did in late May — staying light longer than felt right, like it was reluctant.
Ethan and Jake walked the first few blocks together.
"You really think the tea thing works?" Jake said.
"I've seen it work." Which was true, in the sense that he'd watched approximately a hundred small food and drink businesses launch successfully in the previous decade and understood the pattern. Low overhead, high-margin, captive audience, limited options on campus. It was almost too easy.
"And the tutoring."
"That starts Thursday. Three confirmed, probably two more by end of week."
Jake shook his head slowly. "You've been back at school for like a week and a half."
"I've had a lot of time to think."
"Apparently." Jake stopped at his corner. "Hey. For real though. The study session today actually helped. The essay structure thing, the practice problems." He paused. "I don't know. I feel like I might actually be okay for the exam."
"You're going to be better than okay," Ethan said.
Jake nodded. Not dismissing it this time. Just nodded.
"See you at six forty-five tomorrow," Ethan said.
"For the tea setup?"
"For the tea setup."
Jake pointed at him and walked backward toward his house. "Three fifty a cup. Don't let me down."
Ethan got home at quarter past seven to the smell of his mom's cooking drifting out from the kitchen — something with garlic and something with rice and something he couldn't identify but that his stomach immediately responded to with enthusiasm.
He set the remaining bags down in the living room.
His mom appeared in the kitchen doorway with a wooden spoon and looked at the bags. "What's all this."
"Lemons, limes, black tea, cups, straws." He took off his shoes. "I'm going to sell homemade lemon tea at school tomorrow morning."
His mom looked at the bags. Looked at him. Looked at the bags again.
"...Okay," she said, in the tone of a woman who had decided a long time ago that her son's ideas were usually fine and the energy spent arguing wasn't worth it. "Wash your hands, dinner's ready."
His dad looked up from the table. "What kind of tea."
"Lemon black tea. Fresh lemons, good tea, cold. Three fifty a cup."
His dad considered this with the pragmatic interest of a man who ran his own small business. "You have a supply of cups?"
"Two hundred."
"Margin?"
"About two seventy on cost for the whole batch. Selling price puts me at three hundred plus profit on fifty cups, more on top of that."
His dad nodded once — the nod that meant that math works — and went back to his dinner.
His mom set a bowl in front of Ethan and sat down. "How many people know about it?"
"Enough. Word spreads fast in that school."
She shook her head with the expression she wore when she wasn't sure whether to be impressed or worried, and had settled on a combination of both.
They ate. Normal conversation, normal evening — his dad's supply route, a thing at his mom's office, whether the oak tree in the backyard needed trimming before it became somebody's problem.
Ethan ate two bowls and helped clear the table.
Shower, room, desk.
He pulled out the anthology of essays he'd dug out of his shelf a few days ago and opened it to where he'd left off. Henderson had flagged composition as the one remaining gap, and Ms. Kim had given him the framework today. Now he just needed to fill it in.
He read for a while — not passively, actually reading, marking the sentences that worked and thinking about why they worked. The good ones were always doing two things at once: saying something clear on the surface and implying something slightly larger underneath. Not showing off. Just — depth without performance.
He copied a few structural patterns into his notebook, adapted them, rewrote a paragraph from his morning practice essay using the new approach.
Read it back.
Yeah. That was better.
His phone buzzed on the desk.
Sofia: "You're up late again."
He smiled and typed back: "How do you know."
Sofia: "It's eleven PM in Ohio. Either you're up late or you message people in your sleep, which would actually explain a lot."
"Fair point. How's Cambridge."
Sofia: "Rainy. I finished my thesis draft today."
"That's a big deal."
Sofia: "It feels like I should be more excited. Mostly I just feel tired and slightly suspicious that I missed something obvious on page forty-seven."
"You probably didn't."
Sofia: "You don't know that."
"No but page forty-seven is always fine. It's page ninety-three you have to watch."
A pause. Then: "That is strangely specific."
"I contain multitudes."
Another pause. Then a laughing emoji, which from Sofia — who he was learning used them sparingly — felt like something.
They talked for another hour. The usual wide range — she wanted to know about the exam prep thing, he asked about what she was planning after the thesis, they argued productively about whether Formula One was actually a sport or elaborate theater with good branding. She maintained theater. He maintained both could be true simultaneously. Neither convinced the other.
At twelve thirty he typed: "Okay. I have to be up at five thirty."
Sofia: "Why five thirty."
"Lemon tea operation."
A longer pause this time.
Sofia: "I genuinely cannot tell if you're joking."
"I'm not."
Sofia: "Goodnight, mysterious American."
"Goodnight."
He put the phone down, closed the essay anthology, turned off the desk lamp.
There are some advance chapters ahead in my Patreon. If you are interested can check it out.
patreon.com/B_A_3439