The next few evenings after Lip explained the plan did not look all that different from the outside.
School still took up most of the day. The Gallagher house was still loud at the wrong times and somehow louder at the times it should have calmed down. Lip still worked nights at the Alibi when Kev needed him, and Mandy still moved between the Milkovich house, the Gallagher house, and the bar with the kind of ease that had stopped feeling new weeks ago.
But something had shifted anyway.
It was there in the way Mandy looked at him when the notebook came out. There was still skepticism in it, still that instinctive suspicion she had toward anything that sounded too good or too easy, but it was no longer the same disbelief from before. She was no longer listening like he was spinning out some half-baked idea he would forget in three days. Now she listened like she was checking the structure of it, testing it for weak points, trying to see whether it could actually stand.
They were in his room again one night, the notebook spread open across the bed between them.
The pages were messier than before. More arrows, more numbers, more notes squeezed into the margins because he had run out of room where he originally meant to write them. Lip sat cross-legged near the foot of the bed with a pen in one hand, adding another line beneath an old calculation while Mandy leaned over his shoulder, reading everything upside down without seeming bothered by the angle.
Downstairs, the house sounded the way it always did at night. A TV too loud in one room. Fiona moving around in the kitchen. A cabinet shutting harder than necessary. Carl's voice rising and Debbie cutting across him before he could finish whatever he had been saying. None of it really reached the room in a way that mattered. It was just the usual noise, blurred by floorboards and distance until it became part of the air.
Mandy tapped one of the pages with one finger.
"You're telling me people really buy this stuff."
Lip didn't look up from what he was writing. "They already do."
She frowned at the list. "Phone cases."
"Everybody's got a phone."
"That part's true."
He glanced over then, just long enough to catch the look on her face. Mandy wasn't mocking it now. She was actually thinking about it, turning the list over in her head the same way she did with people. Looking for what held up and what didn't.
She tapped the page again. "And the whole point is you never touch any of it."
"Not if it works right."
Lip flipped to another page and turned the notebook slightly so she could see the diagram more clearly. It was rough, just boxes and arrows and a few notes written in between, but the structure was there.
"We put the product on a site," he said. "Somebody buys it. We send the order through. Supplier ships it."
Mandy studied the page. "So we're in the middle."
"Yeah."
"And that's where the money comes from."
He nodded.
She went quiet, looking at the page longer this time. "How much."
"That depends."
"Give me one."
Lip pointed to a set of numbers boxed off in the margin. "Say the supplier sells it for two. We list it for eight, maybe nine if it doesn't look ridiculous."
Mandy blinked. "That much."
"Not all of that stays ours," he said. "Shipping costs. Processing fees. Ads. Still leaves enough."
She sat back against the wall then, one knee drawn up, notebook still open between them. "You really sat down and figured all this out."
Lip gave a small shrug. "Had time."
"That's one way to put it."
He smiled a little and kept flipping until he found another page with a shorter list. Startup numbers, stripped down. Bare minimum. What he could get away with if he kept it tight and didn't waste money trying to make it look bigger than it was.
Mandy looked over it. "So what's first."
"Saving."
"That's it."
"For now."
She gave him a flat look. "Real inspiring."
Lip uncapped the pen and tapped the page once. "You don't build much with nothing."
She crossed her arms over her knee. "How much are you aiming at."
"A few hundred to start."
Her eyes narrowed slightly. "That's all."
"That's enough for a basic site and enough ad money to see if something moves."
"Ads," she repeated, like the word itself annoyed her.
"Facebook. Google. Somewhere people are already looking."
Mandy let out a small breath through her nose. "So the internet sells the thing, the supplier ships the thing, and we sit here hoping strangers want cheap plastic."
"When you say it like that, it sounds worse."
"It sounds exactly like your plan."
"That is my plan."
She looked at him another second, then down at the notebook again.
Lip reached over to the desk drawer and pulled out the envelope he had been keeping there. It was plain, creased at the corners, nothing special. He tossed it onto the bed between them.
Mandy picked it up. "What's this."
"Open it."
She did.
There wasn't a huge amount inside, but it was enough to make her pause. Folded bills. More than pocket change. More than she had been expecting if his job at the Alibi still lived in the category of casual bar work in her head.
She counted fast, then looked up. "How long have you been putting this away."
"Since I started working."
Mandy looked back into the envelope, counted again more slowly this time, then shut it and set it in her lap.
"That's close to three hundred."
Lip nodded once. "Close enough."
That changed something.
Not dramatically. Mandy wasn't the type to put on some wide-eyed reaction because someone had a stack of cash in an envelope. But the fact of it mattered. He had not only thought about this. He had already started. Quietly. Without announcing it. Without trying to impress anyone.
She looked at the envelope, then at the notebook, then back at him.
"Alright."
Lip watched her face for a second. "Alright what."
"I'm in."
The answer came so cleanly that for a second he thought he must have misheard it.
He looked at her properly. "That was quicker than I expected."
"Don't make a thing out of it."
Her tone was flat, but there was a small spark in her eyes now, the same one she got whenever she found something worth putting her hands on.
Mandy pulled the notebook back toward her and flipped to the product list again. "If we're doing this, half this stuff has to go."
Lip leaned back against the wall. "You haven't even seen half of it."
"I've seen enough." She tapped one of the entries with her finger. "This is boring."
"Boring sells."
"That's depressing."
"It's true."
She kept scanning the list. "Phones are better."
"That's what I had."
"Cases. Chargers. Dumb little accessories people buy because they lose the last one."
Lip gave her a look. "See. Now you're doing it."
She glanced up. "Doing what."
"Thinking like me."
"That sounds like a health issue."
He laughed quietly at that.
Mandy went back to the page, now fully in it. "Still not convinced about cheap jewelry."
"Why."
"Because it looks cheap."
"It is cheap."
"That's not helping your argument."
He shifted closer and pointed to another line. "It doesn't have to look expensive. It has to look good enough in a photo that somebody clicks on it."
She thought about that. "That's annoyingly true."
"Exactly."
She pointed at the page again. "See. I'm already useful."
Lip looked at her for a second before answering. "You were useful before this."
Mandy rolled her eyes, but she did not argue with him, which was answer enough.
The next few weeks fell into a rhythm after that.
School in the day. The Alibi in the evening. The notebook somewhere in between all of it.
Sometimes research happened in his room with the laptop open on the bed and Mandy leaning over his shoulder, scrolling through product listings with the kind of ruthless expression she usually reserved for people she did not like. She was good at it, too. Fast at picking out what looked cheap in the wrong way and what looked cheap in the right way. Good at spotting photos that would make people click and ones that would make them move on.
Sometimes they talked through ideas on the walk home from school, cutting through blocks while Mandy listed things people their age were always buying and Lip tried to work out whether the margins would hold.
And sometimes the notebook came to the Alibi.
One evening Mandy was sitting at the counter while Lip unloaded another delivery in the back. She had the notebook open in front of her, turning a page with one hand and drinking whatever V had handed her with the other. Kev wandered over at some point, wiped his hands on a rag that already looked dirty, and nodded toward the notebook.
"You two planning something over there."
Mandy closed it halfway without looking up. "Maybe."
Kev narrowed his eyes. From behind the register, Veronica glanced over. "If they build a criminal empire out of this place, I want a cut."
Lip came back through the swinging door with a box in his arms just in time to hear that.
"You'd be the first one asking for shares."
V looked at him over the top of the register. "Obviously."
Kev laughed. "If you get rich before I do, I'm going to take it personally."
Mandy looked from Kev back to Lip with a small smile tugging at her mouth. "Then maybe start preparing."
Kev pointed at her. "See. That one's got faith."
"She's got attitude," V said.
Lip carried the box behind the bar and set it down with the others. The work kept moving after that. Bottles to stock. Deliveries to sort. Someone at the far end of the bar wanting another beer before they had finished the last one. The usual.
But the notebook stayed on the counter near Mandy's elbow, and every now and then she flipped it open again and made another note in the margin when she thought of something.
That became normal too.
Later that night, once the crowd had thinned and Kev had finally stopped trying to reorganize things V had already organized correctly the first time, Lip and Mandy walked back toward the Gallagher house together.
The neighborhood had gone mostly quiet by then, or as quiet as it ever got. Streetlights were on. Most windows were lit. A dog barked a few houses over and somebody yelled at it to shut up. A car rolled slowly through the next block and disappeared.
Mandy bumped her shoulder lightly against his as they walked.
"You know," she said, "this could actually go somewhere."
Lip looked over at her. "That surprise you."
She glanced ahead. "A little."
"Wow. That's touching."
"Don't get weird about it."
He smiled to himself and kept walking.
Mandy shoved both hands into the sleeves of her hoodie against the cold. "I'm not saying I'm fully sold."
"That'd be asking a lot."
"I'm saying it sounds less insane than it did before."
"I'll take it."
She looked up at the streetlights for a second. "Still don't know how we explain any of this if it works."
"We don't have to explain anything."
That seemed to satisfy her.
They kept walking. Their steps stayed in pace without either of them really thinking about it. The closer they got to the Gallagher house, the more the neighborhood settled around them into the familiar shape it always did at night—light behind curtains, televisions going, the occasional voice through a half-open window, the sense that everybody was inside living some version of the same evening.
Mandy looked at him once more.
"You really think we can do it."
Lip looked ahead at the house coming into view. "Yeah."
She studied him for a second longer, then nodded once, mostly to herself.
For now that was enough.
It was still just the two of them, the notebook, the envelope of money in his desk, and an idea that had not turned into anything real yet. No store. No orders. No proof beyond numbers and instinct and the fact that Lip had thought it through far enough to believe in it.
But walking back through the neighborhood with Mandy beside him, with the plan finally living somewhere outside his own head, it felt a little less like some private thing he was carrying alone.
And that changed it more than he expected.
Advanced Chapters: cozyread.org