[May 1929 - The Sterling Household]
Alexander placed the envelope on the kitchen table with the reverence of someone handling nitroglycerin. Which, metaphorically, he was.
"One thousand dollars."
His mother's coffee mug froze halfway to her lips, steam curling into question marks that the universe wasn't ready to answer.
"Alexander James Sterling, what in God's name—"
"Every penny earned honestly," he interrupted, pulling out his ledger like a lawyer presenting evidence. Four years of meticulous record-keeping spread across the table—the paper trail of a child who'd been playing the longest of long games. "Tutoring at twenty-five cents an hour. Fifty for advanced mathematics. Essay editing for lazy seniors who'll probably become congressmen. Some translation work for local businesses. All legal, all taxed, all documented."
His father lowered the evening edition of the New York Times, headline screaming about record market highs in fonts that might as well have been written in the blood of future suicides.
"You saved everything?"
"Compound interest is humanity's greatest invention," Alexander said, settling into his chair with careful precision. Fifteen years old in body, thirty-six in soul, and feeling every year of both like geological strata. "I want to invest it."
"In what?" His mother's voice climbed octaves like a mountaineer fleeing an avalanche. "Baseball cards? War bonds? A nice girl from temple?"
"The stock market."
Joseph Sterling laughed, the sound bouncing off their brownstone's walls like rubber bullets in an echo chamber. "Son, the market's hotter than a Broadway chorus line. Everyone's making money. My barber's giving stock tips between haircuts."
"When shoeshine boys give stock tips, it's time to get out of the market," Alexander said quietly.
The laughter died faster than optimism on Black Tuesday.
"What did you say?" His father's voice had gone very still, like a lake before a storm.
"It's something I read. But think about it, Pop. When everyone's buying, when every cab driver and bootlegger thinks they're the next J.P. Morgan, when the market can only go up..." Alexander spread his hands. "What happens when everyone realizes the music's stopped and there aren't enough chairs?"
He pulled out a folder he'd been preparing for two years. Newspaper clippings annotated in handwriting too neat for a teenager. Hand-drawn charts that would make a economics professor weep. Pages of analysis that belonged in a doctoral thesis, not a high school student's homework.
"Look at these patterns. Industrial production is outpacing consumption by 30%. That means factories are making things nobody's buying. Consumer credit has expanded 400% in five years—people are buying stocks with money they don't have to buy things that don't exist."
He spread the papers like a general planning D-Day if D-Day was fought with numbers instead of Nazis.
"Every historical parallel points to the same thing. Tulip mania in Holland. The South Sea Bubble. The Panic of 1873. They all follow the same pattern—euphoria, delusion, reality, devastation."
"Where did you learn this?" His mother's voice had gone quiet—the dangerous kind that preceded either hugs or homicide.
Alexander met her eyes, letting her see just a fraction of the weight he carried. "Library. Your newspapers. Eavesdropping on brokers at Goldman's when I deposit my tutoring money. Standing outside the Exchange and watching grown men worship numbers on a board like they're messages from God."
And from YouTube documentaries that won't exist for ninety years, but let's keep that between us and my existential crisis.
"But mostly," he continued, "I see patterns others miss. Like how everyone's buying on margin—borrowing money to buy stocks to borrow more money. It's a house of cards in a wind tunnel, and someone's about to open the door."
"You're asking us to bet against America," his father said slowly.
"I'm asking you to bet on math. America will survive. Most Americans won't." Alexander leaned forward. "But we can. If we're smart. If we're willing to do what others won't."
"Which is?"
"Sell the house."
His mother shot up so fast her chair screeched like a demon being exorcised. "Absolutely not! This is our home! Where you were born! Where your father carried me over the threshold! Where—"
"Where we'll lose everything if we're sentimental instead of smart." Alexander kept his voice level, channeling every nature documentary about predators he'd ever watched. Cold. Calculated. Necessary. "Mom, I love this house too. Every crack in the paint, every squeaky floorboard, every memory soaked into these walls. But love doesn't pay mortgages when the banks fail."
"Banks don't fail," his father said, but even he didn't sound convinced.
"Tell that to the Knickerbocker Trust. Oh wait, you can't. It failed in 1907." Alexander pulled out more papers. "Banks are just buildings full of promises. When people stop believing the promises..."
"You're scaring me, Alexander."
"Good. Fear keeps you alive. Complacency..." he tapped the newspaper headline, "kills."
Joseph removed his glasses, cleaning them with the mechanical precision of a man buying time to think. The gesture Alexander had seen a thousand times before particularly hard decisions—whether to buy a new radio, whether to let Alexander skip grades, whether to believe their son was a prophet or insane.
"You're that certain?"
"I've never been more certain of anything in my life." Both of them.
"The market's been going up for years. Everyone says—"
"Everyone said the Titanic was unsinkable. Everyone said the war would be over by Christmas. Everyone says a lot of things right up until reality kicks down the door and takes a shit on their assumptions."
"Language," his mother said automatically, but her heart wasn't in it.
"Sorry. But Mom, Pop, I'm trying to save us from what's coming. And what's coming is bad. Bread-lines-and-suicide bad. Selling-your-children bad. And I can stop it from happening to us, but only if you trust me."
They looked at each other, having one of those telepathic married-people conversations. Alexander waited, knowing this was the pivot point. Either they believed him or they didn't. Either they bet on their strange, too-smart son or they rode the market down into hell with everyone else.
"If you're wrong," his mother said finally, "we lose everything."
"If I'm wrong, I'll work three jobs to buy back this house brick by brick. But I'm not wrong."
"How can you be so sure?" His father's question carried the weight of a man about to jump off a cliff on faith alone.
Because I've seen the documentaries, read the books, watched strong men break like cheap toys when their paper fortunes evaporated.
But he couldn't say that. So instead: "Because everyone else is sure of the opposite. And in my experience, when everyone agrees on something, everyone is usually wrong."
"That's... cynical for a fifteen-year-old."
"The world's cynical, Pop. I'm just paying attention."
Silence stretched like taffy. The radiator clanked. Somewhere outside, a car backfired. The sounds of a world about to change.
"Alright," Joseph said finally. "We'll get the house appraised. Quietly. If the offer's good enough—"
"It will be. Property's at peak value. In two years, this place will be worth a third of what we can get now."
"You sound so certain. Like you've already seen it happen."
If only you knew, Pop. If only you knew.
"I've seen the patterns," Alexander said instead. "And patterns don't lie. People do. Numbers don't."
His mother sank back into her chair. "My baby boy, talking about shorting the market. Where did my little Alexander go?"
"He grew up, Mom. The world doesn't wait for you to be ready. It just happens, and you either ride the wave or drown in it."
"And we're riding?"
"We're going to ride it all the way to the bank. The one bank that won't fail because we'll be keeping our money in a safe, not in stocks that'll be worth less than the paper they're printed on."
That night, Alexander lay in bed listening to his parents argue in hushed tones. His mother cried—quiet tears for the home she'd have to leave. His father paced—heavy steps of a man carrying the weight of an impossible decision.
But by morning, they'd decided. The Sterling family was going to bet against the American Dream.
October 24th, 1929, Alexander thought, staring at the ceiling. Black Thursday. One hundred and forty-eight days.
He'd done it. Convinced them. Set the pieces in motion.
Now came the hard part: profiting from catastrophe without losing his soul in the process.
Who are you kidding? that cynical voice whispered. You lost your soul the moment you decided to profit from knowledge of future misery. You're just haggling over the price now.
Maybe. But at least his family would eat when others starved. At least they'd have a roof when others slept in the streets.
In a universe where gods and monsters were real, maybe that was the only heroism that mattered—keeping the people you loved safe, even if it meant becoming something monstrous yourself.
Tomorrow, find a broker. Someone hungry enough to take a fifteen-year-old seriously. Someone greedy enough not to ask too many questions.
Time to dance with the devil on Wall Street.
At least this devil trades in dollars instead of souls.
Usually.