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Steph squeezed her eyes shut and crossed her fingers, but she wasn’t going to be lucky this time.
“Stephanie Brown, Ada Bishop, and Georgia Hansen, you’re Group 18. That’s everyone, so come along now, we’re going to be in this room down the hall.”
She had been praying all day that she wasn’t going to get stuck in a group with the two girls who spent the most time trying to make her life hell, but things just had a way of working out in the worst possible way for Stephanie Brown. In the day, anyway. At night, things had been looking up recently.
But at school, things were as bad as ever. It wasn’t that she had a parent in prison – half the school had a parent who was or had been in prison. She didn’t exactly live in the best neighbourhood. But nobody else in school had a D-list ridiculous supervillain for a dad, and so Steph was the one getting bullied. The whole “teenage pregnancy” thing hadn’t helped much either, if she was being honest.
Ava and Georgia were the worst of a bad bunch, though. Girls whose families were closer to the bottom of the middle class range than she and her mother were. Girls who got decent grades and had boyfriends who played sports.
Well, Steph had a boyfriend, but she didn’t exactly mention him at school. For one, they would never believe her. Saying you were dating Tim Drake-Wayne, the richest guy their age in the entire city, when he’d never come by school to pick her up or even been seen in her neighbourhood, was definitely a step up from the old ‘girlfriend in Canada’ routine. Although this one was actually true.
“Come along, ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got a busy day ahead of us.”
It was ironic, then, that the latest scene of Steph’s humiliation was actually the Wayne Enterprises headquarters. Her boyfriend’s office, as one of the VPs of the company, was somewhere about 15 floors and a million miles up from where she was, visiting on a field trip to learn about enterprise. She and the rest of her underfunded school’s junior class were split up into teams to spend the day with WE marketing staff, doing whatever rubbish was about to be foisted on her. Steph looked up at the Wayne logo, shining down at her from every screen in the lobby, and felt further than she ever had before from her boyfriend and the rest of his family. This wasn’t her world, and it was somehow the world Bruce and Tim had been born into. They even complained about it, as if earning millions of dollars a year wasn’t worth spending a few hours a week telling their assistants to fill out paperwork.
As they were led to a large events space clearly designed for visiting school parties, filled with tables, chairs, and posterboard, Steph sighed. This was going to be a long day.
Three hours later, she was ready to tear her hair out. They were supposed to have come up with a new potential product for WE, and to have put together a pitch presentation for their product. Steph hadn’t even bothered to contribute an idea, since it was so obvious that she was going to get outvoted, but she’d tried to make the best of a bad situation and work with Ava and Georgia on their ‘keyring that’s also a ring light’ idea. They had invented the already very-much-a-thing flashlight keyrings, except the lights were in a circle now. Revolutionary.
But now they weren’t even letting her contribute to the presentation. All her ideas were dismissed as idiotic, with a “why are you even here if you’re just going to be stupid, Brown, drop out of school already,” only for one of them to turn to the other and suggest the exact same thing with a slight variation, and add it to their slides.
Suddenly, Steph felt a presence beside her. She turned, hackles raised, but it wasn’t anyone she was going to have to fight. Cass, her best friend in the world, was calmly sitting next to her as if one of the brightly coloured plastic chairs sized for children in a room full of West Gotham High students was a completely normal and natural place for her to be.
“Cass? What are you doing here?” she hissed. Ava and Georgia had yet to notice their table’s new addition, too busy stealing Steph’s ideas and adding clipart to their slides.
Cass shrugged. “My building. I can be here.”
Steph realised with a jolt that it was true. Well, not really. But she’d been so busy feeling every cent of the class divide between herself and Tim that she had forgotten that her best friend was Cassandra Wayne, billionaire Bruce Wayne’s only daughter. She had a Wikipedia page, for god’s sake. And even if she didn’t own the building, she certainly wouldn’t be getting kicked out of it.
“Not what I meant and you know it.”
Cass just smiled. “You looked like you needed chocolate.”
Steph took the offered cookie with a grateful smile that quickly faded into confusion. “You were looking at me? How did you even know I was here today?”
“Tim.”
“And how did Tim know I would be here today?”
“Bruce.”
Well, that didn’t need any further questions. Bruce made it his business to know everything about everyone – the fact that it has blipped on his radar that Steph’s school was visiting his company today was completely unsurprising, in hindsight. She just wished she’d managed to get in and out without anyone who had any claim to the surname ‘Wayne’ knowing she had been there for a rubbish school thing she hadn’t been able to get out of.
She was just pondering whether the cookie was worth the fact that her boyfriend knew she was on a field trip to his workplace when Ava and Georgia finally turned to look at her again and found themselves face to face with someone they probably both followed on Instagram. One day, Steph would let Cass upload a photo of them together, to really spite them.
“Hey, who are you?” Georgia asked. She was the slower of the two.
“Oh my god, Georgia shut up! That’s Cassandra Wayne! I am totally your biggest fan Cassandra, it’s so exciting to meet you. Are you here to be our Wayne Enterprises mentor for today?” Ava and Georgia, who had now also recognised her, squealed and jumped up and down at the thought.
Cass regarded them both for a moment. “No,” she eventually decided on saying.
“So… You’re just going around and saying hello to all the groups from our school?” Ava ventured.
“No,” Cass repeated, clearly enjoying saying it. “Here to see my friend. Steph.” Cass gestured towards her, a little unnecessarily. “Okay, nice to meet you. Bye.”
With that, Cass was gone, breaking whatever spell the sight of her had cast over the two girls. Steph finished her cookie, trying to savour every crumb.
“What the hell, Brown? You know Cassandra Wayne?” Ava demanded.
“Her friends just call her Cass, actually,” Steph said with a smirk. Now, this might be something she actually could milk at school.
Georgia tapped Ava on the arm. “That’s totally true, I’ve read that somewhere.”
Ava tilted her head. “If you read that somewhere, Brown could have read it too. She can at least read, I imagine.”
“And I guess I somehow made up the very real Cass you just saw in front of you and interacted with?” Steph said, rolling her eyes. Of course it wasn’t going to be that easy.
“You paid her to say she was your friend!” Georgia burst out. Ava gave her a look.
“Brown, who doesn’t have a penny to her name, paid Cass Wayne to come here and pretend to be her friend? Georgia, what the hell?”
Steph sat back and relaxed while the other girls bickered. This wasn’t bad at all.
Finally, the moment that Steph had both been waiting for and dreading was upon them – their team’s turn to pitch. All of the groups had been made to line up outside a conference room, where a panel of WE staff who apparently had nothing better to do were waiting inside to hear their pitches.
On the one hand, this meant the day was nearly over. Beyond the five minutes she got to see Cass, the whole day had basically sucked. Ava and Georgia had continued to bicker, before eventually deciding that Steph had some form of blackmail on the Wayne family thanks to her criminal dad’s connections, even if he was a “completely lame Riddler ripoff” (Georgia’s words).
On the other hand, Steph could think of about a million things she would rather do than walk into that room and read the card in her hands about the importance of being able to take good selfie lighting on the go, in case of emergency online business meetings or unexpected good backgrounds. Some of those things included wading through a sewer looking for Killer Croc, or telling Alfred that his pancakes sucked.
The three of them filed into the room, and were duly stared at by a row of white men in suits, plus one empty chair. “Apologies, ladies,” one of the men said. “We’re just waiting for our last panel member to return. Please, set up your slides.”
Ava quickly and efficiently did just that, and then they were once again awkwardly standing around, waiting for the guy who’d probably taken as long as he possibly could in the bathroom to avoid spending any more time around high schoolers from Park Row.
A phone on the table buzzed, and the man who’d spoken before picked it up and read the message he’d just received. He looked up at them. “Well, our last panellist is insisting that we go ahead and start without him. So, ladies?”
The presentation went off without a hitch. Well. Steph dutifully read her card when Ava frantically gestured at her. Everything else seemed to go fine, although their panel had definitely never heard of ring lights before, which wasn’t going to be a point in their favour.
Deliberations were just about wrapping up when there was a knock on the door, and a head poked in. A very familiar head.
“Sorry I had to step out for this one,” Tim Drake said, before letting himself into the room fully. It was amazing how little his awkwardness showed when he was wearing a suit that cost more than her house and her Mom’s car combined. “I didn’t think I could be impartial when my girlfriend is on the team. But I also didn’t want to miss the chance to say hi.”
With that, Tim crossed over to a stunned Steph, and gave her a quick peck on the lips in greeting. “Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” she said back with a smile. “I didn’t know you were supposed to be one of the judges for this thing.”
Tim’s bashful “Yeah, well-” was cut off by Georgia’s screech.
“Is this what you have on Cass Wayne, you freak? You’re screwing her brother?”
Tim cocked his head. “Cass came to say hi?” he asked Steph. She really loved him sometimes.
“She brought me a cookie. Chocolate.”
“One of Alfred’s?” he asked.
“Almost certainly,” she said, winding her arms around his neck.
“I didn’t bring you any cookies,” Tim said, faux-horrified.
“Well, I guess I’ll just have to take what I can get,” Steph said with a smile, and leaned in to kiss him again, properly this time. Ava and Georgia’s gasps of shock and horror felt almost as good as making out with her boyfriend after a very long day.
Their team came 14th out of 18. She knew that panel had no idea what a ring light was.