Chapter 7: Home for the Long Break

The Long Break, Day 2

Home. I am writing this in my old bedroom, which Mum has turned halfway into a room for drying laundry, so I am sharing it with a row of Dad's shirts. The train ride took most of yesterday. I watched fields go past for hours and felt my shoulders come down a little at a time. When I came out of the station, Felix was waiting with Dad, pretending he hadn't been waiting. He has grown so much that I had to look up at him. He is sixteen and wears it like a new coat.

Mum made the soup she always makes when somebody comes home. They asked whether I was sleeping, whether the café was busy, and whether Lina is as funny in real life as she is in my messages. (She is.) It was the first evening in weeks that I didn't think about green lines on a screen, and I am a little ashamed of how good that felt.

Then, at dinner tonight, Dad said, "Tess, you're the clever one now. Tell me something." A man he works with at the printing shop has been talking for days about a new digital coin. A digital coin is a kind of money that exists only online. The general name for such coins is cryptocurrency, and there are a great many of them. Dad's coworker says this new one will be "worth ten times as much by spring", because an online group he belongs to has "inside information" about a big launch. The coworker has already bought some, and he told Dad there are "only a few days" left to buy at the low price.

Dad said he wasn't going to do anything silly. Maybe just a part of the money he and Mum keep aside for repairs to the house, he said, because the boiler is old, and if the coin did well they could buy a new one without worrying. Mum said nothing and looked at her soup in the way that means she has a great deal to say later.

I felt the words rise in my throat: Dad, that sounds like a scam. I didn't say them. I thought of the cold wall outside the science building and of Marcus's face when I told him about the warning list, and of how fast a person stops listening when they feel they are being called foolish.

Dad isn't foolish. He has run the big machines at the printing shop for twenty years and can find a mistake on a page that nobody else sees. So I said, "Can we look at it together in a few days? I've learned a way of checking things this term, and I'd like to show you." He looked pleased, which made me feel guilty and hopeful at the same time.

Marcus messaged tonight from his mum's home. He sent a picture of his balance. "Still growing," he wrote. I wrote back, "Glad you're home. Say hello to your mum." I did not write anything about the warning list. I said it once, I meant it, and he knows where to find me.

The Long Break, Day 5

Two people in my family, two rising numbers, one day. If my family were an experiment, I would say the results are very consistent.

This morning Felix came into the kitchen holding his phone as if it were hot. He is in a fan group for his favourite online game, not the game's official group but one run by players. Someone in the group is selling "tokens" that are supposed to "rise ten times" when the game's new season starts. This person says that the makers of the game are secretly behind the tokens and that only early buyers will get the big rise. Felix wanted to put in all his birthday money. He had already filled in half of a form.

I didn't want to behave like a typical older sister, so I made coffee for both of us and said, "Show me." Then I asked him Grandma's first question: who says so? Felix scrolled. The tokens were announced by a member with a picture of a dragon who had joined the group three weeks earlier. Felix didn't know who the member really was. When he thought about it, he realised he had never seen the dragon member write anything in the group except messages about tokens.

Then came the second question: how can we check it ourselves? Felix said we could ask in the group. I said that would be like asking the stoat whether his cheese was real. Instead, he typed the name of the game into a search himself and found the makers' own official website, the one with the news about seasons and updates. We read their news pages together. There was nothing about tokens.

Then Felix found a help page that said, in plain words, that the makers never sell anything outside the game itself and never ask players for money in fan groups. He read it twice and went a little red.

"I'm such an idiot," Felix said. I told him that last week my lab partner, one of the cleverest people in my class, told me he had put most of his savings into an app whose name was on a warning list, and that I nearly put in the price of two textbooks myself in week 9. "You checked," I said. "That's the opposite of an idiot." He looked at me for a second to see whether I was being kind or truthful, and I think he decided I was both. He deleted the half-filled form and left the group.

Dad's turn came this evening. In the end I didn't tell him anything at all. I asked him to show me. We sat at the kitchen table with tea and his laptop, and I said, "Let's do it the way Grandma taught me. You ask the questions, and I'll just hold the pen."

Who says so? Dad wrote: my coworker. Then he stopped and wrote more. His coworker heard it from an online group. The group heard it from the coin's own website and from people who had already bought the coin.

"So really," Dad said slowly, "the people who say it will go up are the people who already have it." I said nothing. I let him keep that thought all to himself, because it was his.

How can I check it myself? Dad typed the name of the official office that supervises banks and investment firms into a search himself, and we found its own website, not the advertisements at the top of the results. It had a page for the public about digital coins. The page explained that the usual protections for money kept in a bank often do not cover digital coins, that their prices can rise and fall very quickly, and that promises of sure gains, "inside information" about a launch and very short deadlines are common warning signs of fraud. I watched Dad read it with his printing-shop face, the one that finds mistakes.

Who gains if I believe it? "The people who bought first," Dad said, "if they can get people like me to buy after them." He closed the laptop and said he wasn't going to touch the repair money.

Then he said, "I nearly felt stupid there for a minute." I said, "I nearly did it too, Dad, in week 9, with my textbook money. Marcus really did it, with much more." He reached over and squeezed my hand, which he hasn't done since I was little. Mum came in, found us both smiling at a closed laptop, and put the kettle on again.

I want to remember why it worked. I didn't win anything. I didn't say the word "scam" once. Dad found the answer himself, through a source he chose himself, so the finding belongs to him. Nobody had to be wrong in front of anybody.

The Long Break, Day 8

Grandma came to stay for three days. Dad drove to fetch her this morning, and she arrived with a tin of her ginger biscuits and a bag of apples from her garden, which she calls "the last brave ones" of the year. She looked smaller than I remembered. Then she started telling Felix to stand up straight, and suddenly she was exactly the right size again.

At dinner the whole family was at the table at once, which almost never happens any more. Somewhere between the potatoes and the apple pie, Felix told the token story again for Grandma, with extra dragons, and Dad told the digital coin story, and both of them made themselves sound sillier than they had been. Mum said she was proud of all three of us and a little tired from worrying. Grandma listened to everyone, the way she listens to me on Sundays. Then she put down her fork and said, "Well. Then you all need the tortoise."

She told the fable at the table, with the plates still out, while the pie went cold. I wrote it down afterwards in my room, with the shirts watching. I have tried to keep her words.

Grandma's Fable: The Tortoise and the Three Questions

In a wide meadow beside a beech wood there lived a tortoise who was very old and very slow. The young animals were fond of her, but they did not ask her advice, because by the time she had finished thinking about a question, they had usually finished doing whatever it was.

One autumn a jay flew into the meadow, glossy and loud, and landed on the tallest thistle. "Friends," he called, "on the far side of the hill there is a tree whose nuts double every night. Give me your nuts today, and I will bury them under it. By spring, every one of you will have ten nuts for each one you gave me. But hurry. I can carry only so many, and the first to give will be the first under the tree."

The squirrels began to run to their stores. The dormice began to fill their cheeks.

The tortoise lifted her head and asked, in her slow voice, "Who says so?" The animals looked at one another. "The jay says so," said a young rabbit. "And who told the jay?" asked the tortoise. The jay laughed and said that he had seen the tree with his own eyes. "So," said the tortoise, "the jay says so, and the one who says it is true is also the jay."

"Then how can I check it myself?" the tortoise asked. "You?" said the jay. "It would take you three days to climb the hill." "Yes," said the tortoise, "it would." And she began to walk.

The squirrels laughed at her, and some of them gave all their nuts to the jay at once, so as not to lose their places. But the rabbit and the dormice hesitated. They were curious now, and they decided to wait three days to hear what the slowest animal in the meadow would find.

On the third evening, the tortoise came back down the hill, dusty and tired. "On the far side of the hill," she said, "there is a rock, some brambles and a stream. There is no tree." The dormice turned to ask the jay about this, but the thistle was empty. The jay had flown away that morning with all the squirrels' nuts.

"Now the last question," said the tortoise, settling into the grass. "It is the one I could have asked first, to save my legs. Who gains if I believe it?" Nobody answered her. Nobody needed to. And that winter, when the young animals had a question, they began to bring it to the tortoise, and they learned to wait for her answer, however long it took.

The Long Break, Day 8, Late at Night

After the fable, nobody moved to clear the plates. Felix said, "The squirrels are me in the dragon group," and everyone laughed, Felix the loudest. Dad said, "And I was the rabbit, waiting to see." Grandma said the rabbit was the wise one, because waiting is not the same as doing nothing. Waiting to hear what someone has seen with their own eyes is a kind of checking too.

Then Mum said something I want to write down exactly. "Let's make it a family rule. Not a rule about money. A rule about asking." She took the card she uses for shopping lists and wrote the three questions on the back in big letters: Who says so? How can I check it myself? Who gains if I believe it?

Underneath, Felix added my 24-hour rule: no money decision on the day it is asked for. Under that, Dad wrote: anyone in this family can ask the three questions about anything, and nobody is allowed to be offended. Grandma signed the bottom very seriously, which made Felix laugh so much that he had to sit on the floor. The card is on the fridge now, held up by a magnet shaped like a pear.

I think Dad's line is the one that matters most. The questions are easy. What is hard is asking them out loud without making someone feel accused, and being asked them without feeling small. Now, in our family, both are allowed.

Felix said he would ask Dad the three questions about the football team Dad supports. Dad said that wasn't about money, and Felix said, "It's about your heart, though." Grandma said that hearts are often the first thing such people ask for. I don't think she meant it as a joke.

Later, when everyone had gone to bed, Grandma knocked on my door with two cups of warm milk. She asked about Marcus. I told her about the gold level and the gold stars.

She was quiet for a while, and then she said, "You told him once, and you stayed his friend. Keep doing both. People who are in trouble often hide from the ones who warned them, because they feel ashamed. Make sure he knows that he never has to hide from you."

I said I would. She patted my hand, said goodnight, and then said from the doorway, "Count your milk twice. It's very hot." She is impossible. I love her.

I keep thinking about Dad's face when he said, "the people who already have it." I think that was the real moment. Not when he closed the laptop, but when he saw something with his own eyes that nobody had told him to see. That is what I want to be able to do for people. Not tell them. Help them look.

What I Checked This Week

This week I mostly checked things together with other people, and it taught me that the way of checking stays the same, whoever you check with. For Felix's tokens, we found the game makers' own official website by searching for it ourselves, and their own help page told us that they never sell anything in fan groups. For Dad's digital coin, we found the official office's own website by searching for it ourselves, and its page for the public described the very warning signs in front of us: promised rises, "inside information" and only a few days to decide.

Both times, the most important part was what we did not use. We did not use the link in the fan group. We did not ask the dragon member whether the tokens were real. We did not use the coin's own website to find out whether the coin was safe. A claim cannot be its own proof. The check has to come from somewhere that the person making the claim does not control.

I also learned that Grandma's first question can be followed backwards, like a thread. Who says so? My coworker. Who told him? A group. Who told the group? The coin's own page and the people who bought early.

When you follow the thread back, you often find that the only people saying something will go up are the people who gain if you believe it. Then the third question answers itself.

And I learned how to check with someone without making them feel foolish. Let them hold the laptop. Ask the questions together instead of announcing the answer. Tell them about the time you nearly did it too. When people find the truth with their own eyes, they keep it, and they don't have to defend themselves against you, because you were never against them.

Things to Talk About as a Family

We leave Tess and her family here for now, at their kitchen table, with a new card on the fridge. Here are some things you might talk about at yours. The questions on Tess's card are simple. Agreeing as a family that anyone may ask them, and that nobody will be offended, is a much bigger step.

If someone in your family heard about a sure way to make money, whom would they feel comfortable telling first, and why? How does each of you like to be asked a question when you might have made a mistake? Is there something each of you could say that would help another person stop and check, without sounding like a warning or a scolding?

One small thing to try together: make your own card. Write the three questions on it, and add any rule of your own that you all agree on, such as a waiting time before any money decision, or a promise that anyone may ask anyone. Put it somewhere everyone sees every day. It does not need to be beautiful. Tess's family used the back of a shopping list.