Infinite Cashback: My Wealth Rebate System

Jason opened the message.

Amanda: hey! I’m having a party Saturday, come through

No question mark anywhere in the actual invitation.

Not do you want to come just come through, stated flat, like an appointment she’d already penciled him into without checking his calendar first.

Even now, even after everything, she still talked to him like his presence was a given rather than a request, like the concept of him saying no had simply never occurred to her as a possibility worth planning around.

He read it again and then a third time, mostly to see if a different reading would surface on the fourth attempt, the way a word starts looking wrong if you stare at it long enough but it didn’t change.

Same message. Same breezy, exclamation-mark come through, like she hadn’t spent an entire evening in a park letting her friends dissect him for sport, like none of that had ever happened, like the last conversation they’d shared hadn’t ended with him standing frozen behind a tree listening to himself get reduced to the word convenient

Saturday.

His brain did the math automatically two days out and somewhere in that calculation, a second piece clicked into place. The conversation he had with Ben this evening.

He’d been jogging, that morning, when Ben had mentioned some party happening this weekend.

He had thrown it out casually between complaining about a professor and asking if Jason wanted to split a pizza later, like it was one piece of unremarkable weekend trivia among several others.

Jason remembered brushing past it entirely at the time, half-convinced Ben had simply forgotten to loop him in properly, that this was one of those parties everyone else already knew the details of and he’d just been quietly, invisibly excluded from, same as always.

That was usually how it went. People made plans in rooms he wasn’t in, and he found out later, sideways, if he found out at all.

Except he hadn’t been excluded. He’d been invited. He just hadn’t checked his phone in time to know it.

He scrolled up, checked the timestamp on Amanda’s message, and felt something small and uncomfortable settle low in his chest when he matched it against the timeline already sitting in his head.

It was sent not long after his phone had gone from functional to several hundred fragments of glass held together by hope and a prayer.

Which meant the message had been sitting there, unread, buried under a cracked screen and a system that had rearranged his entire week, this whole time.

Not excluded. Just late. Two very different things that had, apparently, felt identical to the version of him that assumed the worst by default.

Great. Even my own paranoia can’t get the story straight anymore

He sat there a moment, thumb hovering over the reply box, and then he started typing up a reply

hey, thanks for the—

He stopped. Deleted it. Thanks for the what exactly? Thanks for the invite, from the girl whose friends had spent a solid five minutes dissecting the specific, humiliating ways he’d embarrassed himself by simply existing near her?

That sentence didn’t have anywhere good to go, and he could already picture how it would read on her end, grateful, eager, exactly like the old him, the one who said thank you for scraps and called it kindness.

He tried again.

I don’t think I—

Deleted that too. It sounded too final and too dramatic, the kind of line that practically begged for a follow-up question he had no interest in answering.

"I don’t think I’ll make it" usually invited a "why not?" question along with it and he did not currently have a clean, non-humiliating answer to "why not"

The honest answer involved a park bench, a tree, and several sentences he had no intention of repeating out loud to anyone, least of all her.

A third attempt.

Maybe, I’ll see—

He looked at it for a second, decided it sounded like the noncommittal deflection of a man actively lying to himself, and deleted that one too.

Even the punctuation felt dishonest that soft little comma doing the work of a full stop he wasn’t brave enough to actually type.

He let the phone drop onto the mattress beside him and fell backward, arms spread loose at his sides, staring at the ceiling like it might have better ideas than he did.

His chest didn’t feel like it was doing anything dramatic. No racing pulse, no tight throat, none of the wreckage from that first night when her name alone had been enough to put him on the bathroom floor, sobbing over a sink like his whole life had ended in one conversation.

That should have made this easier but instead it just made it confusing because if he genuinely didn’t feel anything anymore, typing four throwaway words back shouldn’t have been this hard.

A man with nothing left to prove shouldn’t need three drafts and a full-body collapse onto his own bed just to decide how to respond to a party invite.

So why can’t I just say something

He picked the phone back up, one more attempt, because apparently he wasn’t done torturing himself yet.

yeah maybe, we’ll see

He stared at that one longer than the others. It was fine. It was nothing. It committed to absolutely nothing while still technically qualifying as a response the diplomatic equivalent of a shrug typed out in six words.

It was, he realized with a small twist of annoyance at himself, exactly the kind of message old Jason would’ve sent, hopeful underneath, dressed up as casual, secretly hoping it would spark something back.

Secretly still waiting by the phone for whatever came next, the way he used to wait for her, always, without ever admitting that’s what the waiting was.

He swiped it away without sending it.

No

If he ran the numbers, actually ran them, the way the system liked to reduce every person in his life down to a tidy little percentage he had a strong suspicion that Amanda’s number would be sitting somewhere embarrassingly low by now.

Two percent, maybe less, a figure that would’ve devastated him a couple of weeks ago and now mostly just sat there, quietly true, asking nothing of him at all.

His life was different now. Actually different, not the temporary, self-help-video kind of different that evaporated forty-eight hours after the motivation wore off.

He had a stupid, ridiculous system that had somehow rearranged his mornings, his bank account, and apparently his entire relationship with his own spine. And somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, without him planning for it or chasing it the way he’d chased her for years, he’d found Sarah who liked him for reasons that had nothing to do with convenience, who’d hugged him back on a sidewalk like she meant it, who didn’t need a percentage on a floating screen to prove she was real.

He didn’t need to reply to Amanda tonight.

He didn’t need to reply to Amanda at all, technically, though some quieter, more practical part of him suspected the silence wouldn’t hold forever.

Tonight, though, it would do.

He locked the phone, set it face-down on the nightstand, and closed his eyes, letting the day finally, fully end.

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