Together Tea by Marjan Kamali Page B

WACC.
  
WACC
  
Weight of that company for
its cost of debt plus cost of equity.
  
WACC
  
alphaKD+(1-alpha)KE
  
Discounted Cash Flow
  
PV=C1/(1+r1) 1 +C2/(1+r2) 2 +C3/(1+r3) 3  . . . . . . .
  
    Darya would be breathless. She’d be up there in the front row, her hand high up in the air. “Oooh, oooh, pick on me, Professor, pick on me.” She’d tell Professor Van Heusen the value for alpha KD. A hundred times over. Her financial calculator would click the fastest of all. The financial calculator was a specialized machine that Darya said made all normal calculators feel like toys.
    â€œIf I get in an interest squeeze, am I going to fall off a steep cliff into oblivion or is it a bump in the road? Meaning, is it a big drop or a little drop?” Professor Van Heusen talked into his water bottle.
    Chip Sinclair bedazzled with a labyrinthine answer. Mina copied down more formulas from the whiteboard.
    â€œCompetitors: Are you dominant? Are they dominant?” Mina’s laptop screen showed the artwork from a recent gallery show in Marblehead, Massachusetts. In a painting of a lone china teacup, white and blue mixed perfectly. Mina copied down the brand of oil paint the website recommended, even though she hadn’t done a real painting herself since college, which now felt like a very long time ago.
    â€œAre these supply sources relatively flexible? If you get into trouble, are they going to help you or liquidate you?”
    Mina remembered the mixture of blue and white on the dome of the mosque near her grandparents’ house in Tehran. She wondered what it would be like to go back there. She typed “Tehran” in her search tab. Photos of universities and buildings popped up, none of which she recognized. Which university had Bita gone to? Had she gone to university? Was she being set up with Mr. Dashti types over there? Maybe she was already married and had a few kids.
    â€œAre your dealers loyal?” Professor Van Heusen asked. “Will they desert you?”
    Mina clicked through photo after photo. She had not been back to Iran in fifteen years. She often thought of what would happen if she ever went back. Would she see what she had left behind? Would it still be there?
    A girl in a camel cashmere cardigan a few rows down typed as if her life depended on it. A tall redheaded boy next to Mina wrote diligently in his notebook.
    â€œThe higher the coverage, the more sensitive you are to interest.” Professor Van Heusen’s marker squeaked as he wrote on the whiteboard. Some students nodded with understanding. They’d solved the problem. Mina had the germ of an idea: if she went back to Iran, she could figure out what her family had been, what they’d lost, what they’d gained. She could expel this sense of never belonging, feeling lost. She could “find herself,” like every character in every book she’d ever read about immigrants going back to the homeland.
    But more important, she could find Bita.
    Mina was excited about her new plan.
    â€œWhat is the point at which debt starts to interfere with operation?” Professor Van Heusen asked the floor. “Ms. Rezayi, could you tell us, please?”
    Mina stiffened at the sound of her name. The students up front turned around and looked at her. Mina had no idea what the question meant. She fumbled through her backpack for her calculator. Where the hell was it? She turned to her laptop only to see her screensaver staring back at her. She looked at her notebook. It was filled with formulas she’d copied down, the name of that brand of paint the artist from Marblehead used and endless strawberries and women in veils.
    Professor Van Heusen blew into his water bottle. It made a hollow, whistling sound.
    Mina’s face grew hot. Her underarms grew sweaty. Chip Sinclair’s hand shot up. A few others did too.
    â€œMs.