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I turned around to observe the room I was actually in as Brandon turned on a space heater. Unlike the rest of his pristine house, this room was a mess. Wood worktables bordered two of the glass walls, which were partially covered with perforated plywood on which to hang various tools—those that weren’t scattered over the tables, anyway. Various half-built contraptions also littered the tables, while a few larger power tools and other unidentifiable equipment took up the rest of the room.
I leaned down to inspect a bit of metal with several multi-colored wires sticking out of it. “This reminds me of one of those mousetrap cars we had to build in my high school Physics class.”
“This is sort of my version of the piano in the basement,” Brandon said behind me. “It’s where I let loose.”
I stood up and faced him. “You’re an inventor? It wasn’t enough to be Gordon Gecko; you had to be Thomas Edison too?”
It was hard to see against his tanned skin, but I thought Brandon blushed at the comparison.
“Ah, not quite,” he said. “I just mess around.”
He picked up the contraption I had admired and touched the wires gingerly. “This one works with sonar technology to monitor heat waves in a baby’s bedroom. I’m trying to get it to identify the living being in the crib and monitor its temperature and possibly other vitals. You know, for SIDS and stuff like that.”
He set the project back down.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, counselor,” I said, “but this looks a lot like engineering. Electrical engineering, to be precise.”
Brandon folded his arms across his chest and pressed his lips together as if to say, “Yeah, so what?”
“I thought you didn’t like engineering,” I prodded further.
“I never said that. If you recall, I said they did a lot of cool stuff.”
“You said you didn’t want to waste your life, and I quote, ‘fiddling with wires.’” I picked up the device. “These look like wires to me.”
Brandon stared at the device until I put it down again, then continued to stare at me, like we were playing some demented game of owl. The guy definitely gave me a run for my money in the stubbornness department.
Finally, his poker face cracked a smile, and Brandon sighed. “I was fifteen,” he said. “So, a complete idiot. Can I show you the rest?”
“There’s more?”
I was speechless as he toured me through several other multimillion-dollar ideas. When he was finished, he looked at me shyly. I was completely dumbfounded. Knowing someone graduated high school at sixteen and seeing the actual products of their genius are two very different things.
“Brandon,” I said slowly. I touched the last semi-prototype, some kind of sonar device that might one day regulate sea life populations. “Why don’t you just fund a lab yourself? You already have the money to hire a whole bunch of engineers to put these ideas into motion, don’t you?”
He shrugged. “It’s just a hobby. And…I don’t know…I guess I like to know that I did it myself. Business is business. This is more where I get some peace of mind, you know?”
“Has your dad—I mean, Ray—seen this? It looks like something he’d like.”
Brandon shook his head. “No, he doesn’t really have the time.”
“Oh.”
I looked at all the works in progress. Brandon was like a mad scientist, minus the crazy and the puffy gray hair and plus a whole lot of gorgeous. Plus a major lawyer. Plus a shark on the market.
How many other personalities was Brandon Sterling hiding?
“This must impress a lot of people,” I said, thoroughly intimidated.
“I’ve never brought anyone up here before,” he murmured, suddenly very interested in picking at a few wires.
I was unsure of what to say. I asked him to show me who he was, and boy, had he ever. In one evening, he’d brought me to meet his foster father with whom he obviously had a difficult relationship, had revealed painful experiences from his difficult childhood, and then opened other recesses of his heart here in his workshop. More than any of the other places I had seen tonight, this place, with its awkward, messy, brilliant labors of love, was Brandon.
“Ah, so I have a question for you,” Brandon said, interrupting my train of thought.
“What’s that?”
“What we did…ah…earlier tonight…You, ah, liked it, didn’t you?”
