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Harper hadn’t had time to be popular, though. After school ended, she worked with her dad. Every day. Weekends as needed. Summers had not been about vacations for Harper. They’d been about learning how to pour a foundation and install plumbing. Her father had built a business he could share with his sons, and when they hadn’t shown up and all he’d been left with was a daughter, he’d handed her a hard hat and put her to work.
The woman knows a thing or two about potential burnout, so I don’t ask her to stop mothering me. “I’m almost through all my savings. If I don’t find a new gig soon, I’m going to be fixing iPads at the mall or walking the aisles of Target asking how I can help.”
“I don’t think you would be good at that,” Anika says, her head shaking as though the vision is too much to take.
It would likely end up with me being fired or in jail. I’m not necessarily a people person. I accept this about myself. I’m better in virtual worlds.
Harper nods and seems to steel herself. “All right. Let’s hear it.”
I need more mimosa. I think seriously about asking the waiter to bring me one but without the orange juice, and to substitute whiskey for champagne. This is something I learned at CeCe’s always designer-clad feet. Alcohol helps. “It’s not one thing. When I get there, I’ll have a better sense of what they’re looking for and I’ll be able to put together a package for start-up funds.”
This, as they say in some circles, is not my first rodeo. I built my first business straight out of college. It was gaming. I developed the prototypes for several games that are still popular today. Not that I make that money anymore. I only developed the prototypes and wrote the base code and then sold those suckers for the seed money to start my second company. We went into school systems and government offices and streamlined the way they did paperwork. Fill out once and not again. That was when I took it to the big time. Jensen Medical Solutions. No one does forms like the healthcare industry.
CeCe Foust had been my first investor. She’d also been the one to tell me she thought my valuation wasn’t right and that I was too leveraged to survive. I hadn’t believed her because surely Nick had known what he was doing, and he was my boyfriend.
She’d been right.
And yet I’m going to walk into her Upper East Side brownstone this evening and boldly ask her for more.
Okay, maybe boldly isn’t the right word. But I am going to shove my stupid pride down and ask. Once I know what she’s looking for.
“Have you thought about going back to gaming?” Anika asks.
“I’m not some shut-in who has nothing better to do with her time than write pay to play apps,” I insist, although some can make a solid argument I’m all that and more. I’m a twenty-nine-year-old woman living in her mom’s rent-controlled apartment in the bedroom I’d grown up in. The one I vowed to never come back to. Even when I visited my mom, I stayed at a hotel. I told her it was because I usually brought someone home with me, but I think she knew the truth.
Maybe that’s why she seems equal parts bitter and strangely satisfied with the way everything’s gone down.
I believe her when she tells me I better start paying part of the rent or she’ll evict me. And this time she’ll toss out my Green Day posters, too, and turn that room into something called a craft room. I’ve never seen my mother do a craft in her life, but she’ll take up popsicle stick construction if it means proving a point to me. Of that I have no doubt.
“But you loved that,” Anika says, her mouth turning down in a frown. “I remember when you were coming up with the storyline and how much fun we had with it. I always thought one of your games could be made into a movie.”
Because Hollywood is so much easier than Tech World. Or maybe it is. I’ll never know.
The truth is I do love that work. I love it and it doesn’t pay. It doesn’t offer me the path I need to achieve my goals, the chief one being never having to live in that tiny apartment I grew up in again.
Actually, now that I think about it, Tech World is like a game. Chutes and Ladders. I work and work and none of it matters because I inevitably land on a chute, and not the golden parachute kind. The kind that deposits one back in the mud.
So it’s time to clean myself up and start climbing again.
“Ani, it’s not what I do now.” I love my friends but sometimes I wonder if they even know who I am anymore. After college, they’d stayed here in New York. I’m pretty sure Harper hasn’t left the city more than a handful of times. I’d moved to Austin for my first job, and then to San Francisco for most of my twenties. I’ve seen a lot of the world, and I know what it takes to make it.
