The Next Big Thing

by Sadie Hayes

  He sprinted silently to the end of the alleyway and stopped at a large square Dumpster secured by a thick rectangular lock. He felt along the backside of the lock for a button he seemed to know was there. He pressed the button to open the top of the lockbox, where he entered a code, waited for another click, and pushed back the heavy Dumpster lid.

  The man lifted one leg, then the other, to climb into the Dumpster, where the rain fell on waist-high piles of shredded paper, disks, drives, and discarded plastic casings. He pulled a stopwatch out of his pocket and set it for twenty minutes before digging through the Dumpster’s contents, stuffing various items into the pockets of his shabby canvas coat.

  When the stopwatch went off, he cursed under his breath, reaching for a pile of folders and jamming them up under his coat. He pushed himself out of the Dumpster and reached to pull back the lid. His hands shook as he replaced the lock in its proper position, and he ducked down behind the Dumpster just in time to miss the beam of a flashlight surveying the alleyway.

  The man breathed heavily but silently from his perch, waiting for the darkness to return. When all was quiet, he took a deep breath, checked the security of his loaded-down coat, and dashed back across the lawn to the street.

  A light caught him midway and he heard a security guard yell. He paid no heed, singularly focused on reaching the street.

  “Stop! You there! I said stop!” the voice called. A whistle blew and a bright fluorescent light snapped on from overhead. He sprinted across the lawn and leapt into the passenger seat of a BMW convertible that sped up Page Mill Road toward the highway as the security guard chased helplessly on foot.

  “Get what you needed?” Violet asked as Adam pushed the hood off his hair and turned to check the security guard’s progress.

  “Do you think he got your plates?” Adam panted, ignoring her question.

  “Doesn’t matter. I put the fake plates on just in case.”

  Adam nodded appreciably, not thinking to ask why Violet had fake plates in the first place. He let his head fall back on the seat and breathed greedily to settle his pounding heart.

  “So did you get the patent applications?” Violet repeated her initial question calmly, not at all rattled by what had just happened.

  “I think so,” Adam said. “I wish I’d had just five more minutes, but they’ve got to be somewhere in this pile.” He moved forward in his seat to take off his coat and started rifling through the drives and files he’d collected from the Dumpster.

  “Nice work,” Violet said, glancing over from the driver’s seat as she exited on University Avenue, reaching her hand over to rub Adam’s neck. He blushed at her touch.

  “Yeah, this is going to be good,” he said as he flipped through the pages, nodding excitedly. He wanted to make out with Violet but he forced himself to concentrate. “Can you take me to the office? I want to get going on this.” Adam looked at his watch: 3:45 A.M. He’d hardly slept the last three nights but wasn’t at all tired.

  “Sure thing,” Violet said, “but I’m going to sleep there if it’s okay—have an eight o’clock meeting on campus.”

  God, she made staying focused hard. “Nap room’s all yours,” Adam said, referring to the bedroom they’d installed with four twin beds to accommodate late nights and midafternoon naps.

  The two were quiet the rest of the ride, but as Violet pulled into the Doreye office drive and shut off the engine, she broke the silence: “So how’d you do it?”

  Adam looked up. “What do you mean?”

  “How’d you know where to look? And how’d you find out the code?”

  Adam cocked an eyebrow slyly. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  Violet studied his face and, concluding that he really wasn’t going to give it up, opened the door and went inside to bed, swinging her hips from side to side as she went.

  Adam waited fifteen minutes from the time she went upstairs and then dialed Jeremy Jacobs, the rambling lunatic from his night in jail, whose contact information Officer Anthony Rodrigues had been kind enough to supply. Jeremy picked up on the second ring.

  “Did you get it?” he asked anxiously.

  “I don’t know. I think so. Can you talk me through it?” Adam whispered into the phone.

  “Okay, did you get the black drive labeled ‘PHOENIX’?”

  “Got it.” Adam pulled the drive out and waited for further instruction.

  “Plug it into your computer and open the file that says…”

  Adam spent the rest of the night and morning on the phone walking through the top-secret information he’d collected from HP’s Dumpster. Jeremy, the former chief engineer for Hewlett-Packard who had been fired when the firm’s management changed hands, was all too happy to give Adam his Hewlett-Packard research on how to efficiently outsource data storage and logic functions to the cloud. “I gave them ten years of my best work, Adam,” he’d said remorsefully on the phone. “They said all that work, all my ideas, belonged to them; I barely had time to throw everything away before they escorted me out of the building.”

  When Adam was done copying the code and notes from Jeremy, following his instructions for what to change in order to avoid patent infringement, he put all the evidence in a box with a mail label addressed to his former cellmate. Inside he included a note: “Here’s ten years of your best work. Looking forward to whatever comes next…”

  41

  Riding Shotgun

  Amelia squished her mouth to one side as she looked at the open drawer before her. What in her wardrobe could she possibly wear on a ski trip in Tahoe? She hadn’t been in sub-fifty-degree temperatures since she’d come to college, much less seen snow.

  She shut the drawer and bent down on hands and knees, peering back under her bed for an oversize canvas bag she’d zipped up for the last time two years ago. She struggled to pull it out into the center of the room and mentally braced herself as she opened it to reveal the contents of her Indiana existence.

  She pulled out a pair of thick gloves and her old winter socks. She dug for the white long johns she’d worn under jeans on particularly bitter January mornings. She found her snow pants and a bright red Columbia jacket she’d bought in a secondhand store and worn every day the winter of her senior year in high school.

  Nestled under the jacket, jammed in the corner of the bag, was a cloth satchel with something in it. She distinctly remembered jamming it there two years ago after the rest of the bag was full in a last-minute resolution that she ought not to let it go. She took the bag out and sat back on her heels, resting it on her lap and slowly undoing the tie as if pretending to herself she didn’t know what was inside.

  She pulled out a floppy, worn rag doll and held it familiarly beneath the arms, slowly running her finger around the plastic eyes and down the blue-buttoned dress. She let her brain open the part of itself that remembered holding this doll as a little girl on the school bus, as a middle schooler when she and Adam were briefly sent to separate group homes, as a teenager when she was in jail and the guard had let her sneak it into her room even though wards weren’t allowed to have any personal possessions. She always believed it was from her mother, though she didn’t remember if anyone told her that or if she’d invented it to feel like she was a regular kid.

  She’d tried to throw it away every time she’d moved, but the past two years were as close as she’d come to letting it go, and holding it here now, she was glad she hadn’t.

  A knock at the door interrupted her nostalgia. “It’s open,” she called, and quickly stuffed the doll back into its bag and the bag into the larger one.

  “Hi.” T.J. stuck his head in and Amelia blushed with surprise.

  “Oh,” she said, standing up from her seat on the floor, trying not to let T-Bag’s words, he likes you, creep into her brain. “Hi, T.J., I didn’t—”

  “Don’t get up. I didn’t mean to interrupt,” he said.

  “Oh, you’re not. Come in.” She pulled her legs around in fr
ont of her and clasped her hands at the knees. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about how he feels about you.

  He took a seat at her desk chair. He was wearing black gym shorts and a tight white t-shirt, and Amelia tried not to stare at his perfectly defined calves, now at her eye level. Where had she seen calves like that? Oh, yes, on statues of Greek gods.

  “Sorry for being so informal—I’m meeting a buddy at the gym.”

  “Stop apologizing,” she said, smiling. “It’s nice to see you.” She hoped that didn’t sound too forward or too hyper-self-conscious-of-being-too-forward.

  “Well, I wanted to swing by because I remembered you saying you were going to Tahoe—”

  “Yeah. I’m leaving this afternoon, actually.”

  “Oh.” T.J. noticed the clothes strewn on her floor and pieced together what the effort was for. “I’m glad I caught you, then.”

  She wasn’t sure how to respond so she didn’t.

  “Anyway, I figured I’d stop by and tell you to have a good trip. And be careful, you know.” He leaned his elbows forward onto his knees. His right heel tapped, causing his calf muscle to flex. Stop looking. She’d never looked at boys before; why was she doing it now? “I mean, skiing but also driving around. The roads are icy and people drink a lot up there and then drive when they shouldn’t and—” He paused and finally sighed, looking up at her. “I don’t know, Amelia. When you said you were going to Tahoe I got this really weird feeling.”

  Amelia’s heart stopped: He got a feeling? About her? “What do you mean?” she said as casually as she could.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m saying. It’s probably nothing, but I got this weird feeling that…” He paused and said quietly, as if testing the words, “That I wouldn’t see you again.” He paused and stared at her, his blue eyes sparkling. “And so … I guess I just wanted to see you, to tell you good-bye.”

  “Is everything okay?” Amelia breathed. “I mean, is something else going on?”

  T.J.’s shoulder lifted and he opened his right hand as if presenting something and nodded. “Well, actually, Doreye’s … it’s in trouble. We’re in trouble.”

  Amelia’s disappointment hit her like a bucket of cold water; of course he came because there was a problem with Doreye. Just like he stayed at ZOSTRA because he was trying not to fail CS 101. T-Bag was wrong: T.J. didn’t like her, he needed her brain. That was it. “What’s going on?” she asked, not caring whether her disappointment showed.

  “It’s the same problem you left us with. The app keeps crashing. Adam convinced himself he can fix it, but…” T.J. shrugged. “I don’t know whether his new energy is good or whether he’s just gone crazy.”

  Amelia laughed gently, thinking about her brother’s habit of semidelusional enthusiasm, and wondered with jealousy if he was returning to his old self. “Don’t worry,” she said, rolling her eyes. “If Adam’s got a plan, he’ll figure it out.”

  T.J. cocked one eyebrow. “He’s no you.”

  Amelia shook her head, looking back at her bag and stuffing another pair of socks in it. “No. In a lot of ways he’s better. He gets distracted, but at his core he’s”—she looked back up at T.J. and shrugged—“at his core he’s really good.”

  Amelia was surprised by her own honesty, even after what Adam had done. He’d hurt her, but he was real; unlike her imaginary relationship with T.J.

  “There’s something else,” T.J. said, looking seriously at Amelia. Her heart beat with hope and she pushed it away. “Something your brother doesn’t know. Something I just found out and haven’t told anyone.”

  “What is it?” Amelia asked, bracing herself.

  T.J. took a deep breath and looked down at the floor. “It’s the company’s investors. We don’t actually know who they are.”

  “What do you mean?” She squinted. “The investor is PKC.”

  “Something bad happened. The fund PKC used to invest in Doreye is owned by someone else—some silent partner wrapped in a shell company—and after you left and your unvested shares left the company, this mystery investor’s ownership went from forty-three percent to fifty-one percent. Which is enough to have final say about everything. And nobody knows who’s behind it.”

  Amelia’s jaw dropped as she tried to comprehend. She didn’t understand the mechanics of investment, but she understood that shell companies masked the puppet masters pulling the strings, and she understood fifty-one percent meant majority voting rights. “How could that have happened?”

  “Adam was in such a hurry to close the round, and PKC was offering us so much more than anyone else.” T.J. half laughed and shook his head. “It almost feels like … like this was all on purpose.”

  Amelia’s phone rang. She saw it was T-Bag, who had told her he’d call when they were on their way over to pick her up.

  “We never had Roger look at the terms,” T.J. went on, placing his hand on Amelia’s, ignoring the ringing phone and running his thumb along her hand absentmindedly. “He was so sick I didn’t want to bother him, but now … I don’t know who else—”

  “I’ve got to go.” Amelia stood up, dropping T.J.’s hand a bit too forcefully. She couldn’t deal with this, couldn’t get sucked into solving this because T.J. was stroking her hand just so. She finished throwing her things in her suitcase and stood up to open the door.

  His perfect calves pushed him up from the chair and he intercepted, grabbing her shoulders to stop her. “Stop,” he said. “Amelia, wait.”

  His hands were so strong on her shoulders she couldn’t move, and she didn’t want to. She could feel the heat of his chest three inches from her own, but taller and wider, as though it could shield her whole body from whatever lay outside the door. He was staring into her eyes, so close she could see the specks of dark blue in his light blue irises, revealing the details of the complexity that made them so addictive.

  “I have to go,” she whispered, her voice cracking.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked, not moving his grip or his stance.

  “What can I do?” She pulled her shoulders away from him. “I was fired,” she said bluntly. “I have no power.”

  “You underestimate your own power, Amelia,” he said.

  A car honked outside and Amelia picked up her bag. “I’ve got to go.”

  “I’ll walk you out,” T.J. said, grabbing the bag to carry it for her.

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  “No”—he gripped her wrist, his wide hand easily enveloping it—“I want to.”

  When they reached the door to the parking lot, Amelia paused and turned back to him. “The other day,” she started, “why did you stay at Gates? I mean, why did you stay to play ZOSTRA?”

  T.J. laughed. “Honestly?”

  “Yes,” Amelia said, hoping helplessly he would say it was to be with her. “Was it just to get extra credit with T-Bag?”

  “No.” T.J. grimaced. “Is that really what you thought?”

  “What was the real reason, then?”

  “Well,” T.J. said, sighing, “I’m kind of a closet video-game addict. I mean, I didn’t just used to play Dungeons & Dragons … I was a tournament-level Dungeon Master. My bedroom at home is still full of twenty-sided dice and trophies of wizards. The two games have a lot of similarities.” His eyes sparkled at the confession.

  Amelia felt her heart drop again. For real, Amelia, let it go. She looked at T.J., though, and thought of another question. “So what do you do when your character is Lawful Good and your opponent is Lawful Evil?”

  “You lose the game, is what happens.”

  “Come on,” she said, scratching her earlobe nervously, “what’s the way out?”

  T.J. thought for a moment. “You’d have to team up with a Chaotic Neutral character. You know, a trickster leprechaun, a pirate or a con man. You’d have to ally with this person and use their disregard for order to your advantage.”

  Amelia’s lower lip curled under and she nodded, the
wheels in her head spinning. “Okay,” she said, pushing the door open.

  “And Amelia?”

  T-Bag jumped out of the car and took her bag from T.J., putting it in the backseat. “You get shotgun. Privilege of being the only girl in the car,” he said cheerily. “Oh, hey, T.J.”

  “What is it?” Amelia asked, addressing T.J.’s earlier question.

  “Never mind,” he said. “Have a good trip.”

  “Yeah, I will,” she said. “Thanks for coming by.”

  He leaned forward and wrapped his arms around her in a tight hug. She lifted onto her tiptoes to meet his embrace. She could feel her whole body disappear in his arms, and she tried to engrave the feeling of his hands tightly gripping the sides of her waist at the same time she tried to let the feeling of wanting it to never slip away.

  “Take care of yourself,” he said softly into her ear.

  “I will,” she whispered into his.

  Amelia avoided looking at him as she opened the passenger door to the SUV and climbed inside.

  The driver was on the phone but waved and mouthed an enthusiastic “Hi!” as he lifted a finger to indicate he’d be done in a second so they could catch up. Amelia studied his face, her mind racing to remember where she’d seen it, and felt her jaw drop as she pieced it together: She was about to spend the next six hours in a car to Tahoe with T-Bag, his secret business-school boyfriend, and Chad Bronson—Patty’s sister’s former fiancé and Patty’s former secret lover.

  42

  The Donner Pass

  “This part of the drive always gives me creeps!” Jason, T-Bag’s secret boyfriend and fake cousin, said from the backseat.

  The foursome was three hours into their ride to Tahoe and they’d been chatting ceaselessly since leaving campus, mostly about start-ups. Jason and Chad would come up with an idea they thought was brilliant, and Amelia and T-Bag would explain all the reasons it wouldn’t work technologically. Then Amelia and T-Bag would come up with an idea that Jason and Chad would pick apart for being unfeasible from a business perspective. So far they’d come up with one idea they all agreed would work: a delivery service that served healthy meals marketed toward body-conscious frat boys who were too ashamed to shop at Whole Foods. T-Bag had suggested they call it “T.J.’s.”