Southern Charmed

by Melanie Jacobson

  “You her boyfriend?”

  Kiana had gotten tired of waiting for me to answer.

  Now I’d have to kill her. “Kiana, that’s not appr—”

  “Yes,” he said, holding out his hand for her to shake. “I’m Max.”

  “You can call him Mr. Archer,” I said, keeping a straight face, even though it wanted to rearrange itself into a Velveeta grin. “He’s going to talk over your presentation with you. See if you like his ideas.” He’d called me the night before to discuss it with me, carefully working through each element I’d worried about and coming up with an idea so ingenious that if I could have crawled through the phone to kiss him, I would have.

  Max pulled out his laptop. My loop-de-loop stomach switched from celebrating our status update to nerves for Kiana’s reaction. Would she see the vision? Max didn’t have any concern on his face. “Lila says you want to create a backdrop that you can use with a multimedia presentation. She described what you want to do, and I think I understand it. What do you think the obstacles are?”

  I relaxed a tiny bit. I’d made a big deal on the phone with him about how he couldn’t think of himself as a coach telling her what to do. He had to be more of a counselor, pulling answers and information out of her, helping her see connections between things.

  “It’s going to be expensive. I don’t have none of that equipment and no money to buy it.”

  Max nodded like he was considering this for the first time and typed something on his laptop. “I’m going to set up a flow chart so we can start figuring out how to solve all this. Is that okay with you?”

  “What’s a flow cart?” He angled his screen so she could see it, and her face cleared. “Oh, that’s like mind maps when we have to do prewriting for essays in English.”

  “Exactly. It’ll help us organize information.”

  “Go ahead then.”

  “Thank you,” he said, not even cracking a smile. As easy as that, he’d made her feel like she held the reins. Magic.

  Piece by piece, they broke down the elements of Kiana’s project. Her expression grew more dazed as it became clear to her exactly how complicated her idea was. But it was also becoming clear to me as I listened to it all that she was right. She was so right. This was the way to do it. Max’s face reflected only deep thought, like he was working out the math that explained why the universe kept expanding.

  A half hour later, her project idea had been disassembled and strewn across dozens of boxes in Max’s flow chart. Kiana had shrunk in her chair as if she were too tired by the magnitude of it to even sit up straight anymore. I looked away, staring instead at the bulletin board we’d put together, the display that was supposed to inspire young minds to discover history and change the world. This was how it happened—moments like this with students where if you could break through to them, everything truly could change. Max was about to present the plan that could change everything for Kiana.

  No. That wasn’t right.

  He was about to present a plan that could let Kiana make everything happen for herself. I didn’t know if she had enough fight left to believe it. I held my breath as he moved his laptop aside and folded his arms in front of him. “I’m a businessman,” he said. “I bet you wonder what that has to do with history.”

  “Not really. Madame CJ was a businesswoman.”

  I let my breath out and smothered a smile. This was going to be okay.

  “Exactly,” Max said. “The fact that CJ Walker was such an incredible businessperson made me wonder how she would solve this problem. But you know her better than I do, so I’m going to ask you. Let’s say Madame CJ needed to do a presentation for a bunch of investors in her company. And to do that presentation, she needed to really blow them away. And let’s say she had all the ideas and talent in the world, but there was no way she could afford the equipment she needed to do her idea up right. What would she do? Borrow it?”

  Kiana considered this and gave a single slow shake of her head. “No. No, she wouldn’t have had much luck with banks because she was black and female. When CJ needed money, she made it.”

  “How about if you do the same thing? Start a business so you can afford all this stuff.”

  This was the linchpin right here. I’d been skeptical at first, but he’d said something I couldn’t shake: “Nothing will teach her the lesson you wanted her to learn from CJ Walker like walking in her footsteps will. If she starts a business to pay for everything she needs, she’s going to end up with a great presentation for sure, but it won’t be her dreaming about the possibilities anymore. She’ll be living them. She’ll learn some skills that are going to take her way past this project.”

  I’d argued about the short amount of time she’d have to work and the cost of getting a business started and the difficulty she’d have trying to work while dealing with all the craziness at home. But he’d settled me down with a quiet request. “This is what I do, Lila. Trust me. Please?” So I’d texted him this morning when Kiana had agreed to meet with him, and now, as I watched him work with her, my heart folded even more of him inside it.

  “I don’t know anything about business,” Kiana said, her energy dropping again.

  “You’ve never been to a business or shopped at a business or watched a show that had a business in it?” Max asked.

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t make someone an expert.”

  “Having a consultant helps, and I’ll be your consultant. Are you willing to try brainstorming with me?”

  I’d seen this look on Kiana’s face so many times before. It was the point at which she was wavering, deciding if she had the energy to give to caring about something we were discussing in class. Usually she shut down again, but when she let go and dove in, she was spectacular.

  “All right, Mr. Business. I’ll brainstorm.”

  I couldn’t help it; I cheered. “Yes, Kiana! Yes!”

  “Simmer down there, Miss Guidry. Writing down ideas don’t pay bills.”

  Max grinned. “Brace yourself, Kiana. We’re about to amaze ourselves. Let’s talk about what you can do for a business.”

  “Marketable skills. That’s a thing, right? I don’t have those.”

  “Everybody does. We’re going to figure out what yours are. Let’s start by listing all the things you like or that you’re good at.”

  “I like TV. I like reading. I make good fried chicken. Go ahead, Mr. Business. Tell me what we’re supposed to do with that.”

  “Nothing yet. Talk to me some more. What other kinds of things do you do?”

  For the next ten minutes, he pulled answers out of her, mostly flippant ones, about her talents, skills, and interests. I could see how some of them could lead to a job for her but not a business. She liked learning but not school. She read a ton because, even though she liked TV, they couldn’t pay their cable bill, so they didn’t have it at home much, but library books were free. She kept her brothers busy at home with the broadcast channels they could get without cable and a steady stream of movies checked out from the library. She loved the library and the park. She liked clothes but couldn’t afford them often. She liked cleaning her house. That one startled me, but I sensed it came from a need to have some control over her environment.

  When he’d pulled a long list out of her, he turned the screen to face her again. “You want to come over so you can see too, Lila?”

  “Yeah, Lila. Come see,” Kiana said.

  “That’s Miss Guidry. To both of you.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” they said in unison, and both of them busted up.

  “I can tell I’m going to have to separate you. Y’all both know it’s impolite to gang up on someone like that.” I settled down in a desk where I could view the screen with them. The screen was full of bullet points.

  “What do you see here that could be a business?” Max asked her. She pointed to “likes to clean house.”

  “I could do a housecleaning business.”

  He nodded. “Yes. But can you find
enough clients fast enough within walking distance of your house to earn the money in time?”

  “Nope. Nobody around has money to pay someone for that.”

  “What else?”

  “Can I be a professional TV watcher? That sounds like a good gig.”

  “No, because if that was a job, my little brother would already be doing it,” I told her.

  “You kind of take the fun out of stuff, Miss Guidry.”

  “Aw, man, and I thought I was the fun teacher.”

  She sniffed. “You’re all right.”

  “What about books?” Max asked. “You have so much book stuff on here. There has to be a way to make that pay.”

  “Maybe she could get paid for reviews,” I suggested. “Wait, no. I don’t think most reputable sites would pay for reviews because it wouldn’t be ethical. It’s probably a great way to score free books though. Librarians always want to know which books teens like. I bet if you set up a book review blog or YouTube channel, you’d have all kinds of authors wanting to send you free books.”

  “That’s going on my list,” Kiana said.

  “What list?”

  “My list of stuff I’m going to do. I’m putting it right after getting paid for watching TV.”

  “All right, smart aleck. Max is right. Let’s go back to talking about books. How do you make money from books?”

  “Write them,” Max said.

  “I have a couple friends who majored in creative writing. I’m going to guess based on their experiences that it’s a very long road that doesn’t pay well.”

  “Probably.”

  “Bookstores,” Kiana said. “As much as they’re always charging for books, they must be rolling in the dough.”

  “You think that’s bad, you should see how much it costs when you get to college,” Max said, even though I was making a slicing motion across my throat. I didn’t want him scaring her with stories of how expensive college could be. “Even the used textbooks are expensive.”

  “You have to buy your own schoolbooks at college? Here you only have to pay if you lose it, and half these fools take theirs home the first day, stick it on a shelf, and don’t look at them again until the last day when they gotta bring them back. Dummies. I always hope whoever had my book the year before was a dummy, because that’s how you get the books that still look good.”

  “Wait.” Max stared at Kiana, but he wasn’t exactly looking at her. He had disappeared in his head somewhere, like he had on my sofa Sunday night. Kiana shifted uncomfortably, and I held up a finger to indicate that she should wait a minute. Sure enough, he blinked and came back to us. “What if you set up a business buying and selling used textbooks?”

  She shrugged, unimpressed. “It’s hard to get over to LSU. Even with the buses, I don’t want to always be dragging big, old, heavy textbooks everywhere.”

  “Think online. You’ll still need to make some trips to the LSU bookstore to look at their used books to see what they’re selling them for, see if you can find those books online for less, and then sell them online yourself.”

  She frowned at him. “Sounds kind of boring. And besides, I barely figured out that selling schoolbooks was even a thing. Who knew people would want to buy stuff like that?”

  I laughed. “I don’t think anyone wants to buy them. They have to buy them.”

  Kiana’s fingers got busy again, this time drumming the top of her desk. “Have to, huh?” Only this time, instead of sounding appalled, she sounded thoughtful. “‘Have to’ is good for business, right?”

  A small smile tugged at Max’s lips, even though he was half distracted clicking around on the Internet. “‘Have to’ tends to be very good for business, yes.”

  “I like getting the new books from dummies, but if I had to be buying those things? Uh-uh. I’d be buying the cheapest, most beat-up books I could find, no question.”

  “Look at this,” Max said. “This is an online search for textbook prices. I picked this accounting book, and it costs almost a hundred dollars new. If you buy it used, in poor condition, it’s still twenty-five dollars.”

  “Crazy,” Kiana muttered.

  “Maybe, but it’s the kind of crazy someone’s making money off of. May as well be you.” He clicked through the different copies for sale from different vendors, having Kiana write down the range in prices for books listed in the same condition from poor to excellent. When they’d gathered data for a few different kinds of books, he sat back and regarded her. “You like math as much as you like history?”

  “I don’t like history,” she said, glaring at me and refusing to give me a crumb. “I hate it less than other subjects.”

  I smothered a smile.

  “Do you hate math less than other stuff too?” he asked, his patience unshaken.

  “I guess.”

  “Then wrap your brain around the numbers you wrote down, and see if you can come up with an angle for a business. I’ll let you think about it while I step outside with Li—Miss Guidry for a minute.”

  “You know what the word euphemism means?” Kiana asked with a sly grin. “Because I do. You go right ahead and ‘step outside.’ I’ll do math.”

  “Kiana!”

  Max laughed and pulled me out of my seat and to the hallway. “You can’t kiss me here,” I whispered.

  “Settle down, Miss Needs-Some-Loving. That’s not why I brought you out here. I have an idea I want to run past you.”

  “Hit me.”

  “What would you think about me arranging some financing for her that she’d have to pay back? I know there are organizations out there that do microfinance-type loans, and she’s going to need some money to buy some of the equipment she needs. Why not set this up so it’s an ongoing income stream for her, a business she runs herself, where she can pay for her project, keep doing the business to pay for the loan, then keep it open as long as it benefits her?”

  “That’s a pretty big financial obligation. I was thinking about trying to find a grant, plus a donated laptop, and all that.”

  “Are you going to be able to find a grant in time? She needs to start making money now, and we can connect her to someone who can make the loan immediately. It’s an obligation, yes, but I had to take this whole microfinance class at Wharton, and it’s fascinating what kind of a difference it makes in lives. Wouldn’t it be better to have her work for it? Wait, public school teachers are usually Democrats, right? Are you about to yell at me for my conservative ideals?”

  I pinched him. “I’m a registered independent. I vote with whoever has the best ideas. This is a really good one. But I’m still worried that we don’t understand the kind of chaos that runs her life, and I don’t want to put her in a position where she’s ruining her credit right out of the gate because forces she can’t control wreck her ability to do this business.”

  “I get that. But microfinance loans are typically geared with highly favorable terms for the borrower and are pretty generous in forgiving debt. If something goes wrong, I’ll personally guarantee the loan so it can’t bounce back on her, but let’s not tell her that, okay? I think she has to feel like this is all on her to pull off, that we’re only here to point her in the direction of possibilities, not to save her.”

  “You’re really excited about this.”

  He shrugged, but the casual gesture didn’t fool me. His body almost hummed with energy. “This is fun. Doing any job day in, day out can feel like a grind. This takes me back to business school and sitting at the edge of possibility each time we planned a project to take the world by storm.”

  “All right. I say we do it.”

  “Cool. I’ll go explain it to her right now.”

  By the time Kiana left another hour later, she looked dizzy, but she’d also rationed out more smiles than usual. She’d figured out where she wanted to tackle the textbook resale business, and she’d committed to writing a business plan based on some templates Max showed her. By the time Max walked out to go back to work for a c
ouple of hours, it was all I could do not to wrap myself around him and beg him not to leave, or if he did, to take me with him.

  He’d slung his backpack over his shoulder and glanced toward the door. “Am I allowed to hug you good-bye before I leave?”

  “Maybe you’re not allowed to leave.”

  “Now, there’s a change I like. You’re usually trying to throw me out of somewhere.”

  I glanced toward the door before getting high enough on my tiptoes to steal a lightning fast kiss from him. “No more throwing you out, I promise.”

  His eyes darkened, and he slid his arms around for a hug that was probably longer than it should have been for as many students as were still on campus. I didn’t care. “Promises like that make me want to promise that I’ll never leave, but I really do have to go back to work.”

  “Go,” I said, stepping back. “I understand.”

  He dropped a kiss on my forehead and walked out with a wave. I walked to my desk and settled behind it, grinning. Even though our meeting was ending, the air vibrated with new beginnings.

  Chapter 22

  It might be boring to say, but I love routines. There is a comfort and security in knowing what to expect. My classroom ran better with routines, and so did my life. But I’d never had a routine as good as the one Max and I had fallen into. He and the Lewises were a part of every Sunday, and Monday nights too sometimes, if Mom decided to have family home evening. Sitting together at church had gone from feeling like a major commitment to the way church was meant to be spent. During the week, we were at each other’s houses most nights, him plowing through work stuff while I graded. My favorite nights were when I had to plan a new lesson and he helped pull together whatever crazy props or supplies I needed to make the lesson happen or when he was bouncing ideas for work off me or asking me how I’d deal with an office conflict he was experiencing.

  A couple of nights each week we worked on stuff for the singles conference, which was going awesome. It only took four days to sell enough tickets to ensure we could cover the cost of the boat.