The Founder (Trillionaire Boys' Club Book 7)

by Aubrey Parker

  “Because it looks bad if you don’t?”

  “Because I want to see the look on Mr. Cohen’s face when he sees that I let you ride up front.”

  “Am I going to get you in trouble?”

  Curtis scoffs as if this is the most ridiculous idea ever.

  “Curtis?” I say, just as he’s preparing to exit.

  He looks back at me, politely waiting.

  “Why are we here?”

  “Because the plane’s here.” He tilts his head. A white jet, too small to be anything but private, is thirty feet away, its door lowered and steps waiting.

  “But why is the plane here?”

  “Because this is where the runway is.”

  Curtis grins, and I know I shouldn’t bother asking any more questions. He’ll just keep fucking with me.

  I wait for Curtis to come around, then do my best to step out like a Hollywood starlet hitting the red carpet. I wouldn’t bother except that I’ve caught movement in the corner of my eye and I know that Evan is at the top of the plane’s steps.

  “Madam,” Curtis says, loud enough for Evan to hear.

  “Jeeves,” I reply.

  Curtis closes the door. I take two steps then turn back and whisper, “Am I supposed to tip you?”

  “It’s not a prom limo, Miss Rebecca.” He smiles wider. “And besides, if you sit up front, it ruins all the pretense — tipping included.”

  I nod my thanks. Then I walk toward the plane, taking in Evan’s attire. Black suit, crisp white shirt, collar erect with no tie. Fortunately, I dressed to match. And, if the appreciative look on his face is any indication, I dressed to kill.

  My charade breaks at the steps. I look up at him. He’s at the bottom, hand out to take mine. I glance at the jet.

  “I don’t like flying.”

  “You will in this.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “LA.”

  “You said we were going to dinner.”

  Evan snaps his fingers as if remembering something forgotten. “Oh. That’s right. I’m so stupid. Luckily, there are lots of restaurants in LA.” The hand again beckons for mine. “Come aboard, fly girl.”

  I look around. We’re alone.

  “Don’t I need to go through security?”

  “Let me guess. First time flying private?”

  “Is security not a thing?”

  “And first time in a limo, I guess.”

  I look back at Curtis. He’s still standing at the car, beside the front door I shouldn’t have come out of. He’s smiling at both of us.

  “Oh, no. I do that all the time.”

  I finally let Evan take my hand. This whole thing should bother me; but for some reason, it doesn’t. I’m a cat with her claws removed. A bee determined not to use her stinger. A snake with no venom.

  Devo and the “Safety Dance” disarmed me.

  All of that vigorous Coming on Eileen.

  Evan leads me up the narrow staircase. We enter the cabin, and I’m shocked to see that it looks like an awesome living room shoved into a narrow tube. The seats are massive, soft-looking things with rising footrests. There’s a double-width couch and a few little tables. The curtain dividers — open now but closable like those on a commercial plane — are something from an elegant parlor, thick and lustrous. Sconces on the curved walls are better than the ones in my home. By a factor of a hundred.

  “Like it?” Evan asks.

  “I’ve seen better.”

  I should by suspicious of my playful tone, but I’m not. In other worlds, this would be called “playful banter.” But I distrust banter of any sort, because I’m never an good at it. You know who is? Steve. Every time I let myself play back with him, I was letting my guard down. Those nights always ended either mediocre, or downright terrible. He’d play the player, and I’d play the idiot sidekick.

  But now, meant for Evan, silly words come naturally.

  I should watch myself.

  I’m flirting.

  With Evan — a guy I’ve promised myself I’d keep at a distance for reasons of professionalism.

  “Have a seat,” he says.

  “No champagne?”

  I was joking, but before I finish my sentence, a woman arrives with a bottle. I guess she’s a flight attendant, but I’m used to them wearing Delta blue. This one looks like a model. The kind of woman that guys drool over. But Evan’s eyes, after noticing her arrival, train on me.

  “Sorry, no. I forgot to request it. But can I interest you in this nice Château Lafite?”

  “It’s a step down from my usual White Zinfandel,” I say.

  “Clearly.”

  “Got any sangria?”

  “I think they have juices and fruit, but I’m pretty sure if we make sangria from the Lafite, the plane will be fallen upon by angry wine snobs.”

  “That’s okay. They have tiny little nerd arms.”

  There’s a moment. I’m suddenly self-conscious of my flirting, afraid I’m crossing that line. We already had sex. I think about it all the time. I want more, a lot more. But I’ve made the wrong choices far too many times.

  “So?” Evan says, indicating the flight attendant’s bottle.

  “No, thanks.”

  I don’t want to be impaired any more than my endorphins have already made me. I’m wearing a pretty dress and heels as if for a date and I’m on a billionaire’s private jet headed to what I’m sure will be a ludicrously expensive dinner in LA. The engines are already firing, coming alive outside the windows. It won’t be a short affair. By the time we get there, eat, and come back, it’ll probably be six or seven hours. Seems logical for me to go along with this, if I intend to stay distant.

  But there’s more than this pull I feel toward Evan — the pull I’m doing my best to be a big girl and resist. I’m also curious. Evan left our lunch like a man rushing to a fire, saying he needed to think. I know that whatever the past weeks of non-action have been leading up to, it’s finally starting to happen. And as the other person present in those weeks, I couldn’t be more curious.

  Evan waves the attendant away. She raises the steps, seals the plane’s door, then vanishes. I don’t know where she’s tucked herself. It’s like a magic trick, how she leaves us alone.

  I’m aware of our solitude, feeling a nervous need to fill the silence with words. But then there’s a sound, and the cockpit opens. I see a man and a woman in crisp white uniforms.

  “All buttoned up back there?” says the woman, the pilot.

  Evan raises his eyebrows at me as if to ask.

  “What?” I say. “None of this?” I start making stewardess gestures, indicating the positions of the cabin exits and the location of the air masks, which I should always remember to put on myself before assisting others.

  “Not unless you want me to ask Jenelle to make something up.”

  “But how will I know what to do in the unlikely event of a water landing?”

  Evan addresses the pilot. “We’re good to go.”

  The door closes. Then, surprising me, the flight attendant appears and closes a second door I hadn’t seen, hidden behind the curtains. Apparently, the curtains are meant for decoration rather than dividing the room. This is a private jet. Of course there’s a door.

  Now we really are alone. The jet moves without hesitation. This is how the one percent travel, no need for the bullshit I’ve gotten used to.

  The runway.

  Speed.

  I’m pressed back into my seat. I don’t like flying, private or not.

  My leg bobs up and down: a nervous tic.

  But Evan’s hand settles atop my hand, gripping the armrest. After that my anxiety departs and a pleasant, frightening sensation replaces it.

  We’re off the ground, into the unknown blue.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  REBECCA

  “WHAT’S BROKEN IN THIS COUNTRY?” Evan asks without preamble. There have been perhaps three quiet minutes between us, and in those minutes, I’ve
watched the ground below retract as if it’s moving instead of us. At some point, Evan’s hand has left mine. Now that my nerves have calmed from takeoff, he must not think I want it there. He’s wrong.

  I turn to look. I have to repeat the question in my head because it came as such a non-sequitur.

  “Other than social programs, poverty, the tax system, and the government, what’s broken?” Evan goes on.

  “You know you love your rich guy tax breaks, don’t lie.”

  Evan waits for my real answer.

  “Healthcare,” I finally say.

  “What else?”

  “Politics.”

  “No.”

  “War.”

  “No.”

  “The environment.”

  Evan looks bored. “You’re bad at this.”

  “Hey, give me a break! A lot of shit sucks right now.”

  “Education,” Evan says.

  “What’s broken in education?”

  “All of it,” Evan says. “Did you go to college?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did it cost?”

  “Dunno. Thirty to fifty grand, something like that? My dad paid before I told him to fuck off.”

  “What was your major?”

  “Civil engineering.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I’m a woman of many talents.”

  Evan seems to need a moment. But then he says, “How much engineering do you do in your work today?”

  “Only a little. Like, thirty percent of my day is spent engineering, max.”

  I guess I’m not out of snark after all. Evan rolls with my joke by ignoring it.

  “So you don’t use your fifty-thousand dollar education.”

  “I guess not, but at cocktail parties when soil mechanics come up, watch out.”

  “How about high school?”

  “What about it?”

  “What did you learn in high school that you use today?”

  “Writing.”

  Evan waves me off. “Don’t pretend that what you do today was what they taught you in school. You learned from experience. From reading.”

  “What’s your argument, that school is pointless?”

  “Not pointless. Broken. Some school systems have figured pieces of it out, but most are teaching by rote. According to an antiquated system, and an outdated model of how humans think, learn, and interact. Education today is simply an iterated version of education from the 1700s and earlier.”

  “Which schools have figured it out? Montessori?”

  “Any with an element of self-direction for sure. Montessori is on that list. As are some of the more progressive schools. A few of the public and private traditional institutions — and there are a bunch in Austin like this — get parts of it. But the issue is bigger than the systems themselves. No one system of education is right because it depends on the learner and the teacher. Different students have varying levels of motivation, self-direction, and interests. And within certain tribes of thought, there are right and wrong ways of doing things. Consider unschooling. I like the idea: kids are left to find their way and learn what interests them. But it varies widely by application. Some kids thrive because they can self-direct, while others need help. And because parents are the closest things to teachers that unschooled kids get, its success is dependent on the parent. Some parents unschool well because they understand what it requires and how to support their students. Others are lazy. Letting the child lead, in those cases, was their way of justifying their abdication of parental responsibility. I’m sorry, but I don’t see how letting your kid eat cake every day for breakfast if that’s what he chooses as educational. It’s neglect.”

  I listen through Evan’s analysis, intrigued. This all feels out of the blue, coming from LiveLyfe’s founder.

  “I thought about all of this when I was going through it myself,” Evan continues. “I was a really good student in high school, and I did well in college. But in this … well, this group I’m part of, there are a lot of rich men and women. I’d say maybe half were decent in school, no more. Many dropped out of high school. Others failed. Almost all of us, if assessed, would probably turn out to have ADHD. It takes an odd mind to succeed. So, to my questions about your education, Becca: all jokes aside, how much of what you learned do you even remember?”

  “Lots, I imagine. I know how to do math and read and write and I know the history of the USA.”

  “When was the Louisiana Purchase signed?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know.”

  “What even was the Louisiana Purchase, exactly?”

  “That doesn’t prove your point. Not knowing specifics doesn’t mean the education was a waste.”

  Evan holds up a finger. “I didn’t say it was a waste. I said it was broken. But what about math, Becca? You took a lot of math if you majored in engineering. Do you remember how to use the cosine law?”

  “I’d have to look it up.”

  “What about linear algebra? Integrating trigonometric functions?”

  “I guess I’m not the only engineer in the plane.”

  Evan swivels his big, plush recliner to face mine. He’s leaning forward. His intensity is magnetic. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone talk as passionately as Evan is talking now. And I think, I did this? Somehow, I got him thinking this way?

  “You don’t remember it, do you?” he says.

  “Of course not. But that doesn’t mean—”

  “It does,” he says, raising a hand, cutting me off. “Schooling still relies on a metaphor of storage. Kids are treated like memory banks, and the goal through twelve grades and beyond, in this country at least, is to jam their heads with all sorts of facts and trivia. It’s meaningful that you don’t remember the details because that was the point. They tried to give you a textbook mind, but you ended up with practical knowledge. You distilled all that education down into the parts that are relevant for you today.”

  “So, it worked.”

  Evan laughs. “Hardly.”

  “What’s the solution, as you see it?”

  “Well, that’s what you got me thinking about.”

  Time to voice my earlier question. “Me? How did I get you thinking?”

  “You got me asking a new question. I’ve been looking for my next big thing, and I’ve always felt this way about education. It’s a behemoth built upon its own back. Self-contained and inefficient. A house of cards. The entire system only exists to recycle itself.”

  “I didn’t talk about any of that,” I say.

  “No, but you asked me what I’d do if I could start over. Do you know why I created LiveLyfe in the first place?”

  I shake my head. The popular media probably knows this story, but I’ve never heard it.

  “It was supposed to be a study aid. I made the first seeds of it for myself, and when my friends saw it, they asked if I could get them a copy. Making copies didn’t make sense; it made more sense to turn my system into a network. That would allow us to pool our resources and learn as a group. Our own little cloud of crowdsourced intelligence.”

  “How did it become a social network?”

  Evan shrugs. “It’s how the wind blew. As word spread, more and more people wanted in, so I added them. Then I hired someone to add them, then two people. Before I knew it, I had a staff. Something had to pay for them all, so LiveLyfe started to lean in the commercial direction you see today. The users, once they spread beyond my little pool of friends, didn’t use the curriculum modules. They shared personal photos and bulletins rather than scanning in notes and sharing academic data. I knew what I was doing. I’m proud of what LiveLyfe became. But it’s gone far from its original intention: a solution to my problems with education.”

  “I don’t understand your solution.”

  “Individualization,” Evan said. “We need a system that understands each student. It can’t be prescriptive. Rather than cramming all that crap into your head, wouldn’t it have been great if a
mentor could have known what you’d retain and need, who lean into your strengths? Given you the right lessons at the right time, tailored to you? Looking to other mentors — maybe even buying your way into business mastermind groups, seeing as you turned out to be such a brilliant communicator and guerrilla businesswoman?”

  “Great idea,” I tell Evan. “But it’s not scalable. Schools don’t have the resources to do that. It would take one teacher per student, and it’d have to be an excellent teacher, with tons of resources.”

  “You’re right,” Evan says. “Schools can’t do it. But better AI can.”

  “AI? You mean artificial intelligence?”

  Evan looks at a clock on the wall, then laughs.

  “Okay. This flight is only twenty minutes old. I’ve just beaten you with ideas for fifteen minutes solid. Maybe we should take a break. Talk about something else.”

  I see his logic, but I have so many questions. I didn’t care when he started talking. Evan’s passion is infectious. I’m there with him now, my hyperactive brain on fire. I’m like the people he described: functional but crazy, brain-damaged in all the right ways. The people who move the world are far from normal, and for a change, I feel like one of them. Like I belong.

  I want to ask a hundred questions. Will he try to build another LiveLyfe, but stick with his original vision? What role am I supposed to play, if this is still co-created: marketer? Connector? Influencer? I’m good at those things, even if I’ve thus far spent my talents making fun of Steve’s penis. And now, I can see it. My usual lack of confidence is gone. Listening to Evan, I feel like we could do this. Maybe I’m not the idiot Steve told me I was. Maybe my high energy and distraction is an asset, not a disability.

  The feeling Evan gives me is addictive, but I see his point about stopping. My head is already full. I look back out the window. “How long is the flight?”

  “Two hours?”

  I nod. I can see the ground because there are few clouds. I’m usually terrified to be this high up, but something about Evan’s presence has made that better, too.

  “What should we talk about, then?”

  “Wine,” he says, pressing the call button.