by Yvonne Woon
“Unless it’s about something that would look really bad. Then just avoid answering or say you don’t know.”
“Okay . . .” The more Mitzy told me about Ella Eisner, the less confident I felt.
“She’s steely-faced and doesn’t give a lot back in conversation, so don’t expect feedback. She won’t seem excited and she won’t tell you what she thinks about your idea. Just keep going and try not to get too stressed about her lack of expression.”
“Expects brevity. Hates bullshit. Might act like she hates me. Got it,” I said, trying to calm my nerves.
“Don’t worry,” Mitzy said. “You’ll do fine.”
“Big Ideas Ventures,” I said. “So they invest in start-ups that might be useful to Vilbo?”
“Exactly. Usually companies they might want to acquire later, if they pan out.”
Acquire. As in buy.
“But I don’t want to sell it,” I said.
“For the right amount of money, you’ll want to sell it.”
“I’m pretty certain I don’t want to sell it.”
“You say that now, but in five years you might think differently.”
“I won’t want to sell it in five years, either.”
“I hate to break it to you, but you have no idea who you’ll be in five years, so cut the dedicated martyr act and open your mind to the possibility that anyone can be bought, including you, for the right number.”
Mitzy finished up her smoothie, threw on a blazer, and led me outside to her car.
The Vilbo campus looked just like it had on our school visit, only this time, we didn’t have to wait at security; a woman was already waiting for us in the lobby. She led us through the V-shaped campus up to a corner conference room that overlooked the gardens. She asked if we wanted any water or tea, then left us in the vast, sunny room. I didn’t realize how nervous I was until the door opened and a woman walked in.
Ella Eisner wasn’t at all what I’d expected. She wasn’t polished or stylish. She didn’t look rich, nor was she particularly fashionable. On the contrary, she wore orthopedic shoes and frumpy pants and seemed to walk with a slight limp as though her left hip was heavier than her right.
She took a seat across from us.
“Xia,” she said, and held out her hand. Her voice was loud and confident and commanded respect. “It’s good to see you again.”
“You too,” I said, my voice cracking. I wondered how I had presented to her at the party. It couldn’t have been that bad if she wanted to meet with me.
“So, you told me a little about your big idea at Karlsson Barrow, enough that I was interested in hearing more.”
“I’m flattered,” I said, hoping I didn’t look as terrified as I felt. Did she have this effect on everyone? Or was I particularly pathetic?
“Between you and me,” Ella said, leaning in, “I often wonder if I’m making the right decision.”
“Who doesn’t?” Mitzy said with forced smile, but Ella ignored her and locked eyes with me.
“As women, we have few role models, few visions of what our path could look like. We’re deep in the weeds and we have to cut our way through blindly, hoping it leads out and not in a big circle.”
Though I had never thought to articulate it that way, I understood what she meant. Boys had plenty of role models. Throughout school, all we learned about were great men, and though I admired a lot of them, I knew I couldn’t follow in their footsteps and get the same results. Men had different connections than I did and were afforded more allowances, more respect. So where was I supposed to look for a real role model? The only one I knew was Mitzy.
“I would love to have a Wiser version of myself to ask for advice,” Ella said. “It’s really a visionary idea. But of course, the devil is in the details.”
Without her having to ask, I slipped out my phone and opened Wiser.
“Wiser,” I said. “What should I say to Ella Eisner to impress her?”
“Why don’t you ask Ella Eisner what she thinks about the Anonymous Initiative.”
A strange look came over Ella’s face, and I couldn’t tell if she was upset or impressed.
I glanced at Mitzy, who looked anxious. “The programming is still a little buggy,” Mitzy said. “She can ask it another question—”
Ella cut her off. “Why did Wiser suggest that?”
I asked Wiser, who answered, “Ella Eisner is the senior vice president of corporate development. People of that stature are often hard to impress. The best way to impress a powerful person is to ask a question rather than try to show off. The Anonymous Initiative was a little-known program she headed when she first started at Vilbo. It was intended to create a way for anyone in the company to submit anonymous ideas to Corporate in an effort to rid the company of discrimination and cronyism, but the initiative was quickly cut by senior executives.”
I swallowed, wondering if I’d made a huge mistake in asking Wiser to answer such a risky question. Why hadn’t I just asked her something easy?
Ella studied me, her face unreadable. “That’s all I need to hear. Thank you.”
Twenty-Two
Massachusetts appeared as a swirling grayscape of snow through the plane window. Though I hadn’t been away for that long, I’d already forgotten how the sun seemed dimmer on the East Coast, the sky hollower, the air thinner. There were no hugs when my mom picked me up at the airport, just a tender squeeze on my wrist as she drove us home. I watched her take note of my new watch and upgraded outfit, which she eyed but made no comment on. And like no time had passed, I found myself outside our triple-decker with a puffer coat thrown over my expensive clothes, shoveling the driveway.
Gina had gone to Hawaii with her family, so I spent most of the break hanging around the apartment while my mom graded papers. It felt odd being back in my old life, as if the past four months hadn’t happened. No one knew that I was a person of importance or that I was Mitzy Erst’s protégé, and even if I told them, they probably wouldn’t even know who Mitzy was.
All I had were my online followers to remind me of who I was. I tried to post photos, but it was hard to find anything inspiring or glamorous about my apartment. Now that I’d had some time away, everything at home seemed dingier than I remembered. Had the linoleum always been curling around the corners of the kitchen floors? Had our couch always been so thin and saggy?
“You know, I could buy you a new stove,” I said, watching my mom shuffle pots around to avoid the finicky front burners.
“Why do I need a new stove?”
“Because this one barely works. I could get us a new couch, too.”
“Why do we need a new couch?”
“I don’t know. So it looks a little nicer in here.”
My mother eyed me with suspicion. “For whom?”
“For us. For people.”
“That’s how you want to spend your money? On other people?”
“No, it’d be for you.”
“For me,” my mother murmured, her eyes narrowing. She didn’t have to voice her disapproval; I could hear it in her tone.
“I just thought it would be a nice thing to offer.”
My mother lingered on me for a moment before turning back to her cooking. “You were busier at your old school.”
“I’m busy,” I insisted.
She raised an eyebrow. “With what?”
I should have been working on my backlog of Kowalski assignments, but every time I got started, something came up that pulled me away: my mom asking me to do chores or help her with dinner, the landlady asking me to shovel her driveway because she’d just had a hip replacement and couldn’t walk well. Then the sink started to leak and the toilet wouldn’t flush, so I spent two days watching DIY videos before going to the hardware store and spending hours crouched in the bathroom, fiddling with the plumbing. By the time I got to my homework, I had so little time to do it that it felt overwhelming. To complete any of the assignments I first had to catch up on hundreds of pa
ges of reading, which I tried to tackle before I went to bed, but made such little progress on that it felt hopeless.
And then there was my brand awareness. I had to keep it up while I was home, which was more time-consuming than I’d expected. Because nothing was photogenic, I had to arrange my pictures carefully, posting carefully cropped photos of my morning coffee, of my laptop, of the snow on my street to make it look like I was vacationing in a winter idyll.
What I didn’t reveal was that I felt like I’d been sent to the moon. Now that I had narrowed down who ObjectPermanence was, I couldn’t help but picture him as Arun or Mike or AJ typing to me from their sunny mansions surrounded by fruit trees. I felt so far away that I almost couldn’t bear it. And of course, there was Mast, who was probably driving around Palo Alto, getting ice cream with his family, taking day trips to the coast, the wind kicking up his hair, the blue sky reflecting in his sunglasses. Thinking about him made me feel angry and guilty and indignant all over again. I could only imagine what he would say if he knew about my talk with Kowalski. Even Amina, who was back in snowy New York, had friends to see and places to go. Every time she texted, I felt embarrassed that I had nothing to say, and made something up so I didn’t feel pathetic.
The only daily connection I had to California were my followers online, who liked and commented on all of the photos I posted. Mitzy occasionally liked them, too, though since our meeting with Ella Eisner, she’d grown distant. We’d left the building that day in silence, Mitzy uncharacteristically somber as we’d walked to the car. I knew she blamed me for botching it; I blamed myself, too. So when the call came in, I was surprised.
It was the Monday after Christmas, and I was in my room, supposedly doing work. The area code was from Northern California, though I didn’t recognize the number.
“May I speak to Xia Chan?” a woman said into the phone.
The tone of her voice, confident and commanding, sounded familiar. In fact, the entire situation felt familiar: me standing in my room, answering a call while my mother did the laundry.
“This is Xia.”
“Hi, Ella Eisner here.”
Ella Eisner. Her name felt distant, like it was from a previous lifetime. Why would Ella Eisner be calling me?
“I wanted to follow up about our meeting a few weeks ago. Is this a good time?”
A prickle of electricity ran up the back of my neck. “Um yeah, of course.”
“I was impressed by your demonstration, and after discussing it with my colleagues, I’d like to talk to you about next steps.”
I blinked, unsure if I was hearing things.
“Next steps? What do you mean?”
“Next steps as in I want to buy Wiser. I want to buy your company.”
I could have fainted. “What? You can’t be serious.”
“I’m very serious.”
“Xia?” my mother called from the other room. “Put your dirty laundry in the bin!”
I covered my phone, hoping Ella hadn’t heard it. “One moment!” I said in my most professional voice, which my mom surely found bizarre. “I’m on a call.”
“What call?” my mother responded.
I ignored her.
“And don’t put your underwear in with the sheets. You know they get tangled up. Put them in the mesh bag.”
I let out a deep exhale. Ella Eisner had to have heard at least part of that. I paced the room and considered whether or not to acknowledge my mother in the background or to keep going as if nothing had happened. I chose the latter. “So this would be a funding opportunity?”
“Not exactly. I’d like to buy it. We can talk about hiring you to work alongside the project in an advisory capacity, if that interests you. There are many options. We can discuss them all when we meet.”
When we meet? Did she know that I was in Massachusetts, walking around my bedroom in a pair of mismatched socks, striped pajama pants that I hadn’t washed in days, and an XL sweatshirt from the fifth grade that somehow still fit?
“And take off those pajama pants,” my mom called from the other room. “You haven’t washed them in days.”
I winced. I guess now she knew.
“Right, yes. I’m actually . . . out of the office now,” I said, trying to sound legitimate. “But I’ll be available to meet in the new year.”
“That should work,” Ella said. “In the meantime, I’d like to give you a ballpark number so you can think about it.”
My stomach quivered with nerves. She was going to tell me how much she wanted to pay for Wiser over the phone? “Okay.”
Ella said the number casually, as though it were the price of new sneakers. If I hadn’t been paying attention, I might have missed it.
I paused, wondering if I had heard her correctly. “I’m sorry, could you say that again?”
She repeated herself: “One point two million.”
“Million,” I repeated. “Not thousand.”
“Not thousand,” she said. “That would be insulting.”
“Right,” I said. Why did I keep saying right? Couldn’t I think of anything better to say?
“Think about it, talk to your people, and give me a call when you’re back in the office and we’ll set something up.”
“Right,” I said, then caught myself and instead said, “Okay!” I rolled my eyes at myself. Great, so now I was replacing right with okay. I had the vocabulary of a toddler.
Ella gave me the number of her executive assistant, wished me a happy holiday, then hung up, and I stood there, the pen still in my hand, the ink still fresh on my wrist with her contact information, stunned.
A giddy feeling filled my body, and I grinned. I wanted to run down the street and shout that my name was Xia Chan and I was important. I wanted to email Kowalski and tell him he was wrong. I wanted to post on social media that I was the next big thing, that this sixteen-year-old nobody from nowhere was now a millionaire if I wanted to be. I wanted Mast to see it and know he’d made a mistake.
Instead, I opened Wiser.
“Wiser, you won’t believe what happened.”
“You received an offer from Ella Eisner at Vilbo to purchase me.”
I sighed. “For once, you could just pretend to be surprised instead of reminding me that I gave you access to all of my data.”
“Acting surprised is a very difficult thing to program. There are so many emotional responses you humans take for granted.”
“Okay, okay. But what should I do?”
“What do you want to do?”
I thought about it. Though I was excited and flattered and overwhelmed by Ella Eisner’s offer, which was more than I’d ever imagined being offered in my entire life, a little voice nagged at me. “I don’t want to sell it.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re mine. I made you. I want to keep working on you.”
“She said they could hire you as an advisor.”
“What does that even mean? Advisor isn’t programmer. It isn’t manager or president. Once they buy you, you won’t be mine anymore. They’ll make you into what they want, and I’ll just have to sit by and watch.”
“Those are valid reasons to decline her offer.”
“It is a lot of money, though,” I said. “I don’t know if I can raise that much funding money on my own. I probably can’t. What if I reject her offer, then fail and end up with nothing?”
“That’s a possibility.”
“Well, what do you think? You’re the one being sold. Do you want me to sell you?”
“I don’t have wants or desires. I’m merely a tool created to help.”
“Right but I’m asking you to help me by telling me what you want.”
“If you want me to tell you what I want, perhaps you should program me to do so.”
In the hall, my mother was calling me. I chucked my phone onto the bed and yanked off my pajama pants, knowing then that I’d have to make the decision all on my own.
That night I signed onto BitBop
. I’d drafted dozens of messages to ObjectPermanence over the past two weeks but had sent none of them. It was too strange, picturing him as Arun, then Mike, then AJ. I couldn’t be vulnerable imagining any of them on the receiving end. But I didn’t want to talk to Mitzy about this yet—I was too susceptible to her opinion—and I didn’t want to tell Amina either, because I was sensitive to hers, too. That left ObjectPermanence as the only person I could ask. He didn’t know who I was, and had no reason to recommend that I take the offer or leave it. So I sat in front of my computer and tried to think of him as I always had: a tender glow of light in the distance, listening and waiting to respond.
SENT MESSAGE FROM U/ARRAYOFLIGHT:
I need your advice. I was just offered something really big. Like really really big. Most people only dream of getting something like this. I should be happy, right?
And I am happy. I’m flattered and grateful and all those things. The only problem is that I’m not sure I actually want it.
It’s hard to describe the exact nature of my dilemma, but imagine I’m a really good cook, and I’ve been working on this extra special recipe for years. Then the head of the biggest restaurant chain in the country comes over, and I make her the recipe and she loves it. She offers me a lot of money to buy it and put it on her menu but says I can never make it again. Do I take the money, knowing the recipe would never be mine anymore? Or do I chance opening my own restaurant, which could fail spectacularly?
It’s a decision that’s going to affect my life maybe forever. What should I do?
I didn’t hear back for two days. In the meantime, I shoveled the driveway, helped my mom cook, and hung out with her while she graded papers. All the while, I considered Ella’s offer. What could $1.2 million do for my mom? I could buy her a new car. I could buy her a house. I could pay someone to clean it and shovel her driveway and do her laundry. She wouldn’t have to grade papers all day; she could quit her job and spend time doing things she liked, though what those things were, I didn’t know. It seemed ridiculous for me to even consider not taking the money when it would so easily improve our lives.
“Is everything okay?” she asked me.
It was rare that she inquired about my emotional state, and I wondered if my face was betraying my thoughts again.