“So we rent them,” he said.
“Jesus Christ, we’ve gone over every freaking scenario and there is not one that is viable.” Amber waved her hands as if she tried not to swipe the whole set of papers off the table. “For. The. Last. Time. The numbers don’t work.”
“They will work,” Nick assured her. “They’ll work until the price point comes down.”
“But it doesn’t come down.” Her face was pale. She pulled a piece of paper out of the pile and didn’t even have to look to check which one it was. That alone showed him how many times she’d been through this. “It’s like…it’s like making a bigger LED TV, si? The expensive part is making it, not the materials. And in our case, we gotta maintain them too. They need updates. They need regular checks to make sure they don’t turn someone’s brainstem into a Krispy Kreme—”
“There’s an image I’m never gonna be able to get out of my head,” he muttered.
“Nick, we need every one of these machines running at fifty dollars an hour, ten hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five simply to break even.” Her eyes had shadows under them, and he wondered when last she had slept. “And that’s the machines. That’s not renting the space to use them. It’s not the advertising or the tech support or the sales or the shipping or…” She sighed and said bitterly, “It’s an expensive toy.”
Nick’s eyebrows raised. He’d never heard her say something like this before and he was a little thrown. He scratched his ear and considered. “Uh…Amber.”
“What?” She didn’t look at him.
“Are you okay?” He folded his arms awkwardly over his chest. “You seem a little down.”
“What gave it away?” She looked at him with a flash of her trademark humor.
That made him feel a little better. His friend was still in there somewhere. He and Amber had met at MIT eight years before when she was dating Jacob, and although that relationship had broken up within a couple of weeks, the three of them had been inseparable since. They’d all gotten their first apartment together, helped each other through a string of job rejections, heartbreaks, and family disappointment, and—
Oh.
“Your parents called,” he said. “Didn’t they?”
Amber gave him a hollow-eyed look and blew out a breath.
Nick fiddled with one of the pieces of paper on the table. He didn’t like to say too much when it came to her parents because if he did, he’d end up saying things she didn’t like and she’d tell him he was only mad at his parents.
Which was true. His parents and hers were very much alike. Of the three of them, only Jacob had a family that supported his life choices. Nick and Amber, on the other hand, got regular calls about how they should go to grad school, or get married, or move back home.
She folded her arms to mirror his stance. “They said they put up with everything because I told them I would change the world,” she said bitterly. “And now, I’m making toys for rich kids.”
“Toys for…what does that even mean?” He rolled his eyes. “And what do they mean, put up with everything? What’s everything?”
“This.” She made a dismissive gesture at herself. At his frown, she sighed. “Oh, come on, like you haven’t noticed my mom always asking me if I have a man?”
“I thought that was merely what parents did,” he joked.
Amber tried to smile, but her heart wasn’t in it. “They don’t get me. God, I sound like I’m thirteen and writing bad poetry. But I thought…Nick, I thought they’d figure it out someday, you know? I wanted to go dirt bike racing for my Quinceañera. I never liked wearing skirts. I’ve told them since I was a kid that I didn’t want to have babies. I only…I always thought they would believe me someday.” She crossed one booted foot over her knee. “And now, the stupid thing is, they understand me enough to make it all hurt.”
“What d’you mean?” Nick leaned forward.
“I wanted to help people!” Her eyes were suspiciously bright. “I intended to write the programs that…I don’t know. I planned to work for people curing diseases. I was gonna cure diseases. And I thought maybe this would all get off the ground and I could go do that, you know?”
“You don’t want to do this?” He looked over his shoulder at the pods. “I thought you liked building this.”
“I did—I do! It’s not that!” She hunched her shoulders. “But it’s falling apart and now, I’ve spent four years doing something that’ll go down the tubes and I haven’t done any of the stuff I wanted to do and what can I even say to them? That—” She sighed.
“You know…” Nick cleared his throat. “My sister said to me not too long ago that making Mom and Dad happy wasn’t the price I had to pay to be happy myself.” He raised his eyebrows at her. “Maybe that’s worth—oh, hey, is that Jacob?”
A door had opened and closed at the front of the building.
“He said he’d be back when he could.” Amber straightened and her anxiety seemed to melt away into gladness.
This was one of the things Nick wished her parents could see about her. She was one of the kindest people he knew, so happy about her friends’ well-being that their good news could make her forget even total misery on her part.
But when Jacob walked into the room, it was clear that what he had to report wasn’t good news at all. He didn’t look like he’d slept in days and he had the air of someone walking through a nightmare.
“Jacob?” Nick tried to catch his friend’s eyes. “Uh…”
“Is everything okay?” Amber’s voice was a thread of sound.
Jacob looked at them and his eyes were bloodshot. From the momentary confusion on his face, he didn’t seem to remember how he’d wound up at the office. Nick pushed a chair toward him and went to start a pot of coffee. What the man really needed was sleep, but he wasn’t sure how soon that would happen.
“What’s wrong?” she asked gently. Over their friend’s head, her gaze locked with Nick’s. A week before, Jacob’s grandmother had suffered a stroke and there had been numerous close calls since then.
“They’re going to…” Jacob’s voice trailed off. “They have to…take her off life support.” His face crumpled as he said it and he bent forward over his legs, his arms wrapped tightly around his chest.
“I thought she was getting better,” Nick said quietly. “I thought the doctors said—”
“They did.” Jacob hadn’t moved. “But we don’t have time.”
Neither Amber nor Nick could make anything of this.
He straightened finally and his face was stricken. “The doctor says it could be weeks,” he managed to say. He saw the looks on their faces. “We can’t—it’s—” He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it to Amber.
Nick watched her eyebrows raise.
“Jesus Christ.” She shook her head. “This can’t be right. Five thousand dollars a day?”
Jacob remained silent.
“A day?” she mouthed again in Nick’s direction.
He came to look over her shoulder as he opened the coffee bag, and his jaw dropped. She wasn’t kidding. Between all the various services and scans and monitoring thus far, it was costing that much or more to keep Jacob’s grandmother in the hospital. He leaned closer.
“It kind of puts our price tag into perspective, doesn’t it?”
From the way she went still, he thought he’d fucked up enough to have another angry tirade in Spanish. But when she turned her head, there was something new in her eyes.
Hope.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, it does, doesn’t it?”
Nick stared at her for a moment before he straightened abruptly. “Oh, you can’t be serious.”
Amber had turned to look at the pods. “It’s climate-controlled,” she said carefully. “The oxygen levels can be adjusted. It’s made to allow easy monitoring of brain waves, heart rate, blood pressure… And what’s the one thing people have tried to figure out how to do for coma patients? Re-engage them. Wake them u
p. A game, an interactive game that breaks through all their outer perceptions—”
“You can’t be serious,” he said again and couldn’t seem to think at all. His mind whirled.
But Jacob had looked up with the first real human emotion they’d seen from him in days. “She could come here,” he said. “She could—she could come here. Guys, you’d do that for me?”
Amber began to laugh. “For you, for…anyone. Jacob, don’t you get it? If your family can’t afford this, how many other people can’t afford it?” She looked at Nick. “I’m not crazy, right? We found our target market.”
“And…” He slung an arm around her shoulders. “I don’t want to be too on the nose here, but it looks like you may have found a way to help people and cure diseases.”
“Holy shit.” Her eyes widened. “Okay, Mr. Hopeful Selling Person. You gotta get ready. We need to make a lot of calls, and you are the most personable one of us.”
Even Jacob laughed. “She’s right. She’s—hang on, my mom’s calling.” He stood and headed into the offices as he took the call. “What’s up, Mom? You won’t believe what we thought of.”
“We could do this.” Amber leaned on her chair and a smile broke through on her face. “We could actually do this!” She smacked the table. “Investors, ha. Who needs ʼem?” Then, she leaned sideways slightly. “Jacob?”
He stood in the doorway. “She, uh…she passed.” He slid his phone into his pocket. “She’s gone.”
“Jacob.” Nick stepped to his side and Amber joined them. “I’m so sorry, buddy. Why don’t we get you home? We’ll get a meal in you, see if your family needs help with anything—”
“No.” Jacob stood a little straighter. “They have it under control and we have work to do.”
“The quarterly statements can wait a while,” Amber said.
“No,” Jacob said. “Not that.” He looked at them. “There are so many people in ICUs all over the country right now. That means numerous families trying to find a way to pay for it. The sooner we get this thing up and running, the better.” He looked at Nick. “Start making calls.”
Chapter Two
“It’s a Valkyrie,” Tina said.
“Huh?” Justin looked at her in confusion.
“My tattoo?” She looked at her arm, where something peeked out from under her t-shirt. “I thought you were looking at my arm.”
In point of fact, he had stared into the middle of nowhere and wished he was literally anywhere else.
He hadn’t wanted to come on this date. His past experiences with dating hadn’t exactly inspired confidence, and there was something hopelessly awkward to him about striking up a conversation with someone he didn’t even know as if there were a simple, easy way to get from Point A to Point B.
Point B, of course, being marriage, babies, and a house with beige carpets.
Unfortunately, after several weeks of browbeating from his mother and dark comments from his father about how someone who couldn’t even afford his own apartment shouldn’t ignore simple requests from his parents, Justin was there and he did have to find something to say.
The amusing part of this was that however his parents had pictured Tina Castro, he was fairly sure it wasn’t anywhere close to reality. There was no way they would have gone from almost constantly getting on his case about his job, his prospects, and graduate school to setting him up with a woman who had worn ripped jeans and a sweatshirt out on a first date. They would expect…
Pearls, probably. And a nice sweater.
He could not imagine Tina in pearls and a sweater. He could imagine it even less when she waved her hand in front of his face. “Hellooooo?”
“Sorry.” Justin took a sip of his beer—which he’d forgotten was beer—choked, and pounded his fist on his chest a few times. “God, this sucks. I’m sorry you’re out with me.”
She gave him a curious look and took a sip of her beer. She spun the bottle in her hands as she looked at him. “You’re not what I expected,” she told him.
“I know,” he said with feeling. “Trust me, I know.”
“My mother made such a big deal of you on the phone,” she said and rolled her eyes. “‘Senator Williams’s son, Tina.’” She adopted a mocking falsetto. “Honestly? I pictured khakis and a polo with the collar flipped up.”
“Yeah, well.” He found a shred of humor. “So were my parents.”
Tina almost spat out her mouthful of beer. “So, it’s like that, is it? Interesting.”
Justin shrugged and hunched his shoulders. “I guess. Why’d you come out with me if you thought I was gonna be a tool?”
“I hadn’t planned to.” She looked around. “Then you suggested an arcade for our first date and I thought, ‘Huh. I wonder what’s up with this dude?’ So here I am.” She wiggled her fingers. “Of course, I kind of expected that if you intended to disappoint your parents, you’d really go for it.” One eyebrow arched.
He opened his mouth, realized he had nothing to say, and closed it.
“Oh, come on.” Tina shifted in her chair. “I should have—” She leaned back as the waiter set plastic baskets of jalapeno poppers and fries on the table. “Thanks,” she told him. When he was gone, she picked up a jalapeno popper and contemplated it before she took a bite. “I should have known our parents would only set us up if they were having trouble with both of us,” she said around the mouthful of food, “but I don’t get why you’re a problem.”
“Do you see khakis?” he asked, not entirely sure what was going on. He had no idea what she meant by going for it.
“No, but…where’s your mohawk? Where are your tattoos?” She squinted at him. “Did you knock up a gold-digging girlfriend or something?”
Justin snorted.
“So, not that.” Tina tapped her chin and made a show of looking skyward as she thought. “Ohhhh, you got high and crashed their car—nice, shiny Porsche SUV, right?”
“Lexus, actually.” He raised an eyebrow. “But no. I haven’t done either of those two things.”
“You haven’t gotten high? Jesus Christ. Okay, are they disappointed because you’re so boring?”
“Hey!” He had been having fun but he was now genuinely annoyed. “I’m not boring, okay? I do stuff. It’s simply that they don’t care about my stuff. I stream games. I’m damned good at it, too. And—” He saw the look on her face. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m a huge nerd, okay? So, why don’t you leave and think of something to tell our parents. Don’t worry, mine will be all too willing to believe I screwed it up.”
“Dude.” Tina set her beer down and looked at him. “I won’t walk away because you’re a nerd, okay?” She cleared her throat. “Look, I was…uh, making a joke. It didn’t work. My bad.” She held her pinky finger out. “No more bad jokes, pinky swear.”
Justin ignored her finger and took a sip of his beer. He merely wanted to be home. “Look, I’m not a drug-snorting, failing-out-of-school, bankrupt disappointment. I’m simply boring, okay? I never liked playing football and I didn’t bring home girlfriends with the hair and the nails and the purses and whatever. Honestly? My parents would probably be happier if I’d knocked up some chick.” He swirled his beer in the bottle.
His parents wouldn’t be happy, of course. They’d be furious. He’d get a huge lecture on how he was letting his father down and endangering the family’s livelihood. How a senator couldn’t afford to have that kind of thing going on in their family.
But at least they’d understand it. This—the streaming online, the video games—they didn’t get that at all.
“I know how it is,” Tina said after a moment. “I think…well, that my parents wish I was a little more boring. No drugs. No tattoos. No piercings.”
“You don’t have any piercings,” he said distractedly.
“Not that you can see.” When he looked up, she had a very smug look on her face.
Justin hoped it was dark enough that she couldn’t see his expression.
“My parents
freaked when they saw my first tattoo,” she said, apparently taking pity on him. “And it was so basic, too.” She held one hand up to show a tiny infinity symbol on the inside of her wrist. “I thought I was sooooo deep.” She paused. “I was sixteen. I probably don’t have to tell you that.”
Despite himself, he laughed.
“So, what about you?” She gave him a look. “Why haven’t you done any of that stuff?”
“What do you mean?”
“I meant what I said before. You’re a huge disappointment, apparently—so why not lean into it? Do all the shit you want to do that they wouldn’t approve of.” She raised an eyebrow.
Justin shrugged. “Like what, though?”
“I don’t know.” She frowned at him. “I mean…what’s the thing you’d do if there were no consequences?”
“Uh…” Justin tried to think of something and came up blank. “Buy a nice gaming setup? Oh, there was a chair I looked at a while back. It looked so damned comfortable. For real, this thing was amazing, all leather—”
“Oh, my God,” Tina said. She looked into the middle distance for a moment and seemed to come to a decision. “Okay, finish your beer.”
“What?”
“Right now. One drink. Finish it.” She folded her arms.
He was about to scoff at her but looked at his beer. It occurred to him that he’d never gone to any of the big parties at his prep school—those everyone snuck off-campus to. He’d heard stories, though, and always kind of wondered what was so fun about them.
Maybe this was his chance to find out. He tipped his head back and drank the beer in one gulp, wiped a stray drop from the corner of his mouth, and looked at her. “Okay, now what?”
“Now finish mine.” Tina pushed hers across the table. She gave a delighted laugh when she saw his face. “It’s gonna be good, I promise. Finish it—go on.”
It was easier to do the second time around. Justin drained the glass and put it on the table so hard it tipped.
“Okay,” she said and leaned closer. “Now you gotta choose.”
Too Young to Die Page 2