Chapter 13 : The President’s Desk

Chapter 13: Chapter 13 : The President’s Desk

The KTLA van was parked at the edge of the lawn, its mast cranked up high. Somebody had hauled Captain Pete back out, and the plywood pelican stood grinning in the exact spot it had held on Sunday.

Noah craned his neck at the mast. "Is that a satellite dish? Are we going up on a satellite?"

"Microwave. It only reaches the station," Ethan said. "That’s plenty."

The reporter started with Hendricks. He’d put on a freshly pressed uniform and stood ramrod straight in front of the mic, hat tucked under his arm.

"Nineteen years," he said. "Students have booed me more times than I can count. Last Sunday was the first time they ever chanted my name."

He paused, and the hat under his arm turned a half circle. "My grandson’s sixteen. Hasn’t said a full sentence to me at the dinner table in two years. Last night he asks me, out of nowhere, what it was like up there." He cleared his throat. "I told him it beat writing tickets."

Then Sal, apron still on, flour still in his eyebrows, holding the notebook with the pen on a string up to the lens. Then Kevin in his yellow polo, pronouncing the word organizer like he’d been rehearsing it in the mirror.

Ethan stood at the very back of the crowd. When the producer came looking for the kid who’d made the video, Ethan told him to put him last.

"Why last?" Noah hissed. "That’s TV!"

"If a freshman goes first, it’s a story about a kid who turned the quad into a circus." Ethan tipped his head toward the camera. "If a cop with nineteen years in and a pizza guy raising money for New Orleans go first, it’s a feel-good story. Same story. Whoever tells it first decides what it’s about. Once they’ve set the tone, I only need one line."

"What line?"

"You’ll see."

When his turn came, the reporter held out the mic and asked how it felt to make something that big.

"Honestly, the real stars are Officer Hendricks and Mr. Moretti," Ethan said. "I just held the camera. SCU let a bunch of freshmen lose their minds on its front lawn for an afternoon, and a cop and a pizza guy turned that into a library in New Orleans. I’m not sure that happens at a lot of schools."

"Two million views," the reporter said with a smile. "You must be making a fortune."

Ethan laughed. "Funny thing is, I haven’t made a dime from YouTube. They don’t pay the people who upload. Two million people watched this video on their site." He glanced at the lens. "I’m guessing somebody over there is watching this too."

The red light on the camera went out. The reporter shook Ethan’s hand and told him the segment would run on the six o’clock news. The cameraman started folding up the tripod, the crowd drifted off in twos and threes, and a few students darted over to grab photos with Captain Pete while they still could.

The second the interview wrapped, Noah was at his elbow. "Did you just tell YouTube to call you? On TV?"

"It doesn’t air till the six o’clock news."

There was no way the people at YouTube had missed a video this size. They didn’t need help noticing it. What they needed was a reason to pick up the phone. At six tonight, that line would go out on every TV in Los Angeles, and onto a few up north in an office building in San Bruno. Five weeks from now, everything over there was going to change. He wanted them to know his name before it did.

The phone in his pocket buzzed. It was Brenda.

"The President would like to see you at four," she said. "Mr. Morales too. Don’t be late."

Ethan hung up and snapped the phone shut. "I’ve got to go see the President."

Noah blinked. "President of what?"

"Of the school." Ethan was already walking, and he pulled Kevin out from behind the camera on his way. Kevin was still riding the high of his interview. At the word President, all the color left his face.

?

Harold Whitman was in his early sixties, white-haired, unhurried when he talked. His office sat at the far end of the first floor of Carrington Hall, its windows looking right out onto the lawn. His briefcase was still standing by the door. He’d probably come straight from the airport.

Ethan had seen that face before. On his graduation day the first time around, he’d sat in one of the back rows on the lawn while Whitman gave the address, too far away to make out more than the white hair.

Four chairs had been set out in front of the desk. Sterling took one, Dana another, and Kevin and Ethan got the last two. Kevin’s knee wouldn’t stop bouncing.

He knew Dana, too. The admissions brochure that had shown up at his house back then opened on her photo, with a welcome letter underneath signed by the Vice President for Enrollment. At the time, she’d been a smile printed on glossy paper and not much else.

Whitman let Sterling go first.

Sterling’s case was thorough. An unapproved cash event. Registered trademarks. No releases. Student Government’s budget. Every point had paperwork, and every piece of paperwork was in date order. Then he laid one last sheet on the desk.

"One more thing, President. This video solicits public donations in the university’s name. Whose hands the money passes through, where it’s kept, whether it’s been sent anywhere at all, the university has no idea. A student who’s been enrolled for one week, using Katrina as—"

"The receipts went up at eight this morning."

It was Dana. She slid two sheets out of her folder and set them beside Sterling’s. One was a printout of the website: a photo of a check written by Sal Moretti, payable to the Gentilly Heights High School Library, in the amount of $2,316. The other was a fax, under a New Orleans high school’s letterhead.

"Their librarian faxed it this morning," Dana said. "It’s addressed to you."

Kevin’s knee, which had been bouncing the whole time, finally stopped. It stopped so suddenly it knocked into Ethan’s leg. He yanked it back and mouthed sorry.

Sterling didn’t look at anyone. The hand he’d kept resting flat on his folder drew it an inch back toward himself. His eyes stayed on the letterhead of the fax. A line tightened along his jaw, then slowly let go.

Whitman put on his reading glasses and read it. It wasn’t long. He took a long time with it.

Sterling’s sheet was still sitting on the desk. Nobody looked at it again.

Dana set down a third sheet. "This weekend, traffic on the admissions website ran three times normal. A hundred and forty out-of-state inquiry forms. On a normal Labor Day weekend we get eight."

Whitman took off his glasses, folded them, and set them down on top of the letter.

"Richard," he said. "When I landed today and turned my phone on, the first message was from KTLA. The second was the chairman of the board, asking why our campus police were on the news. I couldn’t answer either of them."

"President, I was going to—"

"Next time something happens on my campus, I’d like to hear about it from you before I hear about it from a television station."

He didn’t raise his voice at all. Sterling’s face went pale anyway.

The ruling took three sentences. Mr. Morales’s suspension was lifted, effective immediately. The order against Mr. Cole was overturned and reduced to a written reminder: permits first, releases first, next time. Student Affairs would draft the letter.

Which meant Sterling would be writing it himself.

Kevin sagged back against his chair and swallowed hard, and somehow didn’t cry.

Whitman stood and shook hands all around, and held on to Kevin’s a beat longer than the rest. That was the end of the meeting.

The four of them came out of the President’s office together. Kevin had his phone out before the door shut behind him, and walked to the far end of the hall to call his mom. His voice cracked on the second sentence. Dana hung back, saying something to the President’s assistant.

Sterling walked ahead. At the foot of the stairs he stopped and waited for Ethan to catch up.

"Congratulations, Mr. Cole."

"Thank you."

"I’ve been at this university for twenty-two years." Sterling straightened a tie that didn’t need straightening. "I’ve seen a lot of students make a name for themselves in their first week. Four years is a long time. I’ll be here for every day of yours."

Ethan understood him perfectly. Nothing on his face moved.

"Then I’d better keep reading," he said. "Eighty pages. I’m only on sixty-one."

Sterling studied him a moment. Something happened at the corner of his mouth that didn’t quite qualify as a smile. Then he turned and went up the stairs. His footsteps landed one after another, every gap between them exactly the same length.

Dana came up behind him with a brass key in her hand. It had a paper tag on it. HOLLIS B14.

"Basement of the student union. It used to be the photo club’s darkroom. It’s been empty three years," she said. "As of today, it’s the Office of Enrollment Student Content Lab. Whatever you shoot, admissions gets to use."

Ethan didn’t reach for it right away.

"You can use it," he said. "The rights stay with whoever shoots it."

Dana raised an eyebrow. "You sound exactly like the partners at my old agency."

"Then I bet they did pretty well."

Dana laughed and dropped the key into his palm.

?

A room meant he needed a company to put in it.

On the way back to the dorm, Ethan ducked into the library, checked out Nolo’s guide to forming your own LLC, and printed a copy of Form LLC-1 from the California Secretary of State. One page. Seventy dollars to file.

He’d started two companies before, and signed more paperwork than most lawyers ever saw. He couldn’t afford a lawyer right now, and he didn’t need one. The day the company was worth a lawyer’s time, he’d have it all redone properly.

Noah was waiting in the room with the TV on, killing time until the six o’clock news. Ethan set the form and a typed agreement down in front of him.

"The company’s called MrPelican," Ethan said. "You own ten percent."

Noah stared down at the agreement for a long moment. He flipped to the second page and put his finger on a word. "What’s vesting?"

"Four years. Stay one year, and the first quarter is yours. After that it comes in a little every month, and at four years it’s all yours. Mine works the same way."

"And if I bail after six months?"

"Then you walk away with nothing," Ethan said. "A company isn’t a gift you hand somebody. It’s something the people who stay earn a piece at a time."

At his first company in his old life, a partner had taken twenty-five percent, quit after eleven months, and walked out with every share. He’d already paid tuition on that lesson once.

Noah picked up the pen and signed. When he was done, he looked up. "MrPelican. Mister? Sounds like a wrestler."

"Sounds like a guy who slaps a thousand bucks on the table and makes a crowd fight for it," Ethan said.

Somewhere in North Carolina there was an eight-year-old who, a few years from now, would have named himself MrBeast and ridden last-one-to-let-go-wins all the way to the most-subscribed channel on the planet.

Sorry, kid, Ethan thought.

There was one more signature to get.

?

In the computer science lab, Maya was at the station by the window, her screen full of code. Ethan pulled up a chair and spread the agreement and his notebook out next to her keyboard.

"Look at the books first," he said. "If you’re going to run tech, you should know how much money we’ve actually got."

He ran his finger down the page and read it off line by line.

Out: a thousand for the game. Fifty for the ending. Seventeen for the domain and hosting. Forty-five for the fake news. Three for releases. Seventy to register the company. Eleven hundred and eighty-five.

In: Sal’s fifteen hundred. Deposits on the next video: Vince, five hundred. The Subway franchise, five hundred. The sports bar, four hundred. A tutoring company, eight hundred. A used textbook store, three hundred. Google ads on the website, six hundred twelve dollars and forty cents in two days.

"That’s three thousand four hundred twenty-seven, net," Ethan said. "I want to double the budget on the next video, and the site needs to handle three times the traffic. That part’s on you—"

Maya’s hands paused on the keys, then started again, harder. "We." Her eyes stayed on the screen. "You’re good at this. Arranging people. Everybody’s got a spot this week. Upstairs, downstairs, whoever."

Ethan stopped.

He studied the side of her face. Last Sunday night on the library steps, she’d taken his pen to sketch a retention curve, and a strand of her hair had nearly brushed his shoulder. Saturday at one in the morning, she’d wired up the counter without a word of complaint. He couldn’t find where in between something had gone wrong.

"Maya," he said. "What’s going on?"

"Nothing."

He waited. She didn’t add anything. Ethan’s brow drew down.

"I think you’re really good, and I’m not just saying that," he said. "But you don’t have to talk to me like that. If you don’t want in, tell me now and I’ll go find somebody else. You’re not the only person on this campus who can write code."

Maya’s hands finally came off the keys. She turned and looked at him for a few long seconds, her mouth pressed into a flat line.

Then she picked up the agreement and read it, first page to last, without skipping a word.

"What if I leave before the cliff?"

"Then you get nothing."

"And you?"

"Same as me."

She picked up the pen and wrote one line under the last clause. Any code I write belongs to me. Then she signed and pushed it back to him.

Right behind it, she dug another page out of her bag. Thursday’s release, with the 0 still sitting on the payment line.

"Fix that one too. Zero consideration means it isn’t a contract."

Ethan pulled a dollar out of his wallet and laid it on her keyboard. Maya folded it twice, tucked it into her shirt pocket, and went back to her code without another word.

Ethan slid the agreement into his folder and stood up. At the door he looked back. Her back was very straight, and she was typing louder than before.

Eighty days. Ninety-four thousand dollars to go. One room, one company, two partners.

And one of them was mad at him, for reasons he couldn’t work out.