Chapter 16 : Lottery Ticket

Chapter 16: Chapter 16 : Lottery Ticket

The zipper snagged halfway. Maya’s hand stopped on the pull for a second, then tugged it up, then down. The pen slipped out of the case, hit the floor, and rolled all the way under the door-desk. She crouched to get it, and getting it took a while.

"I... didn’t ask about that." Her voice came up from under the desk.

Ethan wasn’t reading anything into it. They’d known each other two weeks. Maya wasn’t about to get jealous over him, and he wasn’t vain enough to think so. What he cared about was something else. When somebody on a team had something stuck in their throat, sooner or later it blew up at the worst possible moment.

"I know you didn’t." He closed his notebook. "What I want to know is, that day in the lab. The way you talked to me. Was it because of that?"

Nothing moved under the desk. Maya stayed crouched there, the pen clenched in her fist, frozen.

There was no way to answer that. An honest answer meant going back to the beginning. How she’d decided, all on her own, out on the library steps, that he was the same kind of person she was. How she’d then decided, also on her own, outside the dorm, that he was guilty. She’d been running the whole show by herself, and he’d never even been handed a script. How was she supposed to say that out loud?

"Sort of." The voice was still coming from under the desk. "Not completely."

Ethan raised an eyebrow. "What, you figured I dumped a pile of work on you and ran off to chase girls? That it didn’t sit right?"

No answer.

"Then I’ll say it one more time," he said. "She’s not my girlfriend."

Not yet, anyway, he added to himself. The company wasn’t even off the ground. There was no time for that. Still, the way Chloe had laughed over that cup of frozen yogurt... He had to admit he wasn’t entirely unmoved.

"Oh... oh," said the desk. "That’s not what I meant."

Ethan frowned. "Then what did you mean? I don’t want us misreading each other any more than we already have."

Maya was still trying to put the words together. "I... didn’t mean... you’ve got it wrong."

Ethan was running out of patience. She’d been down there for close to a minute and showed no sign of coming out. So he got up, came around the desk, planted one palm flat on its edge, and crouched, his body sealing off the little space underneath. "Got what wrong? Chloe told me everything."

That put him right at her eye level, less than a foot away. They both stopped.

Ethan recovered first. He lowered his voice and said it slowly, one word at a time. "Listen. We’re going to be together for a long time. I don’t want any of this getting in the way of us."

The first part had already knocked the air out of Maya. Everything? What on earth had that girl told him? She looked into Ethan’s eyes, and they were completely serious, not a flicker of a joke anywhere. Then the second part landed.

Together for a long time. Us.

Somewhere at the lowest level of Maya’s brain, a line of hard-coded logic fired. She shot out from under the desk so fast she cracked the back of her head on the edge and didn’t even slow down, grabbed her bag, and backed toward the door.

"No... no, no, I..." She wanted to be clear. She wanted to tell him all she cared about right now was code, and that she’d never given anything else a single thought. But the words jammed in her throat and wouldn’t come out.

"I get it," was all she managed. "I’ll... I’ll think about it."

The door banged shut, and a string of footsteps went racing up the stairs.

Ethan stayed crouched by the desk, one hand still on the edge. Think about it? Think about what? She’d signed the agreement last week. She’d even added a line of her own, Any code I write belongs to me. The ink was dry. What was there left to think about?

He got slowly to his feet and rubbed the stubble coming in along his jaw. The body was eighteen. The guy inside it was thirty-eight.

"Maybe I really am getting old," he told the red safelight overhead. "I can’t read girls this age anymore."

By the next morning, half the campus was quoting the same column.

"This week, Los Angeles discovered another genius. He is eighteen years old, seven days into college, and armed with a thousand dollars in cash and a borrowed camera. He got a few hundred college kids to fight over money on a lawn, got a girl to pour water over her boyfriend’s head, and called the whole thing ’content.’ KTLA called it a feel-good story. His university called it innovation. I’ll call it what it is: a street-corner wager, shot just well enough to make greed look funny."

"As for that high school library in New Orleans, I am genuinely glad for it. But notice that in this story, the hurricane isn’t the subject. It’s the set dressing. An eighteen-year-old took a disaster that killed eighteen hundred people and used it to give his video a moving final act. That isn’t charity. That’s editing."

"Hold off on calling him the next Spielberg. A thousand in cash, a hurricane, and a freshman with absurd luck all happened to squeeze into the same afternoon. A man gets one afternoon like that in a lifetime, if he’s lucky. When the next video comes out, we’ll learn whether MrPelican is a company or a lottery ticket that’s already been cashed. My money’s on the ticket."

The column ran on page two of the Sunday Bay Chronicle under the byline Chuck Ross. Anybody who’d lived in the South Bay long enough knew the name. He’d been writing a column for that paper for twenty-six years, and nobody was better at booing in a room full of applause.

That week there’d been at least forty stories about MrPelican, every one of them glowing, and hardly anyone could remember a single one. This one was different. Since Sunday noon it had been making the rounds of the dorms. People photocopied it, or snapped pictures and put them up on Facebook, all of them wanting to see who’d had the nerve.

Noah’s copy had come from their RA, who’d pushed it into his hands first thing that morning, and the corners had already gone soft. He sat at a window table in the dining hall and read the two paragraphs out loud again, leaning hard on the words lottery ticket.

"Twenty-six years." He slapped the paper down on the table. "Twenty-six years in the business, and this is what he comes up with? Forty good reviews out there, and he’s got to be the forty-first bad one."

"Which is why everybody remembers him." Ethan took the paper and started from the top. "Nobody passes around forty good reviews. One bad one, and everybody’s got a copy. Look at his last line. My money’s on the ticket. That’s him covering himself. Whatever our second video turns out to be, he gets another column out of it. If it’s good, the ticket hit twice. If it bombs, he told you so."

Noah opened his mouth, thought it through, couldn’t find a hole in it, and only got madder. "So we write him a letter and rip him apart?"

"He’d love that letter. You mail it Monday, he runs it Sunday, and he doesn’t even have to change the headline." Ethan turned the page, then the next, working his way back through the paper slowly.

A tray landed on the table with a clatter. Tyler dropped into the seat across from them and jerked his chin at the paper.

"I heard. Lottery ticket." He bit into a strip of bacon. "Whole building’s talking about it. So? Are you guys shooting a second one or not?"

"We’re about to." Ethan didn’t look up.

"Is your fat slob going?" Tyler didn’t wait for an answer. He was already on his feet with his tray. "If he’s in, count me in too."

He was halfway across the room with his tray before the sentence was even finished.

Noah shot to his feet and yelled at his back. "Hey! Show some respect! He has a name!"

Tyler didn’t turn around. He just raised a hand over his shoulder and waved.

"Sit down." Ethan tugged Noah back into his chair and tipped his chin at Tyler’s retreating back. "Last time, Mac played him like a fiddle in front of a few hundred people. The guy sat on that for two weeks, and all he came back with was ’fat slob.’ Honestly? That’s restraint."

Noah sat back down in a huff, stabbed his scrambled eggs twice, and looked up again. "So what are we actually shooting? Yesterday you said we had to figure out what they were doing wrong first."

"We figured it out."

Ethan’s hand paused near the back of the paper for a few seconds. Then he folded it up and put it in his backpack. "Back to B14. Grab the cameras. We’re heading out."

The cameras had shown up the Friday before. Dana had kept her word. The minute the Office of Enrollment Student Content Lab sign went up, admissions carved some money out of its marketing budget: two brand-new Sony HDV cameras, a tripod, and a pair of wireless mics, packed into three black cases that now lived under the door-desk. The first time Noah opened them, he crouched there staring for a good while, and wiped his hands on his jeans twice before he dared touch anything.

They each took a case and caught a southbound bus outside the main gate. Ethan didn’t say where they were going, and Noah asked the whole way.

"So what are we shooting?"

"Just stick with me."

Two stops later. "Is it Sal again?"

"Sal already paid. Use the same sponsor twice in a row, and people start thinking we work for him."

Five more stops. The storefronts outside got older, and the letters on the signs got bigger. Noah pressed his face to the glass. "Are we even still in L.A.?"

"Gardena," Ethan said. "Four more stops."

Noah sat back, held out for a while, and then couldn’t. "Give me one word. Just one."

Ethan thought about it. "Bob."

"Who’s Bob?"

"A fat guy."

Noah stared at him for three full seconds. "This morning Tyler called Mac a fat slob, and I almost got into a fight over it. Now you’re dragging me forty minutes on a bus to go see a different fat guy?"

"He’s fatter than Mac."

"How is that better!"

"The difference is," Ethan said, nudging the case at his feet out of the aisle, "this fat guy’s got something we need."

"Like what?"

"You’ll see when we get there."

Noah hugged his case a little closer. "You know what you sound like right now? The guy outside a school with a bag of candy, trying to get kids into his van."

"Vans are expensive," Ethan said. "That’s why we took the bus."

Noah held on to his case and said nothing. One stop later, he muttered at the window, "You still owe me twenty bucks."

Across the street from the stop was a used car lot. A string of faded pennant flags drooped along a wire, and thirty or forty cars sat on the lot with prices scrawled across their windshields in neon marker. Out front stood a big sign with a cartoon fat man on it, giving a thumbs-up and grinning so wide his eyes had disappeared.

Noah looked at the fat man on the sign. Then he looked at Ethan. "...Bob?"

Ethan nodded and pointed at the red letters over the fat man’s head.

BIG BOB’S AUTO — NO CREDIT? NO PROBLEM!