The Anti Social Network (7 page)

Like that would help. That would just make things more awkward at the incubator. Oh, God! The incubator. She would have to see him there, all the time. Maybe she could start working from campus. Now that school was starting, she could say she needed to be at Gates to … get advice from more engineers. Yes, that’s what she’d do.

She pulled her bike up to her dorm and locked it. Ugh! How could he!

When she got to her dorm room there were six notes push-pinned to the small bulletin board she’d affixed to the door. She’d signed up to be the Residential Computer Coordinator for Alondra, a freshman dorm, because it guaranteed her a single room with her own bathroom and no roommate. But it also meant she had to deal with notes like these, panicked requests from clueless freshman who didn’t know how to set up their e-mail accounts.

Could this day get any worse? she thought as she pushed open the door.

Yes, it could.

Adam was seated on her bed. “Where have you been?”

“Working,” she said tersely, throwing down her bag.

“But today’s the deadline. They’re going to call any minute.” As he said it, his iPhone rang. “It’s them, Amelia. They’re going to send the letter to Stanford today if we don’t do what they say.” Amelia glanced disgustedly at the phone. “Put it on speaker,” she said.

He did, fumbling with the buttons in his haste and panic.

“Hello?” Amelia said into the phone, the annoyance resonant in her voice.

“Amelia. Long time.” It was Jacob, the eldest son in The Family.

“Yeah. There’s a reason for that,” she snapped back. “Listen, I’m assuming you got the e-mail, so there’s nothing more for us to talk about.”

“What e-mail?”

“The one about Gibly.”

“That was from you?”

Amelia rolled her eyes. “Of course it was from me. I sent it from a disguised address.”

“But how could you—”

“It’s not important, Jake. The point is that I’m not going to embezzle money for you. But I do know how to make it look like you’re embezzling money, and use Gibly to get you caught.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“You’d better damn well believe I will,” Amelia said sourly into the phone. Adam was watching her, speechless. “Your dad gets out of jail when? In a few months? I’m pretty sure the state doesn’t look lightly on repeat offenders.”

“But that’s … that’s creating false evidence!” the voice on the other end protested.

“And you are blackmailing me to commit a crime!” Amelia retorted.

“Who’s the worse offender?”

She took a deep breath. “Listen, Jake. If you’re going to make me play this stupid game, you’d better believe I’ll play it better than you. Leave my brother and me alone. Or I will make sure your father stays in jail for the rest of his life.”

With that, she ended the call. It was moments like this when she wished there were still landlines. Throwing down a receiver was far more satisfying than tapping a touch-screen button on an iPhone.

She looked up at Adam, who was staring at her, his mouth agape.

“What?” she snapped.

He guffawed. “That was awesome.”

Her irritated scowl melted into a laugh. “I guess it kind of was, huh?” She pushed her bangs out of her face and took off her glasses, rubbing the bridge of her nose. “He caught me on a bad day.”

“You should have more bad days. They make you a ferocious negotiator.” She smiled and sighed. “You know that’s not what I want to be.”

“But it’s still good to have in your back pocket,” he said, punching her on the arm playfully.

“Listen, I’m going to go over to Gates and bury myself in some code.

See you at the incubator tomorrow?”

“Sure thing. I’ll be there in the afternoon.”

“Great. Let me know if you hear anything more from The Family, but I think they’ll be leaving us alone from now on.”

T
he Bristols were on the terrace of the Atherton Country Club having drinks with the Morgans, another Atherton family with whom they were dining that night, when Ted excused himself to take a phone call.

T. J. was chatting with Mrs. Morgan—or, rather, he was listening to her go on about her latest personal training session and how it was doing wonders to tone her butt. He’d perfected the art of nodding just enough to indicate engagement, occasionally throwing in an “Oh, really?” or “How interesting” while he thought about something else.

Mrs. Morgan was a piece of work, literally. She could hardly blink she’d had so many facelifts, and the botox injections had made her forehead so smooth it was impossible to distinguish happy expressions from sad ones. She was hot, to be sure; a classic “cougar” who worked out two and a half hours a day to achieve arms like Madonna and used plastic surgery to finish whatever the yoga-pilates-spinning-kickboxing concoction didn’t.

Her husband hardly noticed her—everyone knew he had a young model girlfriend in New York, where he took frequent business trips—and, as a result, T. J. knew she sought attention from younger men like him.

T. J. smiled his most flattering smile. “Sounds intense,” he said, and stared past her shoulder at Ted, who was listening intently at whoever was on the other line, instinctively nodding to whatever information he was receiving. T. J. wondered whether he’d gotten the news yet that Doreye had turned down the sale.

Finally, the families sat down to dinner. Ted was his normal jovial, charismatic self. He must have heard by now, T. J. thought, but then how could he be in such a good mood? Why wasn’t he saying anything about it?

Either way he should tell T. J., right?

By dessert the suspense was killing him.

After dinner, per the club’s tradition, the men went to the cigar room for an after-dinner drink and the women went to the ladies’ lounge. In the cigar room, Mr. Morgan fell into conversation with another club member, and Ted took T.J. aside, finally addressing him. “So, they turned down the offer. But I guess you already knew that.”

“Yeah,” T.J. said, shaking his head. “I tried to persuade them, but they just wouldn’t budge.”

Ted took a sip of his scotch. “You’re a bad liar, son. You should work on that.”

T. J. blushed. “What do you mean?”

“I know you advised them not to sell. And I’m very disappointed.”

“I—” T. J. scrambled to think of something to say.

“It was a test, T. J. The call with Jay?” T. J. felt a lump in his throat.

“Did you even bother to look up who Jay Resnick is? Nobody. I was talking to a dead line. Complete fiction.” He laughed. “Come on, did you actually think I hadn’t planned for you to overhear that conversation? That I would be so careless? I don’t make stupid mistakes like that, son. Jesus, you have a lot to learn.”

T. J. was staring at his father. “I don’t understand. You mean the whole thing was—”

“A test. To figure out where your loyalties lie.” Ted motioned to the waiter for another drink.

T. J. felt his chest rising with every breath. “You mean you never intended to buy Doreye?”

“Oh I
intend
to buy Doreye. But not yet. It won’t hurt enough yet.” He grinned as the waiter handed him a new drink. “You see, when you first start a company, it feels like a new toy. You’re enthralled by it, fascinated with how it works and what it does and what comes out of it. But after a year, it’s not a toy any more. Your ego has gotten involved. Slowly you’ve grown attached to it. Now it feels like it’s become a part of you.” He sipped his scotch. “And after another year, it starts to become not just a part of you, but
the most important
part of you. Your identity. And that’s when it really hurts to have it taken away.”

Ted’s eyes were crisp and angry, his jaw set.

“And that, T. J., is when I’ll take Doreye from Amelia.”

J
ust opening the doors to the Gates building made Amelia’s heart rate slow to a more relaxed pace. She climbed the stairs and made her way to her favorite cubicle. There weren’t many people there, which suited her fine. The pride she felt this morning about her peers respecting her for the TechCrunch article now made her self-conscious.

She clicked to the latest Doreye code and began typing, but she quickly found herself two hours in with a pattern that wouldn’t run. There were over two thousand lines of code and she had no idea where the error was.

Why was she being so sloppy?

But she knew exactly why. Her mind kept drifting back to University Café and Sundeep’s words, “I have a girlfriend.” Why had he had to show up just then? Right when she was feeling confident enough to do something so stupid? She’d been having such a great day, and then he’d gone and ruined it all. She tried to take herself back to the time before their conversation, to access the elatedness she’d felt after all the interviews. But Sundeep was like a wall, like this malfunction in her program that blocked everything from working. She hated him.

She took off her glasses and sat back in her chair, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath.

“Amelia!”

She slowly opened her eyes. Was that George?

A strange new version of George stood next to her at the cubicle. Since she had last seen him at the end of spring term, he had lost about forty pounds and cut his hair.

“George?” she said, questioningly, putting her glasses back on.

He laughed awkwardly. “I know, I look a little different. I finally took Google up on their free personal training sessions this summer. How was your summer?” Before she could answer, he stepped in. “Of course, I already know how your summer was. I read the TechCrunch article about you. Man, Amelia, that is just so rad.” Amelia shrugged her narrow shoulders and offered a lifeless, “Thanks, George. It is exciting.”

She glanced back at her screen, hoping he would take the hint that she wanted to be alone. But he kept going, his eyes shining above his freckled cheeks.

“To think that I was here the night you first made the original Doreye application work! Do you have any idea how cool that is?” She smiled politely.

“Listen, Amelia.” He took a deep breath. “I thought about you this summer—a lot. Not just because of Doreye, but because I think you’re a really … a really special person and I’d love to get to know you better. And I thought maybe, if you’re up for it, we could hang out … some time.” Instinctively, she began to turn him down. “George, I think you’re really—”

But then, abruptly, she stopped herself. Why should she always decline?

Sundeep had a girlfriend; Patty was in her sorority; Adam was living in a frat house now and, apparently, had a girlfriend. And all she had was two thousand lines of code that weren’t working.

“Sure, George. I’d love to hang out some time.”

“Really?” George tried to contain his excitement. “That’s great!” He scrambled for an idea, afraid that if he didn’t get a plan made now it might never actually happen. “What are you doing tonight?” Amelia looked at the jumbled code on her screen. It was a lost cause.

“Nothing. I’m not doing anything.”

“I was going to head over to the Lair to play
ZOSTRA
. We have a group that gets together every Wednesday. Do you play?” George was referring to the virtual reality game that had developed a cult following in the computer science community.

“I’ve never played,” Amelia said, watching his face drop. “But I’d love to learn.”

“Excellent!”

Who was she kidding? Guys like Sundeep didn’t go for her. She was a computer science geek. She might as well act the part.

A
melia had heard of the Lair, but she had never actually been there.

Situated across campus from the Gates Building, it was technically a twenty-four-hour study room. Stanford was always updating the equipment in the Gates building and, whenever they did, they put all the old (meaning six to twelve months outdated) equipment in the Lair and left the space largely unmonitored.

It had become an upper-class computer science hang, where engineers who wanted to socialize more than code came to “study.” They’d start filtering in after dinner and open a problem set. Then they would log-on to Instant Messenger and flirt with people across the room. By ten o’clock at night, everyone was usually huddled around a few monitors watching YouTube clips or two people battling against each other in Angry Birds or Scrabble.

Wednesdays had officially become
ZOSTRA
nights, starting promptly at midnight.

Amelia followed George through a painted red door and up two flights of concrete stairs to the Lair, where two guys she recognized as Computer Science TAs sat at a table collecting money and handing out player numbers.

“Hey, guys!” George said to the two. “Do you know Amelia? Amelia, meet Tom and T-Bag.”

T-Bag, a lean, good-looking blond guy wearing a sport coat with a pocket square, stood up and took Amelia’s hand, bowing his head to her in mock formality. “Forgive these imbeciles. Everyone calls me T-Bag, but as you seem rather sophisticated, feel free to refer to me by my Christian name, Theodore.”

Amelia smiled with surprise. Who was this guy, with his strange European accent and ornate speech? “Very nice to meet you, Mr. T-Bag,” she said, taking his hand and playing along.

Tom, a chubby Asian boy wearing a tie over his t-shirt, khaki shorts, and no shoes, also stood up and shook her hand. “You’re not
the
Amelia, are you? The one doing that device linking thing with Tom Fenway?” George swept his arms up, as though he were a magician presenting his finest act. With these guys, he had an air of confidence and charm she had never witnessed in Gates. “Indeed, she is. Gentlemen, you are in the presence of greatness.”

“Tickets comped!” T-Bag exclaimed. “May I have the honor of getting you a drink, Madame?”

Amelia wasn’t sure if they were mocking her or if they were seriously impressed, but it didn’t matter; there was something utterly loveable about these three. T-Bag handed her a plastic cup filled with cheap vodka and cranberry juice. “Our very finest, for the lady,” he said, and she felt her heart flutter a little as she happily took it from him.