Total pages in book: 102
Estimated words: 96454 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 482(@200wpm)___ 386(@250wpm)___ 322(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96454 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 482(@200wpm)___ 386(@250wpm)___ 322(@300wpm)
“What do you mean?” Heath asks. “I would think the over-the-top thing would hurt her.”
“It didn’t hurt Jobs,” I point out. “He held court like a king.”
“Huh,” Heath says. “I guess I never thought about it that way. And now I feel super sexist because I’m thinking of all the over-the-top billionaire tech gods who I would never have said that about. Bezos rode a giant dick into space.”
He had. “CeCe would do the same if she had any interest in leaving the earth. She would say a dick is most likely to get you extremely high before it brings you right back down.”
Heath laughs, and I like the sound. “You seem to be really close to her. I’ve got to know how you met her. You grew up here, right? You didn’t grow up in her world.”
“Exactly here. This very apartment,” I agree. I’m barely three miles away from CeCe’s mansion, but there’s a massive world between us. “When I was in high school, she came to my school to talk about going into STEM. The girls, that is. One of the teachers at my school was her husband’s cousin’s daughter, and she would do anything for anyone connected to George.”
“He’s been gone for a long time, right?”
“Far longer than they were married, but she says he was the love of her life, and now she’s happy living out the rest of it, having fun.” Sometimes I wonder if her lush lifestyle isn’t an odd way of grieving. I know in the beginning building a business with what George left her had been. “Anyway, she came in and talked about how the future was in the code, and whoever wrote that code controlled the future. She was very intense, and there was a lot of talk about not depending on anyone to take care of you. There was the ‘money protects you’ talk. I’m pretty sure she scared most of the girls.”
“But not you.”
I remember being in awe of her. Harper had pretty much ignored her, and Anika had been one of the ones who wouldn’t look her in the eyes. But I’d seen someone with confidence. Someone I wanted to be. “I was already a complete nerd. I was a mathlete, and I’d been playing around with robotics and game theory. I started hacking around that time.”
He grins, his eyes shining in the low light. “Seriously?”
I stare at him. “Like you never hacked a system?”
His hands come up as though to show me how innocent he is. “I’m a good Catholic boy. I stay away from the illegal stuff. Though I can get through a password. I have to be able to. No one remembers their passwords. I’ve got an aunt and uncle who run a restaurant and they password protect their systems, but no one writes it down. Not anywhere. They’re paranoid someone will find it and steal their recipe for caponata, because they do write that down even though they’ve made exactly the same thing for fifty years. But the password they have to change every two months they think they’ll remember. So I have to break in.”
I know how it feels to be everyone’s tech support. “When I was running Jensen Medical, my mom would call me in the middle of board meetings to ask me how to get on Google.”
Heath snorts. “It’s fun to be the only tech savvy person in a family of Luddites.” He seems to remember he had started this line of questioning for a reason. “So you met her there, but how did we get from high school to her giving you fifty grand because you showed up at a party?”
“Simple. I emailed her and asked her some questions,” I reply. It had taken a lot for me to get the courage to write to CeCe. “I wanted to know what she thought I should study in college and what I needed to learn to become successful. I never expected her to write me back, but she asked if I would like to take tea with her. I did not know what that entailed at the time, but, unlike my mom, I was pretty good with Google even back then.”
I had dressed in my very nicest skirt and borrowed a silk blouse my mom wore when we went to church every Christmas or Easter, and I’d made my way to the Upper East Side where I met with CeCe and tried to pretend like I knew what teas to drink and how to sit in the big, luxurious wingback chairs and that I was perfectly comfortable with the white-gloved waiters who gracefully poured from silver pots.
She’d had two martinis and none of the tea cakes or elegant sandwiches I’d inhaled, but when it had come time to go, she’d had them pack up everything left and sent it home with me.