Page 16 of The Billionaire's Second Chance
“Mr. Martin!”
A miniscule kid in the second to last row had her hand stuck up above her monitor, flapping it wildly to get my attention. I didn’t think I would ever get over just howtinythird graders were; I could barely see her from behind the giant screen she sat behind.
“Oh, sorry, Devon,” I said. Presumably, I hadn’t noticed her raised hand. It wasn’t my fault I hadn’t seen her; she was just so small. It was certainly not because I’d been staring fixedly at myownscreen, wondering if Sam would reply to my email. “Are you stuck?” She nodded, screwing up her mouth into a pout, and I stood, walking around to peer at her screen, rather than my own. I hunched over, my hands on my thighs–the personal trainer I employed for myself and my employees was always getting on me about my posture–and took a cursory look at her work.
“I can get it to run almost all the way through,” Devon said, scrolling through her work. We were using a simplified coding system to build games, and the bits of code were stacked like colorful Tetris blocks across her display. “But it gets stuck right around… here? I think?” She wiggled her hand, her cursor mimicking the movement on her code. It only took me a second to figure out what had gone awry: an if-then loop that she hadn’t closed.
“Hmm,” I mused. “What do you think went wrong?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Martin,” she said. “It just gets… stuck.”
“It’s doing the same thing over and over again?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said, frowning at her screen with the same expression I saw on my programmers at the office while they were debugging. I smiled.
“Almost like it’s stuck in…”
“Stuck in a loop?” she asked, looking up at me with a questioning look in her eyes.
I didn’t say anything, just raised my eyebrows back at her.
“Oh!” Her face cleared, and she turned back to her screen, straightening up in her chair. I watched her click around, getting closer and closer to the wayward instruction. “Oh! I figured it out!”
I tapped the back of her plastic chair as I levered myself back up to standing. “Great debugging, Devon.”
“Thanks for your help, Mr. Martin,” she said, glancing up at me.
“No thanks necessary. You said it yourself:youfigured it out.”
It’s the look of quiet pride visible in her big eyes and gap-toothed smile that makes this all worth it, I thought as I made my way through the rows, peering over the students’ shoulders at their progress. This wasn’t an official class, just the school’s computer club, so we didn’t have much of a curriculum, per se; they were each working on their own projects, with me for support. I did the same for my programmers at work: on Fridays they could work on a side project if they wanted. A little bit of freedom kept professionals and eight-year-olds alike interested and passionate about their work.
And it let me be here, of course, instead of in a board meeting. More and more, I’d found myself living for Friday afternoons, my amateur attempts at teaching, the kids, the cute little games they were working through.
Ding, dong, ding.
The electronic bell announced the end of the school day. I was gratified to see at least some of the students lingering over their keyboards for a few moments instead of dashing out the door, but at last, they’d all filed out, leaving me alone to tidy up between the rows of monitors, pushing in chairs and straightening mousepads and mice.
“Hi, Charlie.”
I looked up to see Flora standing in the doorway. She taught in the elementary school, and it wasn’t uncommon for her to stop by to say hello. “Hey, Flora.” I greeted her with a smile. “Or should I say…Mrs. Walker?” She was blushing, her cheeks pink–or maybe that was just a slight sunburn. “How was Tahiti?”
“Amazing,” she sighed, then narrowed her eyebrows at my expression. Flora and I had become friends since I started running my little computer club at the school she taught at, but I had first known her as my best friend’s nanny… who I’d once walked in on half-naked on his kitchen counter, him between her thighs. Not a fantastic first impression, and one I’d worked diligently to erase from my memory. If her husband was my oldest friend, I could count her as my newest. “Not like that,” she scolded. “I meant the weather. The scenery.”
“I’ll tell Ryan you said so,” I smirked. “It wasn’t the company you enjoyed, just the beaches.”
“You tell him whatever you want, Charlie,” she smirked right back. “And I’ll prove you wrong tonight when he gets home.”
It was my turn to scoldher. “Mrs. Walker!” I said, holding a hand to my chest in mock outrage. “If you’re only here to scandalize me, I must ask you to leave.”
She laughed. “Actually, I came by to ask if you could give this to James to pass to Edie.” She dug in a ratty old tote bag, withdrawing a book and holding it toward me. “We were supposed to hang out tonight, but she said she’s feeling tired and wants to stay in.”
“No problem,” I said, grabbing my backpack and making my way toward Flora in the doorway. I reached for the book dangling from her fingers, a romance novel, knowing her and Edie; a cursory glance at the cover confirmed my suspicions. “This one any good?”
Her face lit up. “Oh my gosh–sogood. It’s the second in this series and I’ve been waiting like a year to read it. Edie got an early copy from Sam, she’s the author’s agent.”
“Ah,” I said, taking hold of the book. “Of course. Sam.”
Flora’s fingers tightened around the cover. I tugged, but she didn’t release it. I looked up at her.
