His dark hair was thick but neatly cropped, and his big brown eyes were as clear and bright as they’d been the day he was adopted by Avillage ten years earlier. He was thoughtful and compassionate, but often difficult to read with an expression that tended away from extremes. It was an accurate external representation of his constantly working mind, but one that was occasionally misinterpreted as cold or indifferent.
Although he held celebrity status with a few students on campus who’d either figured out or had been told by their shareholding parents who he was, he maintained a small group of close friends and a wider group of friendly acquaintances, like most of the other kids did. And since the arrival of the first freshman class near his age the previous fall, he’d had no trouble finding dates.
He had yet to find a course that he’d considered a real challenge; the most difficult decisions he faced often centered around which classmates he’d work with on group projects – a sensitive issue in a school of grade-mongers often being graded on a curve.
And even though he had more than enough credits to graduate, he kept up a heavy course load in a wide array of subjects, ranging from mathematics to psychology to history to international law, all while making good money in the stock market. And neither he nor his parents nor Avillage saw any advantage in his graduating before he was eighteen.
Away from the classroom, he’d come up with a way to combine a rough application of an incomplete-information game theory model with his unique ability to rapidly assimilate and recognize patterns in large sets of data to come up with a strategy for trading futures on the Chicago Board of Exchange. Using his method, he was reliably gaining 3% per day on 60% of his holdings, while the other 40% would end up down by the same amount. That led to a modest net increase in his bankroll of 0.6% per day. But compounding that daily over the roughly 250 trading days of the past year – a year in which the commodities markets were relatively flat – he had nearly quintupled his original bank roll, while quietly socking a portion of his profits away into a growing portfolio on the Avillage Exchange.
He was on his way out of a World War II history course taught from the various perspectives of all of the major players, contemplating how he and Dillon were a lot like the pseudo-allied United States and Russia – ideological opposites thrown into an alliance against the bigger and more immediate threat of Avillage’s Germany – when he was blindsided by a phone call from New York.
“Hello?”
“Who is this?” came the hushed but determined Latina-accented voice on the other end.
“Who is
this?
” Ryan asked.
“You texted me!”
“What are you talking about?” Ryan scoffed. Then his face sank.
He wouldn’t.
Ryan looked down at his phone and saw the caller’s 212 number. He’d only seen it once, several months ago, but he recognized it instantly. He was on the phone with arguably the world’s top supermodel.
He wanted so badly to respond with the disdain he’d always held for her, but, finding himself incapable of not picturing her on the other end of the line, he instead felt his pulse quicken and his mouth dry, as he started stumbling for words.
Why couldn’t she have just texted back?
“You said you wanted to meet me?” Annamaria asked forcefully, as she grabbed her keys and slid on her Cartier sunglasses on her way to the hotel elevator.
“Yes. Yes, I did,” Ryan stammered, cursing himself for coming off as such a starstruck dweeb. “When are you available?”
Ugh!
He sounded pathetic.
He
should be dictating the terms!
“I’m in New York. I’m just getting in my car now. You are in Boston, no?” Annamaria asked.
Dammit! She even sounds sexy!
“Yes, I’m in Boston,” Ryan answered mechanically in a full sweat, futilely trying to relax. “It’ll take you about 4 hours to get here. I’m not sure if you know the city. Maybe we could meet at a coffee shop or restaurant?”
“I know the city,” Annamaria answered bluntly. “But I can’t just show up at a restaurant. I
will
be noticed.”
“We could meet at the Widener Library,” Ryan said. “Everyone pretty much minds their own business...”
“Don’t you have an apartment or something?” Annamaria interrupted. “I assume you want to keep this private too?”
“Uh...” and with that, Ryan came officially unhinged, with a lump in his throat so big it rendered him temporarily mute. She’d completely taken control of the conversation, and he couldn’t believe he was reacting this way. “I guess we could meet at my place,” he managed. “Just put the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Dunster Street in your GPS, and call me when you get close. I’ll direct you from there.”
“OK,” Annamaria said resolutely. “I’ll see you in about three hours. I drive very fast.”
“Bye,” Ryan said, just as his phone beeped to indicate the call was over. And finally, his shoulders dropped and the blush started to fade from his cheeks. He could breathe again.
After a quick pause to collect himself, he whipped out his walkie-talkie. “Dillon! Come in! I know you’re there!” No answer.
~~~
Annamaria parked her convertible Mini Cooper on Dunster Street and brushed right by the meter on the curb behind her rear bumper, not giving the first thought to paying it.
As she hurried up the red brick sidewalk toward Massachusetts Avenue, she caught her first glimpse into Harvard Yard. The timeless, classic brick buildings on the periphery circumscribed a yard of bright green grass that was speckled with towering oak trees and streaked with black walking paths, crisscrossing at sharp angles in every direction. She’d traveled all over the world and had gained access to places most people would never see, but this still impressed her. Growing up in small-town Panama, most people hadn’t heard of Stanford or Yale or Princeton. They all knew Harvard.
And while she had more money in the bank and a higher future earning potential than 99% of the students bustling by her in both directions on the crowded walk, she felt somehow out of place, self-conscious even.
Ryan had spent the better part of the past three hours scouring the internet, reminding himself why he’d never had any interest in contacting this hollow social butterfly and convincing himself that it was not he who should be intimidated. Especially on his home turf. This time he was prepared for her call when it came.
“Yeah,” he answered.
“It’s me,” Annamaria whispered into her phone, almost demurely. “I’m at kind of a triple archway on Massachusetts Avenue at the entrance to Harvard Yard. Do you go here?”
“Yeah,” Ryan said coldly. “Stay there. I’ll be down in a few minutes.” Click – he hung up his phone, leaving the prima donna no time to protest.
Now that’s how it’s done
, he thought.
Ryan slowly descended the steps of his dorm, exited out onto the yard and strolled at a deliberately lazy pace toward Mass Ave, fighting the urge to peek toward the arched gate. As he walked through, he found Annamaria sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk with her back resting against one of the brick archways.
“I’m Ryan,” he deadpanned. “Follow me.”
“Nice to meet you,” Annamaria smiled, jumping up to a stand. “This place is amazing. I’ve never been here before. Any chance you could give me a quick tour on the way back to your place? And maybe we could just pick up a little snack? I’m starving.”
“You eat?” Ryan sneered.
“I’m not that skinny!” Annamaria shot back playfully.
“No, certainly not everywhere,” Ryan said, looking her up and down, convinced that she’d had some work done. “You are definitely uniquely proportioned,” he muttered just loudly enough that he hoped she would hear.
They walked on in uncomfortable silence through the Yard for another sixty seconds.
“See that there?” Ryan said condescendingly, pointing toward Widener library. “That’s a library. You may or may not be familiar with one of those. It is a place of learning, full of books. One of the books inside is an original Gutenberg Bible. The Bible is a popular religious text that I’m almost certain you’re not familiar with.”
“What the hell is your problem?” Annamaria snapped. “You contacted me!”
“Someone contacted you on my behalf,” Ryan clarified. “I thought it would be a waste of my time – and yours.”
“Oh, I see. So you think you know me?” Annamaria asked, her Spanish accent intensifying with her anger. “Please, don’t pretend that you know me,” she continued without giving him a chance to respond. “
You
get more looks around here than I do. How would you like it if I asked one of these ass-kissers about you, and I based my whole impression of you on that?”
I don’t give a damn what you think about me
, he thought before thinking better of actually saying it aloud. “You’re right,” he conceded half-heartedly. “I don’t know you.”
He pointed out the statue of John Harvard and a few buildings of interest as they continued the awkward tour toward one of the science buildings where they ducked in to grab a snack before doubling back to Ryan’s dorm on the south end of the Yard.
Ryan’s “single,” a privilege of upperclassmen, was on the third floor of Wigglesworth dormitory. The unadorned walls were coated with thick white paint that had been caked on progressively thicker over the decades. A few of the beams of the original hardwood floor were just starting to buckle upward, but the floor was clear of clutter and his twin bed neatly made, an unusual state for his room – one which he’d argue to his death had more to do with the fact that he had
a
guest than with who that guest may be. A microwave rested on top of his perpetually empty dorm fridge at the foot of his bed, and his black wooden Harvard chair was pushed up tidily to his desk under the room’s lone window that looked down on the peaceful Yard below.
Ryan unlocked the door and invited Annamaria to have a seat wherever she liked, as he mulled over how much he wanted to reveal to her. From the doorway he could see that his laptop was still open, displaying a picture of a bikini-clad Annamaria on the cover of some trashy tabloid, toting some sort of fruity alcoholic drink across some generic tropical beach while flirtatiously smirking at a throng of salivating suitors. The headline teased “Off Again?” suggesting that her currently-rumored relationship with her Hollywood boyfriend
du jour
had ended.
Annamaria gazed over to the laptop with a hint of disappointment on her face as Ryan rushed over to close it. She shed her hat and her sweatshirt, under which she wore a form-fitting plain white T-shirt, and sat down on the side of the bed, curling one foot up underneath her as she popped open a can of Coke.
Ryan sat facing her in his black wooden chair, thinking about where he should begin (and grudgingly admiring the fact that she didn’t drink diet) when she completely disarmed him by speaking first.
“Tell me about your parents,” she said, sliding off her sunglasses for the first time, and looking him straight in the eye, as if the argument they’d just had had never taken place. The sincerity in her eyes was undeniable, and the depth was hypnotizing – like a bottomless volcanic lake in the dead of a moonless night.
The tabloid covers instantly vanished from his mind, and he was forcefully struck with the realization that the two of them shared a terrible, powerful, character-defining history.
He hadn’t talked about his birth parents to anyone for years, but not a single day had passed that he hadn’t thought of them.
“My dad runs a hedge fund,” he started, with a last-ditch effort to evade her question.
“Your
real
parents,” she interrupted, still staring directly in his eyes intently – but tenderly.
“They were both doctors,” he said, turning toward the window as tears began to well on his lower lids. “I remember every moment I spent with them from the time I first started to form memories.”
His voice stayed steady as an occasional tear trickled down his cheek and Annamaria listened. “My dad was a huge Cleveland Browns fan. Every Sunday at 1:00, without fail, we would park ourselves on the couch, eat popcorn, and watch the game together – the whole game – no matter how bad the score got. He told me when he was finally done with all of his training and making a real doctor’s salary, we were gonna go to a game and sit at the fifty yard line, no matter what it cost.
“My mom was busy, but she never let me feel it. She’d work on Saturdays if she had to to make it to my school so I’d have someone there on days parents were invited. She taught me to read and how to ride a bike.
“When I was scared or sick, one of them would come and stay in my bed with me and then go to work at the crack of dawn the next day on essentially no sleep. They loved me. Unconditionally.
“I was an only child. When they died, I was completely alone – devastated.
“I was seven, and...” he drew in a deep breath before continuing. “I saw it. I saw it happen. For the next few months I woke up with nightmares of that scene every morning.” He shook his head slowly. “It was terrible.