Spoils

by Tammar Stein

  An anxious look crosses Isakson’s face as he senses the mood of his crowd.

  “Are there any questions?” he asks.

  Awkward silence descends. No one makes eye contact with the professor. One of the employees of the restaurant pushes in a metal trolley to gather used plates and the wheels make an annoying little chirp with every rotation. Chirp, chirp, chirp. Isakson waits for questions. There were too many chairs set up for his talk, which only highlights how few people came.

  “When will the algae be up and operational?” someone asks.

  “Excellent question.” Isakson bobs his head nervously. “There are several promising strains that we will continue to test in the coming months. Once we isolate the best performer, we will begin negotiations for land.”

  “So you’re, what, more than a year away from any kind of product launch?”

  “We hope to move sooner than that,” Isakson says vaguely, but everyone in the audience can hear the truth. He’s nowhere close to being up and running.

  He waits a beat.

  “Any other questions?” he asks. The silence grows heavy and he turns to straighten a stack of handouts on the low table next to him. “I’d be happy to speak with any of you in private,” he adds.

  There’s a sporadic attempt at applause.

  “Come on,” I say to Gavin. “Let’s go talk to him.”

  “Bad idea, Kohn.”

  But I tug on his arm and he follows. People are still sitting, shaking off the stupefying effects of a thirty-minute PowerPoint presentation, and Gavin and I reach the professor before anyone else.

  “Hi,” I say.

  Isakson looks grateful for someone to talk to but disappointed that it’s a couple of teenagers. His brown-and-red beard has a lot of gray, but there is something youthful about him. He isn’t much taller than me and I am in the unusual position of feeling somewhat protective of an adult who is decades my senior.

  “Leni Kohn,” I remind him. “My parents are Peter and Linda.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” he says effusively, pumping my hand.

  “This is my friend, Gavin Armand.”

  The professor blinks at the mention of Gavin’s name.

  “Mr. Armand,” he says, frowning, eyeing Gavin up and down. “I didn’t expect to see you again. I believe I made my thoughts clear a year ago.”

  Gavin tenses next to me and his face goes white.

  “Professor,” I begin, horrified.

  A man with a huge gut and the squinty eyes of an avid fisherman comes up to the professor. “Interesting concept you’ve got there,” he says as he hitches up his pants in back. Isakson, with an ingratiating smile, turns to him.

  “Excuse me, Professor,” I say, but the grown-ups are talking and he all but pats my head in dismissal, unwilling to waste time on a couple of non–financially contributing, and therefore useless, teenagers.

  My parents are mingling with a couple they know and Gavin has this awful, cold look on his face. There isn’t anything here for me to do.

  I interrupt my parents’ social chitchat. “We’re heading out,” I announce. My mom eyes Gavin, seemingly absorbing every possible detail and clearly noting the frozen look on his face, but other than reaching out to shake hands with him and saying in a cool voice that it’s been a while, she doesn’t react.

  “Gavin.” My dad looks him over with a gimlet eye, a flush rising in his face.

  “Hello, sir,” Gavin says. He reaches out to shake hands and it is a long, insulting moment before my dad shakes his hand. “Thank you for letting me spend time with Leni.”

  My dad doesn’t answer.

  “Don’t stay out too late,” my mom says, her hand visibly tightening on my dad’s arm like she’s holding him back. “Keep your phone on in case we need to reach you.”

  I kiss her cheek.

  “Love you too.” She smiles. She kisses me back, then wipes at the lipstick stain on my cheek. “Be safe.”

  I nod. Their automatic mistrust is the cost Gavin pays for choosing the wrong door. What will it cost me if I choose the wrong one?

  Gavin and I slip out the door.

  With an inky-black night above and dark churning water below, we lean on the railing at the pier and watch the tiny lights of fishing boats out in the Gulf. The pier’s a good twenty feet above the water, low enough for the fishermen’s lines to reach the water, high enough to catch a nice breeze and a great view. The wide expanse of water and the gulf air do little to clear the tension.

  “It could have been worse,” I finally say.

  Gavin exhales loudly. A soft, salty breeze blows our way.

  “I’m so screwed.” His voice is grim in the dark. He tilts his head back, eyes closed, radiating defeat.

  “Gavin—”

  “I’ve been following his work. It could literally change the world.” He pushes off the railing, kicks the post and shoves his hands in his pockets. “Penicillin. Movable-type printing press. The steam engine. He could make one of those moments happen except he’s clueless. You saw him.” In the weird orange light from the lamps, Gavin’s eyes look like dark pits, his face like a skeleton.

  “Yeah, but—”

  “I can help him,” he says, his voice almost shaking with passion. “This is what I’ve been working on. Isakson is a brilliant scientist, but he’s not a businessman. He doesn’t get it. You saw him tonight!”

  The fund-raiser we left that wasn’t going to raise any funds flashes through my mind.

  “He thinks he needs to have the perfect formula, the optimal combination of algae and fuel, and once he has that, he thinks he needs to buy land to set up the tanks.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “No.” Gavin shakes his head. “It’s backward. People need to see something happening. They don’t need perfect, they need progress. And it’s ass-backward to buy the land. He needs to lease it. He needs to find cheap land that people aren’t using—which should be a freaking piece of cake since he wants brackish water—and with little capital outlay, get some equipment and get started.

  “After Hurricane Erica last year, tons of farmland in South Florida was flooded. Those fields are shot for the next three years. If he wanted, he could rent hundred of acres for peanuts. Why drop hundreds of thousands of dollars on a small piece of property when you don’t even know that the company will be around in six months? And it won’t be if he doesn’t get moving.”

  “Wow.” I think about it for a second. “That makes a lot more sense.”

  His smile is a pale cousin of his typical confident grin.

  “It’s not that amazing. But he needs to do it. He just doesn’t know it. He’s so focused on the science that he’s missed the boat on the business of running a company.”

  We stare out at the water, the black wavelets lapping at the barnacle-encrusted pillars below us.

  “How do you know all of this, anyway?”

  “I met a lot of entrepreneurs at juvie.”

  “Really?”

  “A drug dealer is like any small-business owner. They got inventory, they got customers, they got cash-flow problems and competition. It’s no different from any other business in that sense. It sparked my interest—not in drug dealing, I mean, in business. I took some business classes at Tech and afterward, I studied on my own. I thought it would be cool to start my own company. Once I learned about Isakson’s company, I started poking around commercial-property sites. They’re out there if you look for them.”

  “So how come he remembers your name from Tech?” I ask hesitantly. “You weren’t there very long.”

  “I was the last one to check out this book that later turned up missing the pages necessary for a tough assignment,” he says flatly. “Someone accused me of doing it. Anonymously. Just try proving you don’t have something in your possession.” He shrugs. “It’s impossible. I lost my scholarship, I was kicked out of school. And yeah, Professor Isakson remembers my name,” he says dryly. “The assignment was for his
class.”

  “That doesn’t even make sense. Like people couldn’t just read it online? What is this, 1870?”

  He laughs hollowly. “Isakson’s old-school. He gave us this big lecture at the start of the semester about libraries and books and how our generation is losing touch with what it means to research. Part of his class was about library skills. He made sure we had to use old, rare books that weren’t online. Half the stuff you couldn’t even take out of Special Collections. No scanners. No Xerox machines. These books were historic. He wanted us to read this thing. It wasn’t a published book really—it was the student notebook of Francis William Aston.”

  I nod, fake-impressed by a name I don’t recognize.

  “Uh, he won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in the 1920s?”

  “Oh, right. Cool.”

  “It was kind of incredible, actually. To hold the notes that this guy wrote when he was a student, it was unbelievable. The librarian had a fit that an entire class of underclassmen was going to be handling it. I had to wear gloves. Which made it even shittier that someone cut out some pages. They changed their policy after that: no undergrads could access Special Collections without a TA.”

  “Did you ever find out who accused you?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Isn’t that unconstitutional or something?”

  He laughs hollowly again. “I didn’t go to jail, I was kicked out of school. I doubt a school’s honor code falls under federal jurisdiction.”

  “It should.” Gavin’s story reinforces my belief that he was framed by an expert, the best of the best. What did Natasha’s charmer promise his dupe at Tech? And how much is it biting him on the ass now?

  Gavin puts his arm around me like a pal giving me a one-armed squeeze for my loyal support. I shiver at the sudden warmth of his arm. To mask it, I fiddle with my purse and pull out a pack of gum.

  “Professor Isakson left school after that, you know,” he says, accepting a piece of gum. “In his interview with the school paper, he said he was ready for a new opportunity but I always felt like it was my fault. Like, if it wasn’t for me, he’d still be teaching.” He’s trying to be flippant, but it’s obvious how much those words still hurt. It’s that hurt that worms its way through my defenses.

  “So we have to figure out how to get your business plan to the professor, convince him that you were framed and that you’re not the embodiment of the self-entitled, lazy future of America.” I blow a bubble and it pops loudly. “Easy.”

  Gavin laughs and hugs me to him. He was always easy with his hugs at school, always physical with everyone, like a big puppy. I don’t take it personally.

  “Sure,” he agrees. “Easy as pie.”

  “It’s your business plan that could do it,” I say earnestly, pushing out of his arms. “You can’t cheat your way into an idea like that. That company, what does he call it?”

  “AlgaeGo.”

  “That’s a stupid name,” I say, “but whatever. AlgaeGo is his baby. Right now, it’s failing. If you do something that gets his company really going, that lets people see how beautiful his baby really is, then he’s going to love you. And since it’s not something you can copy or steal, it’ll prove what you’re capable of. He’ll be forced to reconsider.”

  “It’s not that easy,” Gavin says. “He doesn’t even want to talk to me—why would he listen or believe anything I say?” Even though Gavin is arguing against me, there’s a spark of excitement in his voice.

  “Because you come with hard numbers,” I say. “You track down the landowner of a flooded farm, you dazzle them with your charm, you negotiate a fantastic deal on behalf of AlgaeGo and then you present him with the figures. No one else knows enough about the company, or cares enough, to do it. Once you have the deal worked out, it’ll speak for itself.”

  “Dazzle them with my charm?”

  “Don’t make me repeat it,” I laugh. “The fact that you’re taking the time to pull this deal together is going to change everything for Isakson. I’m assuming the land will be cheap?”

  “That’s a safe assumption,” he says with no false modesty. We share a grin.

  “All teachers dream about the student that goes above and beyond the basic assignment,” I argue. “Here, you’re not only doing that, you’re making an assignment where none existed. And you’re only doing it for the success of his company. How could he not be impressed? How could he not reevaluate his opinion?”

  “And what, I negotiate as AlgaeGo’s agent? I don’t have that authority.”

  “Gavin, seriously? You say you’re the company’s agent but that you have to present any final offer to the owner himself. It’s not that hard.”

  He angles his head away from me, hiding his face. That amazing brain of his is firing, looking for holes in my argument, following my logic to its conclusion.

  After a moment, he nods.

  “Maybe you’re right.” He shrugs coolly. “At this point, there’s not much I could do to lower his opinion.”

  “First thing to do when you’re in a hole is to stop digging.” I echo my dad’s folksy truism. “Next is to figure out how to climb out.”

  “Is that so?” There’s amusement in his voice and if nothing else, I’ve given him the needed nudge away from morose depression and toward constructive action.

  Michael, I think as I glance up at the starry skies, I hope this works for you. I’m sure it’s only atmospheric changes that make the brightest star in the evening sky look like it’s winking at me.

  We linger there at the edge of the pier, the briny air blowing possibilities and ideas our way.

  In two hours, it will be five days until my birthday.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I skip school on Monday morning—a first for Goody Two-Shoes little me. As I ride my bike in the quiet downtown streets after rush hour, I half expect some responsible citizen to call in a truancy officer to haul me back to school.

  The start-up office is located on the third floor of a nearly vacant office building, one of the older ones that manage to be both stately and dilapidated. It’s on the unofficial border between the new, shiny high-rises, galleries and boutiques that stay empty all day, now that the economy has turned and no one wants to spend three hundred dollars on a strange-looking vase, and the part of the city that even during the boom years refused to spruce up and ditch its quick marts selling pressed Cuban sandwiches and cheap beer (ice cold!). Where weirdos loiter and the homeless, grungy and disgruntled sprawl on benches in the middle of the day. I lock my bike to a lamppost and hope it’ll be there when I return. The heavy leaded-glass door to the building isn’t locked.

  The office suite has a stained, threadbare carpet, windows so smudged they barely let in light, and office furniture that looks like it was picked up off the curb on Big Trash Day. There’s a main reception area with dusty fake plants, a framed poster of the company logo, and a big messy desk with no one sitting behind it. Of the two doors off the reception area, one is open to an empty room. Muffled sounds come from behind the closed door.

  I walk over and knock loudly.

  The muffled sounds cease immediately and after a short pause, the door opens. Isakson looks at me quizzically, apparently unable to place me.

  “Yes?” he asks.

  “I’m Leni Kohn,” I say. “I’m here to help you.”

  He invites me into his office and I sit on a hard plastic chair, fighting nerves, trying to sound like a confident investor instead of a nervous teenager taking a huge gamble. Isakson wears a light blue collared shirt and pale, narrow jeans that somehow don’t look American. There’s a large carafe of French-press coffee sitting on the ledge of the dirty window, which strengthens my impression that he wasn’t raised in the States. Europe or maybe the Middle East, though when he spoke on Saturday, he didn’t have an accent, just a slightly different way of pronouncing some words, putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable.

  I spent all of Sunday learning about business
models and angel investors from Delaney Cramer, a businesswoman and family friend that my parents helped out a couple of years back. She was the one who helped them set up my trust fund in the first place. She’s always been fond of me and several times has tried to talk me into studying finance when I go to college. We spent two hours on the phone while she gave me a crash course in successful start-up business models. Angel investors bridge the gap for a small company that has tapped funds from friends and family but is too small for venture capitalist firms to bother with. Because there’s such a high risk that all their investment money will be lost if the young company doesn’t make it—which I know very well from my parents’ unfortunate investment experiences—angel investors usually require terms that give them a very high return on their investments. Which gave me an idea of how to pull this off.

  “If you’re looking for investors, you’re wasting your time talking to my parents,” I begin. “It’s not their money. It’s mine.”

  The professor’s eyebrows rise as he looks at me like I’m a puppy claiming to be Napoleon. One office wall is lined with cheap bookcases bending under the weight of dozens of huge binders full of papers. Stacks of papers in various heights have been placed on the floor, like a child’s model city. It’s the office of a busy man who doesn’t have time or money to waste. Sure enough, he lets me know it.

  “Why would a young woman want to spend her money on a start-up that has a seventy-five percent chance of failure?”

  I knew this question would come and I was prepared.

  “Would you ask my parents that? Would you question any other investor that wanted to join the company? Because if that’s your strategy, you need to increase your chances of failure. Ninety-nine percent sounds more likely.”

  He looks stunned and a hurt look flashes in his eyes. Crap. Not the way to win him over.