End of the Road Read online

  Jade’s face flamed red. The worst day, the worst presentation ever.

  “I was standing in the back, and I happened to notice these three guys there completely and loudly ignoring Jade’s PowerPoint—which was about the Clementine Program, by the way—and watching a video on one of the guys’ tablets.”

  “My personal Draco Malfoy,” Jade said, trying to keep her tone light. “Flanked by his Crabbe and Goyle.”

  That was the day Jade nearly threw in the towel and quit the CS program. They’d almost won. But then Dan came into her life.

  Chapter Six

  Jade hated to think about that day. KU’s Hoch Auditorium had smelled like Axe body spray and onions, which only added to her angst, those insidious worms eating away at her stomach lining. That’s how she pictured what happened to her body when her anxiety crawled into the driver’s seat. She was self-confident—overly so—inside her own brain, but her body had never gotten the message. Stammering, the pitch of her voice climbing ever higher the more she talked, sweat taking over her clothing, the humiliation of letting her weakness show.

  Her archenemy’s name was Nishant Sharma, the guy who was watching videos with his henchmen at the back of the auditorium. He competed with her for everything in the Computer Science Department. He did anything he could to undermine her, with the blessing if not the encouragement of the department head, Professor Sauer. Her own personal Snape, to continue the Harry Potter metaphor, only he wasn’t secretly a good guy. He aggressively campaigned against the idea of women in computer science.

  Nishant and his buddies huddled together at the back of the auditorium, their heads bent, their faces aglow from the tiny screen they were all scrutinizing. They wore that YouTube look of anticipation, of gearing up to laugh uproariously whether they found it funny or not.

  Seeing this from the stage, Jade put her hands on her hips—a power pose that allegedly made the poser feel ten feet tall and bulletproof. All it did was expose her soaking armpits to the air conditioner and send a chill through her body. She attempted to continue even without the attention of the three jerks in the back. She tried to raise her voice, but her constricted throat emitted only raspy noises.

  And that’s when they started laughing—at first trying to cover it up, but the video apparently was too hilarious to hold in their hysteria. They tittered in that self-aware “you all need to know what a great time we’re having” kind of laughter. It seemed these days everyone behaved as if they were always being filmed, always being watched. Everyone was the star of their very own YouTube show while simultaneously watching YouTube, on and on, spiraling into infinity.

  She remembered the list she’d made that morning detailing everything that could possibly go wrong, and somehow she’d missed this one. She wished she’d worn all black—another power thing—but it didn’t fit her. Bright colors were more her style.

  Her ankles wobbled. She shouldn’t have worn heels this high, but she needed them for confidence. The flip side of that coin was physical peril. Her size eleven four-inch heels grew her to a towering six foot four, which still wasn’t imposing enough.

  Remember what the book said. Project your power. Power through the sweat and shaking.

  But her knees locked up then, and her imagination transported her back to the gymnasium at Ephesus High, where she’d crouched, paralyzed, after mounting the balance beam. Her hands became claws that would not release their grip and let her stand. Ultimately, her coach had to physically pluck her from the beam in front of an audience of a hundred. The most humiliating moment of her life. Her mind should be able to take control. But her body had proved the victor time and again. She’d tried hypnosis, counseling, beta-blockers—nothing could overcome her nervous system’s boundless power.

  Jade glanced at her instructor, who sat in the front row smiling at her, but nothing could overcome the derision filling the room.

  As the laughter in the back of Hoch Auditorium amplified, Jade lost her place in the presentation, and she’d seen the burly man walk over to her saboteur and pluck the tablet from his hands. “Learn some manners, kid,” he’d said in his big thunderous voice. “Your colleague is speaking.”

  Jade locked eyes with the man she now knew as Dan, and he nodded encouragingly at her.

  Jade cut the presentation short, and ended by saying, “You can read about the rest of it on my website,” she said. At fuckoff.com. She grabbed her iPad and clomped ungracefully out of Hoch, and Dan had followed her and asked her to have coffee with him at the KU student union. Within an hour, it seemed as if she’d always known him.

  “I hope this isn’t presumptuous of me,” Dan said. “But why didn’t you stay at Carnegie Mellon for grad school?”

  Jade explained about her sister and her recently diagnosed mom and how she needed to be close to home.

  “That’s some heavy self-sacrifice for a person your age,” Dan said, stirring his coffee.

  Jade shrugged.

  “Or did you dislike CMU?”

  “No, I didn’t dislike it,” she said. “It was a shock though. Here I am a big Kansas farm girl, and I had no idea what I was walking into. Other than the CS school and the drama school, the rest of the students are Ivy League rejects, and they’re all from the East Coast. I’d never met anyone from the East Coast before, so I felt like this giant, carefree toddler who bumbled into a room with my arms and heart wide open, ready for everyone to love her, and then a two-by-four of New England aloofness and scorn knocked me out.”

  “Sounds rough,” Dan said. “You could write a book for people like you—sort of an instruction manual.”

  “I should,” Jade said. “It would have helped tremendously to know what I was walking into. The only real friends I made in town went to the University of Pittsburgh, kids I met at Cornerstone, the student ministry at Bellefield Presbyterian Church. Even so, I love Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon with a fierce loyalty. Stupid, huh?”

  “Not at all. I think that’s fairly common.”

  “I roomed with three Pitt girls, all nursing students, in Oakland, near a strip club, sophomore year through graduation. When CMU people found out I played high school football, they were amused. How quaint. How provincial. How adorable!”

  “Are you kidding?” Dan nearly shouted. “It’s just one of the many ways you’re a badass.”

  “At Carnegie Mellon, I literally had to retrain myself in so many ways. I tried to relearn how to laugh.” Her high school friends always had made a big deal about how funny her laugh was, how it made them laugh harder. But at CMU, her laugh brought on silence, along with almost concerned looks. She learned to check herself and be aware of how she appeared at all times. She’d learned to slouch then, to draw in on herself, when her dad had always told her to stand up straight and take up as much space as she needed to. She was a loud, outgoing person trapped in social situations she didn’t quite understand, and trying to be a dainty girl exhausted her.

  Going to Carnegie Mellon had given her a deeper understanding of Clementine’s autism—the social cues there were different, the way social cues were always mysterious to her sister, coupled with the constant fear of acting foolishly.

  And she’d carried this on to KU, apparently, because their CS department didn’t want her either. The women in the department were treated like second-class citizens.

  “How am I supposed to survive in this industry if I can’t stand up to misogyny like that?” she asked Dan.

  “All it takes,” Dan said, “is some confidence, surrounding yourself with supportive people who believe in you, and time. You’ll look back on this stage of your life and laugh. You might even feel sorry for your hecklers.”

  She was about to say that would never happen, but then she remembered the incident with the teenagers in the park, when she made the teenage girl bleed for taunting Clementine. She did feel sorry for them, because they were probably underemployed, smoking weed every day, just drifting through life.

  “Colonel Ste
venson,” she said.

  “Call me Dan.”

  “Dan—did you wander into my presentation by accident?”

  He leaned in close, conspiratorial, and whispered, “No. I’ve heard about the Clementine Program.”

  Jade was more than surprised. “Who—”

  Dan waved his hand. “It’s not important. But your program is. If it’s half of what I’ve been told, you have a stellar future ahead of you.” He sat back. “I’m a loud advocate for women in the sciences. My mother was a brilliant physicist who was stymied in the field just because of her gender. I’ve spent my career mentoring women, and I think you just need a little help to make it to where you’re destined to be.”

  Jade couldn’t respond to this lavish praise.

  “Since you didn’t get to finish your presentation,” Dan said, “why don’t you take me through the process of developing the Clementine Program.”

  This was a rare opportunity. Most people glazed over when she talked about her work. “I started to hear patterns in my sister, Clementine’s, vocalizations, and I picked them out on our old upright piano in the living room,” Jade said. “The first time I matched the tones she vocalized, she made prolonged eye contact with me, which is very rare in autistic people.”

  To this day, that had been the most exciting, gratifying moment Jade had ever experienced. It was then she realized the possibilities of computers. Those days of figuring things out, of building and designing, were so sweet.

  “Clementine’s usually always moving,” Jade continued, “but this froze her, and she repeated the musical line and pointed at a bag of chocolate kisses on top of the piano. I pointed at it also and repeated the line, and she just kind of dissolved. I’d discovered the tonal ‘word’ for chocolate. So I would point at an object, and she’d vocalize, and I’d repeat it on the piano until we had a rudimentary vocabulary of nouns worked out in music. I wrote an algorithm based on it. That’s how it all started.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Twelve.”

  “What was the significance of the chocolate?” Dan asked.

  “It’s the only thing that motivated her,” Jade said. “Not time-outs, not taking things away. It’s still the best way to motivate her. Chocolate is to Clementine what money is to most people.”

  “Interesting.”

  “So then I was able to teach Clem to talk once I understood her language,” Jade said. “I designed several phone apps to help her understand the world around her. An app that explains facial expressions, that helps her express emotions she has no words for, stuff like that. I designed one for her we could use to communicate secretly through her tonal language. I still send her texts that way. It’s how I keep in touch with her because she can’t talk on the phone. If she can’t see a person’s face and see their mouth moving, it’s as if the person is speaking in a foreign language.”

  Dan stared in awe. “That is fascinating.”

  “She also experiences music in pictures, which is part of her neurology. The first time I understood this was after she heard the song ‘Just a Girl’ by No Doubt. Do you know it?”

  Dan shook his head.

  “It’s a song about how women are treated like children. So when Clementine hears a song, she ignores the words and just sees the image the music itself—the melody, the notes, the chord progressions—describes to her. What she sees when ‘Just a Girl’ plays is a female angel with massive glowing white wings flying in specific patterns over a large stage.”

  Dan shook his head.

  “So this was another component I used in my algorithm,” Jade said. “By combining sound and image in the way Clementine sees them, the program began to make unique connections. Began to create patterns independently I couldn’t predict. It grew from there, until it acted completely autonomously.”

  “Then you’ve been working on this for—what, almost fifteen years?”

  “That’s right.” She sighed. “If I had access to a supercomputer, there’s no telling how far I could take it.”

  Dan scrubbed his hand over his face. “I think I might be able to land you access to that kind of computing power,” he said. “I’ve just learned about an opportunity that’s starting very soon.”

  He fished a business card out of his wallet and handed it to her. MARTIN FELIX, it said. SiPraTech. “They’re holding an on-campus interview three days from now. Give him a call, and I’m sure he’ll squeeze you in.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because I’ll tell him to.”

  She didn’t know at the time how much pull Dan had in all sorts of places.

  In the days before the interview, she spoke to Dan on the phone several times.

  “Will you be there?” she asked him the day before.

  “No,” he said. “It’s a start-up I didn’t have anything to do with. I’m just making the introductions. You’ll do the rest. Just be yourself. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

  “Give me a pep talk,” she said.

  “You’re smart enough, you’re good-looking enough, and darn it, people like you.”

  “Not quite what I had in mind.”

  “I need to tell you,” Dan said. “My buddy Martin requested a recommendation for the position from the computer science department head. Professor Sauer?”

  She knew what Dan was going to say.

  “You didn’t make the list. No surprise there. No women at all on the list, but I told Martin they needed you. So do me proud, lady.”

  “I’ll do my best,” she said. “Did you tell me about Sauer just to rile me up?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Rage is a great motivator. I’ll tell you what I know that Sauer doesn’t. I know you’re going to kick the world’s ass. I just hope the world’s ready.”

  “Thank you, Dan,” she said.

  “Go get ’em.”

  Jade drove to the Oread Hotel at the east end of the KU campus and parked. The cement sidewalk threatened to trip her at every opportunity as she approached the hotel entrance, but she strove to stand in the light of Dan’s belief in her. She wasn’t just a great big farm girl. She had control. She had this.

  In the lobby stood a man in a suit, looking very secret service, holding a printed SiPraTech Interview sign.

  “Hi,” she said, shaky already. “I’m Jade Veverka. I’m here for the interview.”

  “Follow me, please,” he said.

  She did, stepping carefully inside the elevator. As the doors slid closed, she strained to think of something, anything, to say to this taciturn man, but he stared intently at the ascending numbers, so she did too. This isn’t important, she kept telling herself. What’s the worst-case scenario? They don’t hire me. My life goes on as before. Being overlooked and unappreciated in the CS department.

  As she said this to herself, she remembered Dan’s phrase—life-changing. Did she want her life to change? She wanted to be taken seriously and to stop being so fearful. She wanted people to listen to her and not think of her as an ungainly, horsey, nervous wimp but a confident, take-charge woman. She’d heard fake it ’til you make it, but she’d been faking it for years and hadn’t made it yet.

  When they got to an upper floor, the man walked on silent shoes down a hallway and Jade followed. He stopped in front of a door and said, “Can I have your NDA, please?”

  “My—what?” she stammered, hating herself for it. She’d heard him. She just didn’t have what he wanted.

  “You should have received an NDA via email. You were supposed to read it over and sign it before coming today.”

  “Oh,” she said, her face heating. “I didn’t get it.”

  His skeptical expression made her want to shout, I’m the most organized person I know. If I’d gotten it, you’d have it in your hand. I’m not an absentminded nitwit.

  “I’ll need to get one for you now,” he said. “Your appointment is in five minutes, but it has to be signed before you go in.”

  Before she
could say anything, he put a card key into the slot and opened the door, disappearing inside.

  She stood staring at the door, as if he were on the other side and she could see him. She had the horrifying thought that he’d leave her out here, laughing about it with whoever else was in there about how he’d tricked her, made her look foolish.

  But the man reappeared moments later and handed her a stack of paper, possibly fifty pages thick, and a pen.

  “I don’t have enough time to read this,” she said.

  “It’s a standard NDA,” he said. “We really just require your signature.”

  The man removed the last sheet of paper and pointed. Then he held the rest of the paper like a tray. She obeyed and signed. For the first time, he smiled at her.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Please come in.”

  He opened the door for her and held it while she wobbled on in.

  The room was more like a very expensive hotel suite, the likes of which Jade had only seen pictures of but never stayed in. When she rounded the corner, the first thing she saw was a dining area with a long table, on which sat four gleaming new ASUS laptops, probably K501UXs with Core i7. And the second was Nishant Sharma, flanked by his YouTube-watching cronies, his great big teeth biting into an appetizer. He froze midbite when he recognized her, then his eyebrows rose in surprise. “Hello, Jade,” he said, using her first name for maybe the first time ever. “Great to see you.”

  Really? He’d never spoken a kind word to her, but he was clearly putting on his awkwardly friendly interview personality.

  She froze. Dan hadn’t told her this was a group interview. Maybe he didn’t know.

  “Hi,” she said.

  He held a chair for her as if he were a maître d’, and she had the sneaking suspicion he would pull it out from under her, but she forced herself to sit in it and say, “Thank you, Nishant.”

  “I see you two know each other,” a man in a linty brown suit said, standing up and smoothing his cobalt blue tie as he did so. “You must be Jade Veverka. My name is Martin Felix.” He stretched out a hand to shake hers, but he overshot and stabbed her in the chest with it. He drew it back and his face reddened. “Sorry. Please, have a seat.”