Colleen’s expression didn’t change, but she withdrew the napkin-wrapped money back to her side of the table. “You have a private plane?”
“Please keep the money,” he said.
She shook her head a little bit, letting that thought rattle around in there, he supposed. She said, “It doesn’t matter how much money you have or don’t have. The moral principle is still the same. If you don’t want me to pay you back, then I’ll work it off somehow. I could be your virtual assistant. I could maintain your website or write some sort of a program for you. I know Python, Rust, C-sharp, and Go. And I’m fast at picking up programming languages. If you want a program written in something else, I can probably study it for a couple of weeks, and then I’ll be fine with it.”
Tristan leaned on his elbows and examined the young woman across the coffee shop table from himself. “If you can code in those languages, what are you doing selling gaming equipment at GameShack?”
It was Colleen’s turn to stare into her drink. “I dropped out of college. I have half a degree in computer science. I can do a lot of stuff, but that piece of paper really would’ve been my entry ticket.”
“Why didn’t you finish your degree, then?”
She shrugged without looking up at him. “This and that.”
Tristan was raised not to pry in these sorts of situations. “All right, but if you could go back and finish your degree, would you?”
“In a heartbeat,” she said and then looked startled at what had come out of her mouth.
“So, since you dropped out of college a few years ago, you have to be what, twenty-five years old?”
“Twenty-three,” she mumbled.
There were lots of twenty-three-year-olds running around the greater Phoenix area. It didn’t mean anything, other than she was every bit as devastatingly young as she looked.
He nodded and sat back in his chair a bit. “I code, too. As a matter fact, that’s how I made the money to go from standing in a New York City doorway trying not to freeze to death to having a private plane, among other things. I need somebody with me for a few days who understands coding. How about you fly around the country with me as my business associate for a week, and we’ll talk code.”
“And that would pay off the debt?”
“Oh, no. That money is a gift or a bribe not to sue me. I’ll pay you because I need somebody else there who understands software development.”
“How much are we talking about?” she asked.
Tristan told her how much money he would pay her for the week.
She sat back in her chair, nearly dropping the cash he’d already given her, but she scrambled to grab it.
When she composed herself, she said, “That’s too much. That’s how much coders with a bachelor’s degree would make in six months. Dude, I’m nothing. I’m nobody. I dropped out of college because of reasons, real reasons. I screwed up my whole life because of that. I don’t know how to do anything for real. As far as employers are concerned, I’m a warm body with no skills and no experience in anything worthwhile who doesn’t even deserve to make minimum wage, let alone health insurance. If I were dead, I’d at least be qualified to sell my body to a medical school for gross anatomy dissection. You should find someone who knows what they’re doing, not a fuck-up like me.”
Tristan refrained from commanding her not to treat herself that way. They hardly knew each other. It wasn’t his place. “Look, I don’t know you well enough to argue with you, but I need somebody right now. I don’t have time to go on employment websites and find fifty prospects, vet twenty of them, interview ten, make three job offers, and then start all over again when they ghost on me. I need somebody to work with me right now, and you’re here and you say you know code. Do you?”
“Well, yeah.”
Tristan grabbed a napkin and an abandoned pen from an empty table and scratched out a few lines of code. “What’s this do?”
Colleen took the napkin and looked at it, glanced up at him, and frowned. “Dude, are you kidding me? This is ‘Hello, World,’ the first program every programmer learns to write. It just prints out Hello, World on your screen. This version is in C-sharp. If you just wanted to print Hello, World, it would be a lot easier in Python, which would be just print Hello World, with the Hello World in quotation marks and then parentheses.” She mimed the punctuation marks with her fingers. “Why are you wasting my time with something this easy?”
Tristan grinned at her. “You’re hired.”
“No, really. This wasn’t a test. High school kids taking their first semester of coding could figure this out.”
“I thought it was an excellent test. You’re hired.”
She stared at her slowly melting whipped cream. “I don’t know.”
Tristan said, “If you have a kid, you can bring them along. We’ll find a babysitter for when we’re in meetings.” Jian could do it, which would be funny as hell to watch. “Or I’ll pay for a pet sitter or boarding whilst you’re gone if you have a dog.” Although he would’ve loved to see Jian babysitting a hyperactive Labrador.
“Yeah, no. None of those. I don’t even have a plant.” Colleen squinted at him. “How do I know I’m not going to end up with my head in a freezer?”
He cracked up. He laughed a little too loudly, and other patrons of the coffee shop swiveled their heads to stare at the two of them sitting by the window.
