He pauses for way too long. “In a way.”
I glance up from my inspection. “Why are you being so shifty?”
Connor does the thing he does whenever he’s uncomfortable. He scratches the back of his neck.
“Well, the thing aboutDinoCodeis…” He takes a huge breath and on the exhale he says, “I inventedit.”
I laugh, that’s funny. When I see the look on his face, I stop. “It doesn’t feel like you’re joking.”
“That’s because I’m not.”
“You…invented…DinoCode.”
“Yes.”
“You invented—” I break off, holding the dinosaur right up in front of his face. “Brian.”
“Yes.”
“And Julie.”
“Ben invented Julie.”
“BEN INVENTED JULIE???”
“Yes.”
I stare off into the middle distance, trying to make sense of what he’s saying to me. I’m getting nothing.
“Connor Reid, you explain yourselfrightnow,” I demand. “Is this one of your weird nerd jokes I don’t understand?”
“One of my—what?”
“Did you invent this the same way I invented Coco-nutty ice cream? Because that doesn’t count!”
I’m still clutching the dinosaur figurines. They’re now being used to punctuate my surprise. Like little prehistoric pom-poms.
“This is going about as well as I thought it would,” he mutters, gently prying the toys out of my grasp and putting them back on the shelf.
“Back in college,” he explains, “I made up Brian as part of an assignment for a game development class I was in. Ben wasalso in this class. We had the idea for this little kids’ game where they learned to code through a series of tasks. Our professor at the time really liked it and told us to apply for this grant through the school so we could developit.”
“OK.”
“We won the grant and used it to makeDinoCodein senior year.”
“But,” I say, not remotely getting it. “You work at Taskio.”
“After graduation, Ben and I kept working on it. We worked with an elementary school near campus to get kids to interact with it and give us feedback and stuff. A lot of them really liked it, I guess, and one of the dads of a student there worked at an education software company and got in touch. Eventually, they offered to buyit.”
I have nothing to say to this, so I don’t. My mouth is hanging open, like I’m a fish caught on a line.
“Ben and I were still in California, working out of the kitchen of our house share. We had no big plan for it. Mostly we just hoped it would help us get jobs after graduation. And building up a company is hard. We were running out of money and needed a lot more than just the two of us if we were going to turn it into anything. And then we got an offer.”
I take this information in, picturing Ben and Connor working and living in close quarters fresh out of college. It is not hard to imagine; they still work in close quarters and look like they’re fresh out of college. Which explains alot.
“Did you ever consider running it yourselves instead?”
He shrugs. “Ben wanted us to try. I wanted to sell. I had a girlfriend back in New York and was dying to get home. I overruled him.”
