Excerpt:
Prologue
I want to tell you a
story, but I keep screwing it up. Thankfully, my good friends, Tom and Jessie,
keep coming back to tell me how it really goes. They’re both real nice and
probably the two best friends I’ve ever had, which is maybe why I keep telling
their story wrong. Maybe a part of me doesn’t want to get their story right, because
I know if I get it right, they’ll be gone forever.
Anyway,
I’m going to give it another shot, because they’ve asked me to try again. So,
here we go. Tom and Jessie were brother and sister, and they lived together
with their parents in the Silicon Valley in the year 2009. Tom was a senior in
high-school who’d been accepted into San Jose State’s Physics Department, which
he was partly excited about, but partly not sure about, because he also liked
to speak out against authority, which he’d started to do all the way back on
his first day of kindergarten when he explained to his teacher how the Superman
character on his lunchbox could fly. He said that Superman’s extra-long red
cape let lots of air underneath it and lifted Superman into the sky all the way
up to the clouds and, when Superman touched the clouds, he floated just like
they did – smooth and easy and in a direction that was best for them. But Tom’s
teacher didn’t want Tom to get the wrong idea about the world. She didn’t want
Tom to think that people or Superman could fly like clouds. She leaned down and
told Tom that Superman couldn’t really fly. Tom leaned forward and told
her she couldn’t really imagine.
And then Tom leaned back and kept on
imagining, although as time went on his willingness to speak out against
authority began to dissolve. No one liked a know-it-all, especially the older
people, and so he started to spend most of his time with high-school friends
and the girl he liked, Lisa, who had strong blue eyes and glassy lip-gloss
lips. He would walk with Lisa every day to their 5th period class and, when
senior prom approached, Lisa talked about how excited she was and, one time,
mentioned that she didn’t have a date. Tom said he didn’t have one either. But
that’s all Tom said. He didn’t ask Lisa to prom; he knew he should have, but he
didn’t and he wasn’t sure why. Instead, he stayed home and hung out with his
best friend Dan.
And that was almost it. That was almost
the end of Tom’s story. The rest of this book was almost full of blank pages
for coloring because after high school, Tom figured he would just choose a
college, get a degree, maybe a graduate degree, make his way into some
corporate cubical, and start to calculate derivatives on how to derive more
money for company profit sake. That’s it. That’s all. A story told in three
paragraphs.
But three paragraphs just didn’t feel
right. Something was wrong. Tom was too young; too young for college; too young
for the travelled path. He was a rebellious eighteen-year-old and it wasn’t
because he didn’t have a great childhood or a loving family. His younger
sister, Jessie, was a freshman at his high school, and he’d drive Jessie to
piano practice twice a week. Most mornings Jessie would turn the stereo up and
roll down her window and let the cool air flow in and sing.
No one was more proud of Jessie or Tom
than their dad, John, who wanted nothing more in life than to take pictures of
his kids, cook breakfast for his family, and ski every now and then. John
worked as a computer programmer for Hewlett-Packard, and he’d graduated from
the University of Minnesota, where he swam backstroke and studied math. Not
long after moving to California, he met his future wife, Elise, who was strong
in character and furiously competitive, both of which sometimes caused problems
in her career as a financial analysis for Wells Fargo Bank. One time in a
quarterly review meeting a VP asked Elise if she could pick up his dry-cleaning
after the meeting was over. Elise did not respond. She didn’t want to get fired
but she also didn’t want to be pushed around by testosterone. So she waited
until the meeting ended then she unleashed Elise-fury: calculated and
methodical and justice-seeking. The next day she called the Wells Fargo HR
Department and filed an official complaint and, although the VP remained a VP,
he never asked her to do anything again.
Sometime soon after, Elise and John bought
a house in San Jose, where they’d decided they’d start life. They’d mapped it
all out: house, family, mortgage, and save for retirement: the whole American
Dream. The prospect of the American Dream was enough for them – this made them
happy and content, and their happiness grew stronger after they began to raise
two healthy children, Tom and Jessie.
But, as often the case, something suddenly
happened. John suddenly lost his job. In 2008 Hewlett-Packard cut 24,600 jobs,
and John was sent home with a 6-month severance package. Immediately John
started to look for a new job, but couldn’t find one right away, which produced
moments of unmasked doubt that could be seen by Tom. And with these new
struggles, Tom’s college hesitations intensified and, instead of college, Tom
began to think about money. He started to think about making money, about
figuring out a way to beat the system that said his dad wasn’t good enough for
a job. And it wasn’t because his dad didn’t want a job. It wasn’t because his
dad hadn’t gone to work from seven o’clock to five o’clock every day for
eighteen years, only calling in sick a few times. It wasn’t…it wasn’t fair.
So Tom thought about it and thought about
it, and the last sentence in his third paragraph ende—
Up turning into the first sentence of his story. And his story begins
now.