Page 50 of Heartache & Playdates
The door opened and I looked up to see an attractive young girl walk in. She had sandy blonde hair and large brown eyes. She looked vaguely familiar. So much so that I clicked on her file on my computer to see if there’d been a picture attached to it.
There was, but I was sure that wasn’t why she looked familiar.
I stood. “Angelina Chaplin, I’m Maddox Cruz, nice to meet you.”
She smiled as the door shut behind her. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Cruz. You can call me Lina.”
“Lina, right, and please, call me Maddox. Have a seat.”
She smiled as she crossed the room to the chair facing my desk and lowered down onto it.
“Chaplin, that’s a unique last name. Do people ever ask if you’re related to—"
“Charlie? Yeah, all the time. Actually, my dad is. His great grandfather was Charlie’s first cousin. But apparently his grandfather saidhisdad always got along better with Charlie’s brother Sydney than Charlie.”
“Oh, that’s interesting. That has to be a unique experience to grow up being related to someone so famous.”
Her only response was a small, tight-lipped grin. I’d always been good at reading people. It had been somewhat of a survival skill growing up. I had to know if people were safe, and if they weren’t, I needed to know what their triggers were and what their tells were.
It was clear to me that Lina didn’t want to talk about her family, I just didn’t know why.
Maybe she didn’t want to talk about her great cousin twice removed, or whatever he was. Maybe she wanted this interview to be about her. Maybe she was concerned about nepotism, and she wanted to get the internship on her own merit.
I normally asked more questions about family and childhood, but I didn’t want her to think that I was only interested in those things because she was related to Charlie Chaplin.
“So, I see you graduated high school with honors at fourteen and MIT at nineteen after completing a dual master’s program.”
“I did.”
I always had a soft spot in my heart for people that graduated early. It definitely wasn’t a prerequisite for getting the job, but it didn’t hurt. I’d graduated high school at sixteen and my master’s degree at twenty, which most people thought was impressive, but Lina blew my stats out of the water.
“And I see you already had a position at Google. Wouldn’t this be a demotion?”
She pushed the glasses on her nose up. “Not financially.”
“Still, to be an intern instead of a programmer.”
She paused before saying, “I think there’s more room for growth here.”
Fair enough. She was probably right. I liked that even at her young age, she was thinking toward her future.
Before getting into where she saw herself in ten years, I wanted to know a little about her past, but steered clear of her family. “When did you know you wanted to work in computers?”
She paused, as if she was truly considering the question. I appreciated that. A lot of the people that sat across from me in that chair were so eager to say the right thing, half the time they blurted out a response that I knew was not thought out and they would probably kick themselves for saying later.
“I guess it started with animatronics. My first memory of being interested in that was when I was three. I had a Teddy Ruxpin and instead of being amazed that it could speak, my mom found me in my room with my dad’s screwdriver dismantling it. She asked what I was doing and I told her I wanted to know how it talked. And when I was six, I reprogrammed my Speak and Spell.”
“So that’s what got you interested in programming.” I’d read in her file that her true gift and genius was in programming.
Her lips curled in a smile. “No, when I was five my dad was watching—"
Here it comes.The Net.
“—War Games. I loved that move and ever since then I was obsessed with all things computers.”
“Did you say War Games?” I was sure that I heard her wrong.
She nodded.
