Page 23 of Derivation

“Hey, what are you doing out here?” Gabi asked.

Sarai looked up, surprised to see her, and replied, “Oh, nothing. I just needed a break.”

“From kicking everyone’s butt in Monopoly? Can I sit?”

“Sure,” she said. “And from it all. You know, we’ve had more parties, if you can call them that, here in the past week than I think we did all last year.”

“Why is that?”

“We miss Violet.” She shrugged a shoulder. “She used to be the one to come out here and check on me. Enya is always in her head. I don’t even know how many languages she knows now, and how many dialects, or how many she speaks fluently. She just loves learning. It’s why she’s always on her phone – she’s either in our app, testing it, or she’s learning with these digital flash cards she makes. Arlowe is always in her headphones, coding something. Violet would be the one to notice that I’d left the garage and come out here. I get my best ideas either right in this spot or at my dry-erase board.”

“Why here?”

“I don’t know. I think sometimes, I feel pressure working in the same space with everyone, especially now that we have employees who come and go, so it’s nice to come out here and be by myself. My room is the smallest, so it can be claustrophobic.”

“Why didn’t you move into Arlowe’s room, then?”

“I’m lazy.” She chuckled. “I don’t feel like moving all my stuff. And it’s small, but it’s home to me, and it has been for nearly ten years now.”

Gabi looked out at the yard and replied, “It’s nice back here. Quiet.”

“Yeah, one of the nice things about this house.”

“So, did you get an idea?”

“No.” Sarai laughed quietly. “I wish.”

“Are you short on ideas or something?” Gabi asked.

“Right now, I am. I have an actual budget, which is nice, but when I was in school, I had the best ideas.”

“If you do say so yourself,” Gabi teased her, and Sarai watched her push her glasses up on her nose when she looked over at her.

“My professors said it mainly. I went to a top-five business school with an emphasis on marketing. The year I graduated, they were number one in the country, and I had a lot of opportunities. I told them that later, not at first, because I really wanted to do what we’re doing now, but I had four job offers right out of school, and three possible paid internships at massive advertising companies.”

“Damn, Sarai.”

“I wanted to do this. I still do – I love what we’re doing here. We just rolled out version seven of the app, and we have a new version of the browser coming out soon. We have new components now, too. Cerebral has helped with that.”

“Cerebral? That’s the new tool that–”

“Kicks ass? Yeah. Stella works there. It’s how Violet and Stella reconnected, actually: she reached out to them about their software. Now, we have it, and we’re using it in a different way than pretty much everyone else, so it’s cool stuff that we’re doing.”

“I haven’t tried your app yet, but I downloaded it last week when you told me about what you do here. I’m going to try to brush up on my Spanish.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. But why is it so important to you? I get why it might be to Enya; she loves languages. Why did you want to work here and not at one of those places where you had an offer? Was it just because of your friends?”

“Not only that. My grandma only spoke Hebrew. Her parents did, too. My parents are first-generation, so they speak Hebrew and English, but they were a little lax about learning and speaking Hebrew in our house. I don’t really know why. We also didn’t celebrate the Sabbath or most of the big Jewish holidays. I didn’t even have a bat mitzvah. I got the impression that my mom thought it would be better for me because they sent me to a Catholic school, and they didn’t want me to stick out. It was the best school in the area, which was the only reason they sent me there. I loved my grandparents, though. They’re both gone now, but talking to them was difficult because we spoke two different languages. By the time I realized that I wanted to put the time into learning Hebrew, my grandpa was already gone, and my grandma passed away two years later. I would’ve killed to be able to just talk to her, learn things from her more easily – hell, learn about her and her life more easily. Our app does that and more. It could’ve allowed me to have full conversations with her or my grandpa, as well as teach me the language. Enya’s worked so hard on this thing, and we’ve added so many features that really make it the best language app on the market. We just happen to be one of the smallest.”

“You’re getting there. Sometimes, slow and steady wins the race.”

“You know, there’s this hardware piece we want to make that would help even more. Arlowe has some of the code for the software component done already, but we would need to design it first, and that would take forever.”

“Hardware?”

“Yeah, a wearable. We were thinking glasses or goggles at first because the words could display on the glasses and the person could still look at the other person while reading them, but we’ve been thinking more about how maybe it’s a watch or even a necklace.”