Chapter 3: An Irregular

Christian's POV

I got back to the office just when everyone else was starting to leave. It hadn’t been a hard day, but I was feeling the tiredness seeping into my body. Most of it was probably because of yet lag. Although I could have taken a few days off to settle in, I didn’t want to waste time. I didn’t come here to rest.

Greeting a few already familiar faces, I opened the door to the office of my freshly assigned supervisor.

George looked up from the book he was reading and smiled. He was an interesting guy. Easy enough to get along with.

“Back already?”

I nodded and took the seat across from him. “I completed the arrangements with all of the schools. They were all very eager to help us out. The only one giving me a hard time was my aunt.”

He chuckled. “A private school she leads can’t be looked down upon. She would lose face if she didn’t get something out from letting you collect data on their staff and students. You probably came out better than any other person would have.”

I couldn’t argue with that. If I had sent anyone else, she would probably have chewed them out. As I needed this data to launch my new project, I needed to collect it personally. Being one of the main product designers in the whole corporation had made me lose a bit of sense of what our clients really needed. Having been sent to San Francisco for training, I had decided to use this bustling city as my research ground. This time I wanted to do the fieldwork myself.

“Talking about your aunt’s school, I met with Robert’s daughter today, a very smart girl. She goes to that school, senior if I remember correctly.”

I nodded absentmindedly, not thinking much of it. Robert Black was the current head of this San Francisco branch, so I guessed it wasn’t anything special to see his daughter here. He was a man I wanted to learn a lot from as he had made his way up from the bottom. Even my father respected him highly and even sent me to train under him in preparation for my future CEO training.

“It’s rare to see such awareness and passion to improve in such a young person. Pity that I couldn’t introduce you. I reckon you may have something in common.”

“Really?” I asked. I had never really spent much time with people my age when I was in high school. By that time, I was already designing products for my father, who didn’t mind it, as long as I finished school with acceptable results. I even graduated a year early from university, which meant that my teenage life had been nothing like it was supposed to be. So hearing that I might have something in common with an eighteen-year-old girl was new for me.

“What was she here for?” I asked as I remembered that Robert was currently on a business trip to London.

George pulled open his drawer and took out a folder.

“She was the winner of a competition we organized for supporting entrepreneurial young people. It’s not even a joke to say she won by a large margin. No one got even close to her.”

I opened the folder and did a quick readthrough of the essay. The further I got, the more fascinated I became by what I read.

“Are you sure this was written by a high schooler?” I asked, feeling disbelief. This kind of detail and ideas were something I expected from people even older than me.

George laughed. “If I hadn’t talked to her in person, I would have had a hard time believing it too. But she isn’t much younger than you, is she?”

That was true. But I wasn’t really what was expected of a person my age. I’d had better than good conditions to reach where I was now.

“Interesting,” I murmured, falling into thought. Hopefully, I’ll have a chance to meet her during my research.

I rose from my seat, preparing to leave for today. “Can I keep this?” I asked, showing the folder.

George nodded. “Go ahead.”

“Thanks.” My hand on the doorknob, I suddenly remembered something. “Oh right, what’s her name?”

“Her name is Scarlet.”

Scarlet. I was going to remember that. Now that I had to spend a couple of weeks blending in with high schoolers, I might as well take a closer look at some of my research subjects. Although this one in particular seemed to be an irregular in my scope of prospects. But sometimes the irregularities provided the most valuable data.