Puck Off!

Chapter 2

"How the hell do you own the building?" Ella demanded as we trudged up the stairs to the second floor.

"Same way I paid off mom and dad's mortgage a few years ago. I'm very good at my job," I stated. I also got very lucky to get a year end bonus at a time when the building owner was struggling to attract tenants and bought him out.

"I thought you were doing math stuff?"

I unlocked the door to my apartment, which I'd remodeled after buying the building. Unlike the other four units, mine took up both the second and third floors with a large loft style bedroom on the top floor. "I am doing math stuff. Combined with computers and finance. I make a lot of people very wealthy, and each of the last four years I got some extremely large year-end bonuses."

She wandered around the apartment, which I had to admit was very nice. It was a modern kitchen with a nice island, quartz counters and stainless appliances. The rest was modern too with an electric fireplace, large screen TV and wood floors throughout. She could see the bedrooms later I suppose. "You have this fucking amazing place and paid off mom and dad's mortgage with math stuff?" she scoffed.

"I work for a large financial trading house. They pretty much trade everything from stocks and bonds to futures and precious metals. I write algorithms to analyze data and determine when to buy and when to sell different items in their portfolio. If you write them well, you stay ahead of the market, and you almost always make money," I tried to explain. In truth, it was a lot more complex than that, because analyzing the data could take months for a single item, but when you got it right then everyone celebrated.

"That seems crazy." Ella just waved her hands in the air. "But I hated math, so I guess it finally served you some good after all the crap you went through with it."

The crap I went through with that meaning Tilly Carmichael.

My sister Ella got the height and strength of my father, the blond hair and green eyes of my mother, and the attitude of both of them combined. I seem to have received every recessive gene in the family tree, as I never got close to my father's 6' frame, and my eyes and hair were both brown. On the good side, while the rest of my family hated math and computers, somewhere in my past must be an ancestor who really loved them and hooked me up with those genes.

Throughout my school career, I was the geek, the nerd, the 'do my homework or I'm going to kick your ass' victim. After saying no a lot, and receiving a lot of beatings in return, I started doing it. Not well mind you, but enough to keep the athletes that were on me on their respective teams. I hated it. But I hated being beaten up worse. Nobody was happier to give a valedictorian speech to end their high school career than me.

Tilly was also an athlete, though she never threatened me. She was also the girl that I had a crush on in high school. You know the type. The person who is way out of your league and is the subject of many a person's dreams on a nightly basis. That was Tilly. She was the same height as me, and a lot more muscular. She was a midfielder on the team and was as popular as could be in school. It was like a dream come true when she asked me to tutor her in AP Calculus.

At first, everything seemed fine. She was nice, and she was learning. But then came the little things. The 'oh no I don't have time to do this homework because of practice' things. And so, I offered to help. I actually offered. That was just what she wanted of course, and things progressed from there. Homework help turned into help in other classes. Essays and term papers that were the staple of any high school curriculum now were doubled up for me, because I was doing them all for her. Oh, and of course the other boys that kept up with their threats.