Scar

THREE

It's 5am and I'm honestly not ready to wake up. Should I sleep thirty more minutes?

Yes.

I pull my covers backup and fall asleep.

A ray of light crosses my face, I slowly opened my eyes and stretched my legs out. I turn over and see the time on my nightstand clock.

"7:21!! I quickly throw myself out of the bed and search for my phone. I need to call Josh right at this second! I had scheduled the meeting at nine-thirty and now I'm going to be so late!

Please pick up, please pick up.

"Morning Scarlett!" His voice rings through the phone giving me some slight relief.

"Hi Josh! Guess what, I just woke up, accidently, I swear! I'm about to hop in the shower! I'll be there in about an hour and a half!"

He laughs loudly, "Dude! I got you, don't worry about anything. I'll just start the meeting, discuss a couple of things with the group while we wait for you."

I sigh in relief, "Okay great! Thanks a lot, I owe you big time!"

"Alright I'll see you soon. Drive safely over here."

With that, I end the call and run into the shower.

In the parking lot, I quickly put some lip gloss on and add on some mascara before grabbing my backpack and entering the building. Waiting for the elevator to come down to the first floor, my phone rings a notification. I look down at my screen and see an email from a certain Rebecca from NueTech. Weird? I've been subscribed to their newsletter because they're an amazing company with technology you'd only imagine in movies!

The elevator doors open and I step in, putting my phone back in my jacket's pocket.

I rush over to my office, throwing my bag on my desk and running into our mini conference room, "Hey everyone! Sorry I'm so late!"

Everyone mumbles their okays and smile at me, probably all of them angrily yelling at me inside their heads.

Josh turns to me and reviews what he covered for the past half hour, "We are all quite ready to finalize our parts. Gina and Tom have showed me their whole front-end, really nice. I truly believe our new site is going to capture a lot more attention and they've made our beta download look really cool. Ahmed, Helen, and Tim just have to fix a couple a bugs, other than that, they're all set. I'm pretty much done with our updated business plan and other paperwork we need to share with any investors or new partners."

This is all very good news for me. I'm so proud of my small team. "Wow! Thanks Josh for that. I'm really grateful for all of your hard work. We are in a really good position and I'm super excited to have you all display your skills through this project. Gina and Tom, can you show me your latest work please?"

Gina hands over her laptop and explains her's and Tom's work, "As you can see, we've designed and programmed it to look simple but futuristic, very close to the theme you had discussed with us. We experimented with different colors, refreshed our logo and have made the designs work on all platforms and screen sizes."

I look over their work and smile because they really did an amazing job, "I'm super impressed with this. I love it!". I hand back her laptop and then look over at my other team members who are working on the back-end of our project.

"I have here small clips of how our site and beta download of our system works for now." Tim turns his screen towards the whole group and plays a demo. "As you can see," Tim explains, "everything is running quite smoothly, haven't encountered any major problems since two weeks ago. Now we'll just be reviewing its security."

"Okay, thanks Tim, Helen, and Ahmed. I'm honestly extremely proud of every single one of you. I'll join in with you next week to help out with the security part and give one last look at the database."

I turn over to a page on my notebook and write down notes of what I have to do. "Okay everyone, I'm really happy it is all turning it out very well. It turns out that we've finished faster than I though and I believe that we'll be ready to start showcasing and releasing our beta by the end of July. The rest of May and June we'll use to make any corrections as we discussed. For the first two weeks of July, I will be out of town and I feel really bad about leaving you all so I decided you can all take that time off as well in order to freshen up and come back ready to make business."

All of them cheer excitedly, don't know if it's because of the two week break or that we have a chance to make a big deal soon.

"Josh, do you have anything to add on?"

He bites on the end of his pen as he reviews his notes, "Not really, I think you have covered it all. I just really suggest for everyone to be done with their work by the end of June so that you can all enjoy your breaks. Other than that, I'm also very happy that we've worked really hard to get this through as we planned."

"Thanks Josh," I smile back at him, "and thank you all very much. Do any of you have any questions?"

The room was filled with no's and head nods. "Okay then. This meeting is over. I'm going to order some pizza for all of us alright." Everyone cheered and I started tapping onto my phone to have some pizza delivered for my team.

I sit at my desk and open up my laptop to check on emails. Again, I see the email from Rebecca and open it.

Dear Scarlett Ferrera,

On behalf of our CEO, Damian Lewis, we invite you to visit us and discuss any possibilities that may support the future of your company. We invest in what makes our world a better place and your company seems to be working very hard to make it happen.

Damian would like to meet with you personally anytime you'd like. Contact us back if you have any questions.

Damian really looks to forward to hearing back from you.

Rebecca Ferguson

Executive Assistant at NueTech

Oh my God. The Damian Lewis wants to talk? To me? He's like the coolest guy ever! At such a young age of 32 he's done so much for technology. Not only has he developed awesome space tech but he's done really great things for artificial intelligence too.

I'm definitely going to accept this invitation to speak to him. This too is good news for my team. Damian has invested in small startups and that means he may invest in ours too!

There's a light knock at the door. "Come in!"

Josh walks in with a big smile on his face and says, "Pizza is here!"

"Dude! Come over here!" I call him over to show the email. He reads it quietly.

"Well," I ask, "What do you think?"

"Hmm." He doesn't look to happy but he past my shoulder. "This might be a great opportunity."

"Might?" I question, raising my eyebrow in confusion.

"Yeah, might. He's a cool dude but he has a lot of power and might have another idea and not invest in us."

"Oh."

He smiles at me again, "You can still take a chance though. I do recommend you meet him but just be careful."

"Okay." Now I'm confused because he didn't look so excited about it.

"Are you going to get pizza?" He asks.

"Maybe? I'm not that hungry. You go enjoy the pizza. I'm going to work on some school stuff."

"Well if you're not going to eat right now, can I take you out tonight."

"Josh..."

"Come on Scarlett. You're always working, plus it's Friday, I want to celebrate you, and you kind of owe me one from the morning."

I laugh at his puppy eyes, "Okay Josh! We'll go out tonight. Only because you did save me big time."

"Yes!" He says excitedly, "I'll pick you up at your place at five-thirty."

As soon as everyone is gone from the office, I close up and drive home.