Sparrow's Story - A Girl Defiant

Chapter 4

He was her most annoying customer. ImranA@mit.edu. 

She’d started an online business two years before, making electronic kits out of Altoid tins. A secret source of cash, so she could bolt to Canada if she ever needed to. 

For months, she’d mail ImranA@mit.edu a kit for an headphone amplifier, a voltage control sequencer, or a signal scrambler, and he’d email back ways to improve it. Solder this a millimeter to the left. Cut the opening in the Altoids tin slightly smaller. 

His comments ticked her off, but then she’d try them. Finally, she thanked him for a fix that extended the battery life, and he wrote back, “You’re not a guy, are you?”

Sparrow was shocked.  She did business under her brother’s name. Kept a PO box for orders. Nothing handwritten, everything typed. No pretty stationery to give her away. She was making money and keeping it a secret, and she didn’t want anything to mess that up.

She deleted Imran from her customer files, but a few days later, he was back with an idea for a new product. “What do you think of this?”

She deleted it.

Two days later another idea.

Delete. 

The next day, another. 

Finally, she wrote back. “If you’re so smart, why don’t you build them yourself?”

“Ha! You have returned. You must admit, my ideas are intriguing.”

This guy was so arrogant!

“OK, yeah, there’s one that has potential,” she shot back.

“One?! You fail to appreciate the artistry of my designs.”

“You fail to appreciate that Techwizard’s been selling virtually the same things for nine months.”

Two days later he was back with an elegant new design for a spy scanner, with three features no one else had.

Again, she wrote back, “Why give this to me? Why not do this yourself?”

“Everything I create belongs to the University. I would rather see you build them than see the University bury them.”

That’s when she realized that Imran lived to solve puzzles. Like her, his brain had to play and invent every day. It was in his DNA --their DNA--and she loved that!   

And she loved that Imran couldn’t see her, that they wrote back and forth, and he didn’t have any idea what she looked like. That way, he couldn’t fail the test.

Mom had taught Sparrow about the test before she died, one afternoon when Sparrow lay next to her, combing the tangles from her long red hair.  “Men like to treat beautiful girls like you and me like their trophies, pretty things they own,” Mom said. “If a man cares more about your looks than your brain, he’s failed the test. You walk the other way.”

At ten, Sparrow didn’t understand. But by the time she was thirteen, she began to see how friends’ older brothers sometimes sat next to her at parties and talked her through a football play like she was too dense to follow, and how her father’s friends made jokes when she told them she wanted to be a physicist.

And by the time she was sixteen, she was glad her bodyguard kept most guys away. Staring at her breasts, talking to her like she had the brain of a single celled organism, they were tiger mosquitos in human form. 

But Imran was different.

For six months, they wrote back and forth. He helped her design a scrambler to mess up the Masterson security cameras. When Masterson dropped upper level math and science, Imran helped her pick online courses, and solve physics problems.