12 Midterms

The first half of the semester passed uneventfully. Justin continued to give Emily rides to school every day and occasionally bumped into her at the mailbox or in the laundry room.

He tried so hard not to be awkward but she still laughed at him a lot. Was it just because he was awkward or did she actually think he was funny?

She thought RoboCat was funny but Justin was a lot less reserved as RoboCat. It was easier to be himself behind a screen.

Speaking of behind a screen…his phone rang. He recognized the number. It was Rachelle Adams, one of the freelancers who helped run his website.

"What is it, Rachelle?"

"Sorry to bother you, Mr. Costa, but there's a project that just came in that you are best equipped to handle."

It was kind of hilarious that this woman a decade older than him called him Mister but he had to keep it professional. He turned his laugh into a cough.

"Send me the details."

"I already did, sir."

Justin opened his email and saw frowned when he saw the details of the job. It was easy enough but time consuming.

"Why didn't you give this to Aaron?" Aaron was another programmer on the team who was nearly as good as Justin was.

"Aaron already has three projects lined up," Rachelle said before hesitantly continuing. "Sir, may I be frank with you?"

"Yes."

"There aren't enough of us on staff to keep up with the demand. It was doable when you were taking on projects but since you've been on your break…" she trailed off.

Justin had too many coding projects for his homework to take on anyone else's on top of having midterms right around the corner. There was no way he could anything else.

"I'm much too busy to take on any projects."

He thought about his team. There were only four of them: Aaron, Rachelle, Tiffany, and Jack. The profits were increasing as the number of projects did. He could afford to bring on a few more people.

"How many more people do you think we'd need to keep up with the demand?"

Rachelle thought a moment. "Overall, we have 4.6 stars on the major search engines when people look for freelance coders. Our load is only getting bigger. I'd say at least three more people."

"I see. I'll get back to you on that. In the meantime, give it to Tiffany. She's not as far behind as Aaron."

"Yes, sir." Rachelle hung up the phone.

Three more people…he hated doing interviews. They had to be over the phone because he didn't want anyone seeing how young he was.

Rachelle was the first person to start working for him back when he was sixteen. What self-respecting college graduate would want to be hired by a kid who was barely old enough to drive? At least his voice was fairly deep.

Suddenly, he realized something. He was surrounded by an entire department of computer science students who needed internship credit.

He created an application based on the criteria he needed for people to complete the projects coming in and posted it on the website before printing off flyers to distribute around the engineering building advertising the internship.

The next day, instead of taking his usual nap while Emily was in her first class, Justin went around stapling flyers to every notice board he could find.

His email inbox was flooded with responses before the week had even ended. There were a lot of upperclassmen with plenty of experience who seemed qualified. How was he supposed to weed them all out?!

In the end he settled on ten people to interview over the phone. Scheduling phone calls in between his classes and homework was exhausting. Even Emily noticed.

"Midterms gotten to you?" she asked sympathetically as they drove home one afternoon.

"Something like that. So much to do, so little time," Justin said tiredly as he rubbed his face.

"Me too. I have six different papers to write and I've only started on one of them. I'm going to have a lot of sleepless nights the next few weeks."

"At least we're all in the same boat," he mused. "There probably isn't a student in all of UCLA who isn't exhausted right now."

"Good point," she chuckled lightly before continuing in a poor French accent. "Viva l'amour, we die together!"

Justin looked at her funny. "Do you know what that means?"

"Not really. It's from an old Looney Tunes cartoon," Emily said sheepishly. "Why?"

"Viva l'amour means 'long live love' in French." He didn't really speak French but he knew that much.

She clapped her hand over her mouth. "Oh my gosh, I've been saying that quote for years without context. Ohhhhh no."

"What did you think it meant?" Justin snickered, trying really hard not to completely burst out laughing and make her more embarrassed.

"I don't know, Pepe le Pew said it right before jumping out a window! I thought it was a joke about dying!"

She buried her head in her hands. "You can go ahead and kill me now."

He patted her shoulder, still stifling his laughter. "There, there."

When they arrived at their apartment building she fled from the car, yelling, "I'm just going to go hide under a mountain of blankets now!"

That was the last straw. Justin completely cracked up, laughing so hard he couldn't breathe. Once he finally recovered he felt revitalized to do his next phone interview. That girl was really something else.

Justin really wanted to hire people before midterms started so he didn't have to worry about the backlog of projects at work so he thought all night and made his decision, settling on three seniors who needed the internship credit to graduate. He even gave them the possibility to stay on if they felt like it and did a good enough job.

All of the people who worked for him had special schedules. Rachelle had triplets in first grade and could only work during school hours.

Aaron had 50-50 custody with his ex-wife of their two-year-old son and could only work every other week or when his son was asleep. Tiffany was in grad school, trying to get her PhD to become a computer science professor.

Jack had serious health problems and couldn't physically go into an office every day. Their hours were inconsistent so instead of set salaries they were paid per project.

Most internships these days seemed to be unpaid and Justin didn't think that was fair but also didn't want to treat the interns as full employees until they had proven themselves to be capable so he decided they would get paid half of what his other employees got until the internship ended.

Half is still better than nothing, which they would probably get if they did an internship somewhere else. When he told them the terms they seemed pretty excited so that was one problem down.

Justin reassigned things so the interns got the easier projects that were backing up and the more experienced programmers were left with the big projects. With everything settled he could finally breathe a little and focus on his midterms.

How could anyone be expected to do this much at once? He was just grateful that on top of coding, which he was used to, he only had to write two papers before his tests.

Midterms weren't even half over and Emily already looked like one of the undead. Between her class load and work, she was getting less than five hours of sleep per night and confessed that she thought about ditching class every time her alarm went off but she needed to work to eat.

Justin started leaving small bills like ones and fives in pockets of her backpack when she wasn't looking so she would think they were hers and had been misplaced. As her obvious exhaustion continued he realized it wasn't enough.

What killed him was that he was financially capable of paying her bills so she didn't have to work but they were just acquaintances. He was her chauffeur. That was it. He had no right to do that and he knew she wouldn't accept it anyway.

What he could do was leave a pizza on her front door with a note saying 'Midterms Pizza' with a smiley face on it when he knew she wasn't at work because that was somewhat of an inside joke.

She posted about how the Apology Pizza Guy struck again on Blogr and everyone lost their minds in the comments, making Justin smile. He could do that much for her.

He had another idea too but he wasn't sure if it would work. Since he couldn't pay her bills he at least wanted to minimize her debt.

He had enough money to pay for both of them to go to college all four years. If he made it look like a scholarship she could apply for…she might go for it.

He decided to work on that once midterms were over. Right now there was barely enough time to breathe, let alone come up with a complicated plan.