I pretended to call mom to tell her that Mark was driving me home and then I made him wait while I showered quickly before heading off to Eva’s house. Cadaver practice tonight wasn’t going to happen and I’d have to pick up my car later. Some things couldn’t wait and telling Eva was one of them.

On the way home, I texted James to tell him to meet me at Eva’s and the two of them were sitting on the swing chair on Eva’s front porch when Mark pulled up at Eva’s.

“Hey Abby. Hi Mark. What’s the big news?” Eva didn’t like to be kept in the dark and my message to her had only said that I have life-changing news.

“Big news? What big news? Can’t a girl just come over and say hi to her friend?”

“Spill it, Abby!”

“Oh! That big news. Well, Mark gave me an early birthday present.”

“And? I swear, Abby, if you don’t start talking, I’m going to…I’m going to tell on you to your mother!”

“Well, that’s a threat you’ve never made before. You should go easy on those threats. You’re going to want to be extra nice to me. In fact, I think that you’re going to owe me a lifetime supply of ‘Get out of Eva’s Punishment Exercise Classes’ coupons.”

“There’s nothing you can say that will get you those coupons.”

“Really? Care to bet on that? Those coupons against me going to two classes a week until you go away to school. James will determine the winner.”

“Deal.”

I handed over the envelope with the four passes and waited a few seconds as she took in what they were. The piercing shriek of joy, followed by a lot of jumping up and down and high-pitched babbling aimed at James in explanation, brought Eva’s parents and sister outside to see what was going on. Meanwhile, James was trying to keep his cool, but the silly grin on his face belied that.

“And here I thought that I’d gotten you a birthday present.” Mark said as he played with his ears, trying to get them to start functioning properly again.

“You did. Making it possible for me to share the present and make Eva and James so happy is just another aspect of it and it makes it so much better. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. Speaking of which, do you think I won the bet?”

“There doesn’t seem to be any doubt of that. Well played!”

“Thank you!”

After a round of high-fives and lots of hugging, of which Mark received a generous helping from Eva, and a manly handshake from James, things finally started to settle down. Eva didn’t seem to mind at all when I had James confirm that I’d won the bet and we spent the next half hour planning out our costumes. Mark let out a breath of relief when I explained that he’d be going as Connor Kent, the latest incarnation of Superboy, and that Connor’s costume was a black Superman t-shirt, blue jeans, and black boots.

Although Comic-con was a four-day event, Mark asked us if we minded staying in San Diego longer as he was hoping to mix pleasure with business and visit the McKenzie Resources offices out west. I immediately agreed. It would give me that chance to get do some corporate espionage on the other side of the country and to check out a few of their world-class hospitals. Eva and James were also happy to stay a little longer and play tourists.

While Eva took care of the costumes and James planned out every aspect of our convention time, I went back to working on my medical non-degree. I was getting a little tired of playing midnight grave robber and wanted an alternative way to learn or practice surgical techniques. Once again, I turned to the internet for a solution and it provided one for me. Surgery simulators. Who knew?

There were two types, the mechanical kind and the virtual ones. You could even get a combination of the two. The mechanical ones consisted of a mannequin style body that had all the organs inside. The virtual ones had you wearing a headset over your eyes and they immersed you in a virtual reality operating room. You wore special gloves that allowed you to manipulate surgical tools to perform surgeries. The simulators looked very interesting, but there were so many to choose from and there seemed to be specific ones for each specialty.

Falling back on my old standby, I called Howie to see what he knew about surgical simulators.

Nothing. He knew absolutely nothing about them and he berated me for several minutes for yet again asking him about something that he knew nothing about and for making him feel inadequate and ignorant. He promised to look into it and let me know what his contacts could find. In the meantime, I went back to desecrating corpses.

My one-month anniversary of starting medical school came up and I celebrated by changing my family medicine rotation to an emergency medicine rotation. This was a fourth-year rotation and so the students were allowed to handle slightly more relevant tasks. As with my last rotation, I spent two days learning what the students were doing, before switching my focus to the residents and doctors. I also started to spend some time watching the nurses and how they functioned within the hospital ecosystem. I learned a lot about triage, the art of deciding which patients were in the greatest need of a physician’s immediate care, and in the associated skill of making patients wait quietly for their turn, even though other patients who had showed up later were taken ahead of them. Some nurses were better at it than others. The key difference was attitude. Nurses that gave it, got more of it. A few seconds of explanation and a sympathetic smile achieved far more than ignoring the patients.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Between the complaining and pissed off patients and the demanding and brusque doctors, I decided that I never wanted to be a nurse. I didn’t know if I had enough self control not to accidentally kick someone in the head when they were being so rude and dismissive.

By the time Comic-Con came around, I was ready for a break. Mark picked us all up and drove us to Jake’s plane. I felt great to be on a plane with soft seats. My last several trips had been in L1, where the seats were rock hard. Sitting in the plush chairs was so relaxing and I promised myself that I’d bring some pillows on my next stolen flight.

Halfway through the five-hour flight, Eva came over and sat down next to me.

“I need your help, Abby.” Eva spoke quietly, almost conspiratorially.

“Don’t know which button to press to flush the toilet in the back?” I whispered back.

“No. Mark already showed me that. I want you to fire, James.”

I turned around and saw that James was sleeping peacefully in his seat.

Turning back to Eva, my face was scrunched up in confusion. “Why? He’s doing a great job. The foundation made a twenty-four percent return this year. I even have plans to double the amount of money he’s working with by the end of the summer.”

“You’ve put a seventeen-year-old, with almost no experience with investments, in charge of a twenty-five million dollar account. That’s a lot of pressure. Add to that the pressure of potentially losing all that money and shutting down one of his best friends dreams and it’s no wonder that he been sleeping so poorly lately. I’m worried about him, Abby. I think all this might be too much for him to handle.”

“I know he worried about all that when I offered him the position, but when I explained that his fees could fund his Justice Foundation, he lit up and seemed to put all his doubts away. He hasn’t said anything to me about his worries since. Are you sure that’s what’s bothering him?”

“No, but I know something is wrong and I’m certain that it relates to his work for the foundation. I also know he worries about letting you down.”

“It’s not just letting Abby down that I worry about. It’s all the people that she’s helping with her foundation.” I guess we weren’t being quiet enough and we’d woken up James.

“You really don’t have to worry about that. Even if you lost all the money, the foundation still has plenty of funds available and by the end of the summer, it will have even more. I have another gemstone going up for auction, in Europe this time. It should bring in another fifteen to twenty million dollars. The foundation isn’t mentioned as the seller so that we don’t attract too much attention. The foundation also has other sources of revenue that will come in over time. A few might be as early as next year and some that will only bear fruit in the next ten years. Most of those are related to mining and are tied in with McKenzie Resources. Besides that, I’m working on something now that could lead to a steady stream of very large donations on a regular basis. James, you really don’t have to worry about messing up. At most, it would be a temporary setback of a few months to my plans. Most likely though, even if you lost it all, it wouldn’t slow the foundation down at all.”

“That does ease my mind, Abby, but losing all the money hasn’t been my big worry. It’s actually the opposite of that. I’m worried that we’re making too much money.”

Mark joined the conversation and asked, “Why would that be a problem?”

James looked at me for permission to speak about the account in front of Mark. I nodded my head. “Mark is Jake’s official liaison to the foundation. The investments are foundation business and it’s ok to talk about them in front of him.”

“Good. I thought I might have said too much already. The problem with doing too well, Mark, is that someone is going to notice it at one point and start asking me questions about how I’m doing it. It’s not normal that virtually all of our trades result in positive returns. Right now I can pass it off as beginner’s luck. In another six to twelve months, that’s not going fly. Eventually someone official, maybe from the SEC, is going to investigate us.”

“I don’t understand. I’ve seen the investment reports and you’re trading publicly traded companies on the open market. The portfolio is diversified and has some of the largest companies in the world in it. Thousands of other funds have those same companies in them. What is there to investigate?”

“Two things. One, as I’ve already mentioned, is that we don’t miss. All of our larger trades make money. Two relates to the timing of the trades. We do the bulk of our trades before the quarterly results come out. We buy in the week before and sell in the week after. If you put the two issues together, it starts to look like we have insider information.”

Mark sat back in his chair and thought for a few moments. “That seems like a stretch. Maybe if you were doing that for one or two companies, then I could understand how someone could make the accusation. But you’re doing it with dozens of companies. You can’t get insider information on so many different companies. You’re not doing anything that others aren’t doing, you’re just more successful at it. You should be proud of what you’ve managed to do. Grandpa Jake and I have been seriously impressed with your returns for the foundation. Your hard work and intuition are quite extraordinary. You have nothing to worry about.”

When James didn’t say anything to that, merely keeping his eyes downcast, Mark turned his gaze to Eva and then to me. Seeing Eva’s sheepish look and my pursed lips, he asked, “What is it that I don’t know?”

I sighed. “It’s ok, James. You can tell him.”

“What I was trying hard not to say is that I’m not worried about myself. You’re right about my hard work being important to the success of the investments, but the intuition part comes from Abby. She sends me a list of companies every quarter with her prediction of how the company did in the past quarter. I decide how best to trade the stock, based on her predictions.”

“Prediction? You make her sound like a psychic.”

“What else would you call it when someone makes an assertion without any facts to back it up and yet the results are always withing the range that she sets out?”

“Good research?”

“I have the same sources of information that she has access to, as well as a few others these days. Her predictions make sense, but they aren’t supported by any research that’s available on those sources. They’re not even supported by any of the analysts following the stocks she’s chosen. She used to pass off her information as ‘internet rumors’ and justify them to me. She doesn’t bother to do that anymore. So either she has a large network of insiders feeding her information from over seventy companies, or she’s psychic. Thanks to a great pep talk from Eva, I’ve learned to accept it, but it doesn’t stop me from wondering what’s going to happen when, not if, we’re investigated.”

Mark eyed me suspiciously for a few moments but finally asked James, “Have you considered not always making profitable trades? You’ve had your first year of beginner’s luck. Other investment firms have done as well or better when they started off, claiming that they have a new investment philosophy. However, they rarely keep achieving those high returns. Make a few bad trades and you’ll join their ranks and become invisible. No one will file a complaint against you if you’re merely human and make mistakes. Average annual returns of nine to fourteen percent shouldn’t be looked at too closely.”

James looked like he’d been kicked in the head. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Because you’re so focused on getting the most out of the trades. You always try to do your best. Taking a dive isn’t in your nature.”, I explained.