"Raritan Valley Community College, huh?" Mr. Johnston said. "I wish I knew anything for that one. Sussex as well. I mean you have a good team but for as good as my students are at learning they were born playing MOBAs."

"Did they learn on Heroes of Hearthstone or something?" I said, moving to a place with Stacey could see our little esports leader’s huddle.

"Maybe they used ice frogs’ patch on Warcraft three while they were in kindergarten." He frowned, suddenly serious. "Hey, so I don't know how prevalent it is where you are but how are you guys doing with the advent of all of those AI things that can write your papers?"

Rachel leaned in. "Oh, do tell us, go on."

I smirked. "Well first off, let's start with what is education for. We're teaching them how to think critically. We're teaching them to be capable members of society. Some of that is technical skill, some of that is classical education."

Rachel blinked several times. Then she was looking like she wanted to take notes. Thankfully, she didn’t pull out her phone.

"But the practical part of this is that I have assigned more hands-on work where ChatGPT won't be able to fix it. Stuff like where I have them go and partner with a school club, so they learn how do marketing. Sure, it means a little bit of work outside of class, but it gets them the experience."

Rachel was taking notes. I grinned. Tt was fully out. She had her little minimalist phone app.

"You're making them go market themselves to these clubs?" he said. "Fascinating."

"We've done local businesses before but it's simpler for them to not have to drive to a third location. They can do it via email or phone though. We do give them official school email accounts for a reason. I use my personal connections as well as the Colleges connections to get them what amounts to a very brief internship in marketing."

“And these businesses, you’ve helped them with stuff? Asking for a friend,” Rachel said.

He held up at a wine glass and swirled it a few times before taking a sniff. He gave her a look before unceremoniously drinking the entire thing in one go.

"See that is the type of real thing that happens that I have to tell my kids about. Do you remember when we went to school, and the teachers were like you won't have a calculator on your pocket?" he said.

"Or that you're going to need to know cursive?" I said.

"Wait, those things were real?" Rachel said. "Did you also walk uphill to school both ways in the snow every day?"

"You know it," I said. "The snow was so thick back then that you could stand on two feet of it."

I sighed. I missed snow. Just having it be cold didn't bring the amount of cheer that I wanted. But I need to get back on track. If he was here, I was going to pick his brain.

"Mr. Johnston, while I have you here, Rachel, who just joined. Our team has been training our guys. I figured that I might ask you guys what you're doing for training."

"Honestly, the thing that I have the advantage of is that they all play on their own. Sometimes they play together. It's just the amount of reps they have in the game," he said. "They're... Just obsessed and that drive carries them."

"I don't think that I can simulate all of our guys being unemployed and back in high school with no expectations that they're going to have to pay for their apartments or their lunch. I'm going to have to work a different angle."

My body wanted the pace. Rachel looked like she wanted to say something. She raised a finger, then stopped. Then she did it again. I knew that he was watching her as well. It's you! Stacy, Millie were in the background. We had been talking for a minute.

I hoped she was not thinking that we were trying to bogart her boyfriend. I might try to recruit him to work with me, but he had his own career, and he was busy as well. Heck it was a school night, I had totally forgotten.

"Hey, isn't this a school night?" I asked. "How are you out so late?"

He nearly choked on his wine. Rachel excuses herself to get a drink.

"Well first off it's only about seven and second off, she said that she would have food. I'm a bit proponent of free food."

"Son of a... She didn't say that there was going to be food!" I said. "But I have tomorrow off anyway. I would eat something at home if I had to."

"The catering is coming," he said. "She told me that I have to bring it in for her-"

There was a knock on the door. "She got catering on Halloween?"

He walked over.

"You know she did."

In a few minutes we had set up the catering for everyone. Stacey, a classy woman, had chosen to bless us all with something from one of the diners downtown. It was only three blocks away which meant that she had sent some to grab it. Before long we were eating, and things were good.

I wanted that feeling to stick around. Not only the feeling that Stacey was with a nice guy, but that I was with my tribe. It was too bad that mom didn't like Halloween. She was having fun with her friends. She always did.

It just wasn't her tradition.

"Did you guys get tagged on cabbage night?" Amir asked the crowd.

The consensus of the group was that most people hadn't gotten tagged the night before. New Jersey had a special holiday. The date for Halloween called cabbage diet where kids decided to egg and it would toilet paper houses of people who didn't like. It was one of those things that didn't travel well.

There was a state for haters, and I lived there.

"Don't you teach high schoolers?" Rachel asked Mr. Johnston. "You would think that they wouldn't like you much."

"My kids love me," he said. "I used to wish that they loved me and feared me but I'm settling for love. You get used to it."

"Oh, so you didn't notice when I egged your house," Stacey said, holding up her glass of wine. Her arm bands really looked like she had put in the work. We had come a long way from making props for the school play.

"I... Did not notice," he said. "Some of the trick or treaters wanted to egg me though. I've been told that I have a face for fund raising dunk tanks."

He gave an exaggerated smile.

"You might have that," I laughed. "Now I'm glad that I don't have to deal with that kind of bullshit."

"People willing to donate money to your cause just be they want to get you wet?" he said. "It's either a dunk tank or only fans."

I held back a snicker, covering my mouth. He would not get the satisfaction. Rachel laughed for both of us.

Stacey asked him to help with something and it was me and Rachel again.

"I'm kinda itching to play," she said to me. "But also, I wanted to pick you brain on next semester."

"You want me to go over school stuff, now?" I said.

"Well, no, more like tell me if these professors are good. I'm going to do a full course load especially if I can get in that esports athletic scholarship."

I pretended to gasp.

"You think that you're in line for such a scholarship?" I said, wryly. "What could ever make you think that?"

I was so glad that I had met her outside of the school environment and gotten to know her before. It colored our relationship that was started with a practical thing-her helping me understand the business.

"Well let's just say that I might sleep with the professor in charge of it," she said, emphasizing her sexy Taco truck outfit. "If that's what it takes."

"I think that you don't have to go so far, but I like where you're coming from. What is your goal after school then, do you want to open a business or go work for someone else?"

She took a second to pretend to not have this answer queued up.

"I want to start my own esports adjacent business just like the academy I work at. There's a lot of stupid design choices that the boss man is bound to because he stuck with a franchise. I could do it so much better myself."

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"Go off, queen."

"Well, he pays... You know what he pays. And I'm not even talking about that... it's just an inefficient use of space. He could do that with much less space. I'm going to make it a much better experience."

She explained her evil plan to me. After knowing the insides and outs of the entirety of the business, she could succinctly state how that would work. She knew what he had done, and she knew what she needed to do and exactly how much money it was going to take.

She even knew how much runway her business was going to need in order to survive and thrive. All in all, if she was in my marketing class or business class, I would have given her credit just for that. Heck, she had a class for me next semester and I was going to ask her to present on this.

Either it was part of me last moving over to her or she really was learning. She almost made an investment pitch to me, and I would have seriously considered it. She really had a handle on the business aspect, and she was a good seller.

"Rachel, you I have to understand that there are people that are good at selling the thing and they're people that are good at doing the thing. You have both sides of the coin. You should understand that you need to hire people so that you have to do as little as possible to keep the place running. If something fails because of you then it's designed to fail."

"Designed to fail, huh?" she said. "I need to write some of this down. You're incredible at this."

"I'm just trying to pass on some of the many lessons that I learned."

“Now if we only had something tangible on Sussex,” she said. “Then we could really dig into it. It’s too bad that we don’t have a mole inside of their organization.”

“Is it a thing where you immediately jump to infiltrating the enemy team?” I said.

“You want to win, right?”

I nodded. My glass was empty and instead of refilling it, I put it down. Did I want to play when I got home? I needed to stop thinking about the future and be in the present. I was worried about next weeks game and there wasn’t even an inkling that it was going to be a problem. Of course I was thinking about it far too much.

I set the thought of our next game down. There were two left. I had done as much as I could do.

“I want to win.”

“Alright. Then, let’s train.”

“Let’s train tomorrow,” I said.

“Agreed. But let me go over what the chat has found,” she said.

The Sussex County Skylanders were our next objective.

Somewhat reluctantly, the kids got into the van. It was a last away game and it was the last time that we'll be sharing air in such a way. It was going to be quite a drive. Especially since we had to assemble around 4:30 PM to get there on time.

There was a buzz as we talked about our plans. Everyone had something going on around Thanksgiving break. I was content to hang out with the family. Since most of the kids lived at home, it wasn't like they had to travel far. It's just that they needed to not forget everything between Thanksgiving and finals week. They were close. It was only really two weeks of class before that now that we were fully in November.

November traditionally was hell. This is when the students that had been paying attention, the least realized that they had to up their game for the end of the semester. Now I understand that school might not be someone's top priority and my classes don't have the academic rigor that you might need. But they still transfer to a 4-year school and they still taught you the subject that I wanted you to know.

The only question was did you actually go there and learn something or were you just following the formula so that you could get the degree. Because it's gray is a piece of paper. In education is something they can't take away from you.

I haven't really seen people lose their degrees over things like this but I've heard it happens.

I would dearly love to be at one of those boards when you talk about it.

"So guys," Esther said when we were halfway there. "I have a first draft of my novel."

Instantly, the entire van was silent. I praised my lips and raised a single eyebrow. Esther, as the Team Mom, had chosen to sit in the passenger seat up next to me. Right behind her Rachel as The team mommy, perked right up. Yes, teams can have moms and mommies. And no, it didn't get weird until they started pretending to get engaged again.

"Well what are you going to do with it?" Murph said. "Are you going to try and publish it or are you going to try to put it up on fanfiction.net or something?"

"Is it smutty?" Raquel said. "The spice must flow."

Once again the van was curiously silent.

"It's smutty isn't it," she said.

"Look it's not like it's dark romance or anything," Esther said. "I just write what I know and I what I'm interested in reading. And if girl love is smutty then maybe it should be smutty. Or if I thought the genre was missing that then I've done a little bit of a course correction. There's always room for a course correction."

"Excuse me but you dodged the question and Believe I get my question," Murph said.

"I don't know what I'm going to do with it," she said.

I got off the highway, on to get another highway.

"So what you're saying is that I can expect a copy on my desk sometime next semester?" I said.

"Yeah I want a copy," Rachel said. "In fact, I want a signed copy."

Esther was blushing. I knew that they were supportive and I loved it. The fact that she had come out of her shell so far that she was going to admit this. In part of the team, it gave me little butterflies in my stomach. I wanted to be a professor. Reminded me of why I wanted to work with kids, with students. They all had hopes and dreams and it was just so nice.

"Guys," Esther said. "Thank you so much. I don't know what I'm doing here. I might find a literary agent. See how that goes."

"Whatever you do, we support it," Raquel said. "Plus with your following on YouTube, I'm sure they're all going to want to buy it."

"You think that people that want to watch DOTA content also want to buy Yuri girl.... Uh love novels?" Murph said. "How would that work exactly Professor?"

I don't know that the same people that want to watch her play when she streams are the same people that want to buy her novel, but her core group fans that like her and like when she talks about these things that she loves, they're going to want to buy it. They might not want to read it. I don't know.

It was this kind of experience that made me think of. When was the next time I was going to get a chance to just sit down and listen to this. Too often, people discount how little time they spend with their friends. I had chosen to live in Ridgewood deliberately. I chosen to live near by my friends deliberately. And it was still hard to hang out with them..

They were hours away. But these kids? Young adults who are just getting their handle on their Futures, they ate all the time in the world. Or at least they didn't have the constant pressure of working. Sure, they might have odd jobs but they were students primarily. And though her parents might urge estor to go to medical school or law school or something, they couldn't go to school for her or take her tests. She had to want to do that herself.

Now I didn't know if she was going to go through with it, but it was the same story with all of them. Their compulsory education was done. So they had something that they were searching for. They were looking for satisfaction. They were looking to learn and right now? They were looking to crush the Sussex Skylanders.

Friendship? Fellowship? They had a terrible beauty that really was hard to see without retrospect. But this exact moment here where things were going great and we were moving towards another crushing Victory, I just stayed in the moment. I was not going to let my anxiety about future events drag me down.