I yanked on the door. Stuck again. Twice, three times I yanked. It didn't budge.

"Alex! Chill out with the door!"

I kicked the door, accomplishing nothing except hurting my toe. "The stupid thing's stuck again."

Bill smiled where he was lounging on the couch. "Dude, relax. You're just stressed about tomorrow. Calm down, you know it wouldn't bother you this much usually." He chuckled a bit.

I smiled too as I realized how foolish I was acting. That door had been getting stuck for ages, and Bill was right that it didn't usually irritate me very much. "You've got me."

He laughed. "That's what best friends do!"

I walked over and sat by the table. I didn't really need to go out on the porch anyway, I just felt like I needed to move to let out some adrenaline. "I guess I am a bit stressed."

Bill smiled again. "Of course you are. Anyone would be. Just relax."

I laughed. "Easy for you to say! You're not the one giving a presentation to some of the richest people in the world tomorrow!" Even so, I knew Bill would probably still be lounging on that couch even if he heard that a meteor was about to turn our city into a crater. That man was impossible to fluster.

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I tried to relax, and thought a bit about the next day. Tomorrow was the day I was presenting our project to the people we were hoping would fund our first trials outside of a lab. Bill and I had built a new kind of deep-earth scanner that would pinpoint diamonds and report qualities like size and purity, to make mining for diamonds easier. We called it LIMI, for Low Impact Mining Imaging.

"You still sure about the orphanages?" Bill asked, bringing me back to the present.

"Yeah, I am." Bill and I had agreed to split any profits from our project 50-50, even though I said Bill had done more than half of the work. He had a double major in Mathematics and physics, and he'd done a lot of the work on our project. I was a geology major who had also done some tinking around with computer programming in my spare time. The orphanages he was talking about were the ones I'd decided to donate half of my share to, to help provide education for the kids there. "You know if it hadn't been for the schools where I grew up, I wouldn't be where I am now."

Bill just smiled. He'd probably already known my answer, he was just getting my mind off of the presentation and onto the good we would do. It worked. Mostly.

We chatted and relaxed through the evening before turning in a bit earlier than normal to be ready for the next day.

I was still a bit nervous as I turned in, but relaxing had helped. It was nice to have someone like Bill who had my back no matter what. My last thought as I sunk into the darkness of sleep was that I was totally ready for anything the next day could throw at me.