was a fun opportunity for them to see the young people they had gone to school with, since several of the girls being presented at the cotillion had been her classmates.
To Ruby and her grandparents, the evening was a great success. It wasn’t marked by the vast opulence of Eleanor’s debut forty-nine years before, but it was appropriate for the era, and a lovely party, filled with young people and their parents and grandparents in evening clothes. It was everything Camille would have hated, and that Ruby loved.
She had more in common with the grandparents who had raised her than she would have had with her mother, who was such a rebel. Ruby was never rebellious at any age. If anything, she studied too hard and they had to remind her to take a break and play. She thought studying was fun.
In her sophomore year at Stanford, she was studying in the library one weekend, when a senior sat across the desk from her, seemed fascinated by her, and stared at her red hair. They left the library at the same time, and he explained that he was working on his senior project. He said he’d had a summer job at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center the previous summer, where he said he got interested in GUIs. He explained that they were graphical user interfaces, which allowed a person to interact with a computer through graphics. He made it sound fascinating. His senior project was to devise some applications for GUIs to make using a computer easier for a home user. His name was Zack Katz, and she understood what he was talking about immediately and thought it was brilliant. He grinned when she told him that and they became fast friends from that moment on. He shared his progress on his project with her, and they studied for exams together. He had grown up in Palo Alto with his father, who worked for Hewlett-Packard. He said his parents had been divorced since he was eleven, and hated each other, and now he rarely saw either of them, and had no home life, and never had. They had gotten married because his mother was pregnant with him. He was an only child like Ruby. His mother had remarried and lived in Texas and his stepfather was a jerk. He hated visiting them so he no longer did. His father hadn’t remarried but had a constantly changing slew of very young girlfriends. “My family defines dysfunctional,” was how Zack summed it up. It sounded sad to Ruby. She told him about her parents OD’ing when she was three weeks old, and being raised by her grandparents, whom she said were fantastic and she adored. She seemed happy, normal, and well balanced, and they liked each other immediately and rapidly became best friends and constant companions.
Zack was what other students called a geek, and during school holidays and weekends when she was there, he dropped in to see Ruby at her grandparents’ shop in the city. He enjoyed lengthy conversations with her grandfather, and thought that he and Ruby’s grandmother were “cool.” He liked being around them, unlike his own family. He hung out as long as Ruby’s family would let him.
“He’s so smart, isn’t he, Grampa?” Ruby said admiringly, and Alex laughed.
“He certainly is. I have no idea what he’s talking about most of the time.” But he liked him and he was a good friend for Ruby, and a very decent boy. Alex felt sorry for his disrupted home life too.
“Really?” She seemed surprised at her grandfather’s comment that Zack’s theories were beyond him.
“He makes everything so simple to understand,” she said easily and Alex shook his head.
“For you maybe.” Her grandfather smiled at her. “For us mere mortals, he’s speaking Chinese.”
Zack invited Ruby to his Stanford graduation. She had met his father by then. His mother hadn’t come, and his father brought a cheesy girlfriend who wore a tight dress with a plunging neckline, and was younger than Zack, and Zack’s father flirted with Ruby during the ceremony. Zack was mortified by him. He invited Ruby to join them for lunch at a restaurant in Palo Alto. It was awkward but she stayed.
Two weeks later the applications he had designed for GUIs as a senior project and the new software he had written sold to a high-tech company for two hundred million dollars. He was interviewed in Time magazine and had dazzled the company that bought his