Chapter 76: The Future Looks Bright

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A crisp electronic trill echoed from below, getting closer with every step.

"I am back..." a voice called from outside. Then, after a pause, "Sorry. Wrong room."

Mia sighed.

"Nolan, bring back your directionally challenged brother."

Nolan opened the door and leaned out.

"Here!"

In the corridor, a slim young man with copper-red hair turned around. He wore a white T-shirt with a NASA logo, dragged a suitcase behind him, and had heavy glasses on his face.

"You really did turn into a bull," William Callahan said, laughing under his breath.

They had not seen each other for half a year. Nolan had gotten taller and stronger again.

"And you still look like a stiff breeze could knock you over."

Nolan pushed him lightly, then the brothers hugged.

William Callahan and Nolan Callahan were opposites in almost every obvious way. William was short, thin, and red-haired like their father. Nolan was tall, broad, blond, and had inherited more from their German-American mother. William’s face was freckled and ordinary. Nolan’s was clean and handsome. William could sit in a chair all day, quiet and deep in thought. Nolan could not stay still.

As children, whenever William was bullied, Nolan had been the one to step in.

Because of that, outsiders had often mistaken Nolan for the older brother.

Their differences had never hurt their relationship.

Nolan took the suitcase. William entered the room and hugged Mia and Katherine one after another. They were both happy to see him, especially Mia, who kept patting his shoulder and studying him up close, searching for every small change from memory.

The four of them sat together and talked. William looked around the motel room and finally shook his head.

"You really should move out of here."

Then he turned mysterious.

"Guess what I did this month. I made twenty thousand dollars. And this..."

He showed them his portable cellular phone. It looked a little like Nolan’s, though the screen was smaller and the body was less refined.

"My boss gave it to me as a reward. A mobile phone. Pretty impressive, right?"

He grinned and showed it off to Mia, Katherine, and Nolan.

"I can help with part of Katherine’s tuition. As for a house... let me think about that over the next couple of days. And Nolan, stop playing football. That sport is brutal on the body."

William started arranging things the moment he sat down.

Then he noticed the phone in Nolan’s hand, and his expression changed.

"That is a high-end model."

"You know phones?" Nolan held up the one he had gotten from Lisa. He did not care how advanced or expensive it was. To him, all of this technology still looked ancient.

To William, the geek, it was a treasure.

He took the phone carefully, almost reverently, and began explaining features in detail: call memory, compact battery design, menu structure, built-in tones, the screen, the keypad response. In his voice, the device might as well have been a glimpse of the future.

Geek had once meant someone strange, someone outside the mainstream. Now it was gaining another meaning. A technology obsessive.

William had shown interest in electronics since childhood. Before he turned ten, he had already started taking apart the family radio. His desk always hid broken circuit boards and half-disassembled devices.

At Stanford, he studied electrical engineering, a serious major with a direct bridge into Silicon Valley.

Nolan thought his future looked bright. After graduation, William would probably enter the tech industry and become an engineer.

"Compared with your phone?" Nolan asked.

William smiled sheepishly.

"Mine is nowhere close. It costs maybe a third of yours. Where did you even get this? It is not easy to find."

"The school gave it to me because I played decent football."

"Your brother is not the same boy from Christmas break," Mia said. "He is a once-in-a-generation football talent now."

"He can earn far more than twenty thousand," Katherine added with a smile.

"That serious?" William narrowed his eyes at Nolan, still not quite believing it.

He had thought he would be the family’s surprise. Now, beside Nolan’s future, what William had done felt much smaller.

"William has done well," Nolan said sincerely. For a college student, saving that much in one term was not easy.

Before he could ask for more details, Mia clapped the conversation back into order.

"William is home. The reunion is over. Now we talk about business. Family meeting officially begins. Topic: Katherine’s college choice."

That was the true weight of the night.

Katherine stood, went to her room, and returned with a cardboard box. It was filled with carefully designed acceptance and invitation packages from universities.

Nolan and William opened them one by one while Mia explained the rules.

"Katherine made the first cut herself. The other three of us may give opinions, but the final decision belongs to Katherine."

Katherine had narrowed the choices to six schools.

"My first choice is UCLA’s nursing and public-health track," she said. "It is the most affordable. If there is a chance later, I can continue into a medical or dental path and become a dentist."

She had thought about it carefully. As a California resident, attending an in-state public university kept costs down. Her annual expenses could stay under ten thousand dollars.

UCLA was also one of the strongest public universities in the country. If she continued, its dental school carried real weight and strong earning potential.

And if none of that worked, she could still be Nolan’s private medical support.

Katherine’s thinking was very practical.

"Good school," William said. "But the track... unless you are sure you want to continue into medicine or research, I would not recommend it. I would choose Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering instead. More expensive, though."

He gave the opinion from his own angle.

"If Duke is on the table, why not Johns Hopkins?" Mia said. "The Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. I wanted to go there when I was younger."

"If we are choosing," Nolan said last, "choose the best option among these six. Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania."

Wharton also had undergraduate programs.

In the United States, outside certain specific fields, many undergraduates did not fully declare their major until late freshman or early sophomore year. Katherine had applied as undecided.

All four had reasons. None of them fully convinced the others.

Then Nolan reached the bottom of the box and found an invitation tucked under everything else.

"Why did you ignore this one from the start?"

He pulled it out.

It was an acceptance package from Yale College.

Yale College was Yale University’s undergraduate college. Like the others, it did not force an immediate major.

"Too expensive," Katherine said at once.

"Too far," Mia added.

"No," Nolan said. "This is the one you should choose."

Katherine’s thinking was practical, but it still did not look far enough forward.

Nolan had been thinking ten years after graduation. That was why he liked Wharton. But Yale had one advantage none of the others could match.

The law school.

"Yale has the highest ceiling," Nolan said. "Even if law school does not happen later, you can still pivot into health care or dentistry. There is no reason to throw away the option."

"But..."

"You mean money." Nolan cut gently through the objection. "We have money. I have a hundred thousand in cash. Enough for your next two years. And there will be more after the next game."

"How much?"

Mia, William, and Katherine spoke at the same time.

"You heard me. Call it football-related support."

Nolan kept the ugly details out of the room.

"Damn," William said. "Football players make that much now?"

"Nolan is not like other players," Katherine reminded him.

Whoever paid had the loudest opinion. Under Nolan’s firm recommendation, Katherine finally agreed to choose Yale.

"Also," Mia said, "Lisa will help me find script-doctor work from now on. I may gradually become a professional screenwriter."

The four of them kept talking about the half year behind them and the road ahead.

They had hit bottom before.

But the future looked bright.

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