Page 7 of Skins Game

Even though it was April first, she didn’t want to fool her lab staff by denying them coffee. The pranks would start soon enough. Knowing those clowns, she hoped no one got hurt in the explosions.

Chemistry labs and mat sci labs are dangerous places on April Fool’s Day. When people can use their work materials to manufacture bombs or weapons, you’ve got to watch your back.

Nicole was pretty sure the first prank was already in motion. The HR admin had texted last night to ask if Nicole could give the new club fitter/sales guy they’d hired a tour of the office that morning.

The “new guy” would either be a complete psycho or dumb as a rock, because that was the joke.

Seriously, what kind of a stupid name wasKingston Moore,anyway? They should have come up with a better fake name like Dylan Waverly or Berkeley Tran if they were going to fool her. Nobody was namedKingston Moorein SoCal.

Nicole prattled along in her head, a list of previous years’ pranks scrolling through as she measured out the ashy-smelling grounds and spring water for the catering-size coffeemaker. Her mental chatter was a cloud of cicadas buzzing in the forest of her head: conversations about metal alloys in golf club heads replaying themselves, theories connecting dots about what wasreallygoing on in her favorite dragon-based series, and debate points coalescing for the argument with her landlord about whether she could keepthat manyplants on her balcony.

Hey, she hadn’t manufactured the seven-foot towers of forty-two overlapping pots each. She’d just bought ten of them.

Alotof zucchini were growing just outside her glass sliders.

It wasn’t her fault that they were sucking up a lot of water, and the apartment complex had chosen to include utilities in the rent. She was going to have home-grown tomatoes that summer.

The babble swirled in her head so thickly—would Xylan survive being turned into an evil wizard vernin, and could Zennifer find a way to turn him human again?—that Nicole didn’t notice the email icon on her phone, or the Teamsnotifications flashing, or even the phone call from her head tech buzzing her silenced phone across the table.

Nope, she just held three separate conversations with herself, happily analyzing and scheming and thinking up zucchini recipes, until Arvind flung open the break room door and screamed, “Why don’t you ever answer your phone becausewe’ve been bought!”

She looked over her shoulder at him from watching coffee stream into the glass carafe. “What?”

Spittle flew from Arvind’s mouth as he over-enunciated, “That oldgoatof an ownersoldus to the highestbidder!And it’sventure fucking capital!We. Are.Doomed!”

The worry quivering in her heart froze into crystallized dread at the horror in Arvind’s hazel eyes, and the possible futures of Sidewinder Golf—fifty-percent layoffs, eighty-percent layoffs,liquidation—landed like boulders in the streams of thoughts in her head.“No.”

“It’s true.” Arvind pulled out a chair and collapsed into it, holding his head in his hands. “If it were TaylorMade or Titleist, we’d have a chance at keeping our jobs. But VC…holy shit. They’re going tosavageus. They’re going to wring every bit of value out of the company and then sell us for parts.”

Nicole scrambled after her thoughts, trying to keep up as more andmorescenarios poured through her mind until one very important thought turned and smacked her in the face, and she laughed, yelling, “April Fools!”

Arvind looked up at her, his jaw slack and one hand tangled in his graying hair. “No, Nicole. No, it’s not April Fools. We’ve been bought.”

“Of course, it’s April Fools. Look. if you want to play this out, I won’t tell anybody. But it’s obviously April Fools.”

“It’snot,”Arvind said, his voice breathless. “I know it’s April first, but this isn’t a joke. Check your damn phone.”

Nicole turned back to the coffee pot, making sure the coffee was properly draining into the carafe and not overflowing the basket. “Yeah. Sure.”

“Nicole! I’m serious! We’re in trouble, and we need aplan!”

The panicked soprano notes in Arvind’s voice despite the fact that he was six-two and over forty convinced her to pivot to face him. “You swear you’re serious.”

“I am.” He held up his right hand. “I swear to gods, I amnotpulling some bullshit April Fools.”

Nicole plopped down in another chair. “Well,darn it.”

“Yeah.”

“Which venture capital firm?”

He consulted his phone. “Last Chance, Inc.”

“Sounds stupid.”

“Yeah.”

She shook her head. “This sucks.”