Besides, many of the guys had built up a group of friends, and David was the new kid, as far as they were concerned.
When he reached Accounting, Alyssa was already waiting with his tea. When he sat down, she smirked.
“What?” David asked.
She showed him the most recent article about Fiona and David on one of the tabloid sites. He gave her a mock pout and hung his head.
“Are you okay?” Alyssa asked,
“I’m sorry. Do I just suck? I didn’t know the photographer was there. Am I such a terrible person?” David asked.
“You’re not a terrible person. You’re just a work in progress,” Alyssa assured David.
“Fiona is going to be mad at me,” David said as he acted worried.
“You’re fine.”
“My therapist would disagree.”
That one made the people sitting around them laugh.
“Boys don’t always make the right decisions. It takes years before they become men and wise-up.”
David rolled his eyes at that particular gem of advice.
“What’s up with you and Seamus?” David asked to move the focus from him.
“He’s a horse’s ass.”
“But you like him,” David said as he waggled his eyebrows.
Professor Scarpa interrupted David’s digging for dirt by starting class.
Alyssa bolted as soon as their class was over, so David didn’t get to find out any more about her budding relationship with Seamus. He would corner the Irishman on Wednesday when they played their next game. He also wanted to talk to Allard to see if he and Lindsey had officially decided to see each other.
In his stats class, David was assigned a project. They had to find a real-world application and then apply what they’d learned to date and show their results. It was something you could do in a group or solo. Their professor gave them the last half of the class to form teams and come up with their initial ideas.
David held back until he saw that several teams had been formed, then approached the first one.
“What do you plan to do?”
One of the guys looked like he thought he was in charge. David had overheard him with his friends before and after class and learned he was part of a fraternity. He’d become a ‘big brother’ to one of the new members and spent a lot of time thinking of ways to haze the poor guy. If his new frat brother didn’t die of alcohol poisoning, David would be shocked.
“Our project will be to determine whether the presence of social networks influences the work performance of a person in a company. We’ll collect information about social media presence and link it to the success rates of a certain company’s employees.”
“Good luck with that,” David said as he got up and found the next group.
David listened to and rejected several different groups. It wasn’t the concepts he had problems with, it was the execution required. Either it would involve a ton of work or be almost impossible to get the data.
The projects that he heard included:
• Figuring out if alcohol consumption affected pay. David would bet that younger people drank more and made less money. He didn’t think they’d be able to determine whether there was a causal link between the two.
• What difference was there between the web-browsing habits of college-aged males and females. David figured most guys would way underestimate the amount of time spent watching porn, thus messing up the numbers.
• A group of girls decided to check different types of shoes and see if they were priced differently geographically within the LA area. That was a ‘hell, no!’
“Does anyone not have a group and want to team up?” David asked.
There were no takers, so he decided to go it alone. He had the kernel of an idea. He wondered how Ashley had discovered the property he’d made an offer on. It wasn’t yet listed for sale, yet she’d found it somehow.
That got his mind racing as he tried to think whether there were life events that triggered home selling. The flip side was, what influenced home-buyers to search for and buy houses at particular times? For example, there was the Target case study where they identified pregnant women from their purchasing choices. David figured such women might be in the market for a bigger home.
He decided that before he got too deep into this, he would go home and talk to Ashley and his mom to see what they used to find sellers and buyers. He expected they could steer him in the right direction to do an easy project that would actually produce some practical results.
After class, David grabbed lunch on campus. He knew Lexi would be doing the same, so he called her.
“There’s mister ‘I want to be an average college guy’ getting himself plastered on all the gossip shows and tabloids. Frank is rather annoyed at you for not giving him a heads-up.”
David was sure that Lexi had handled his publicist. If she hadn’t, Frank wouldn’t have hesitated to call.
“Did she tell you what we did?” David asked, referring to his Sunday night date, Fiona.
“I told my dad, and he was green with envy. He would kill to get invited to one of those dinners,” Lexi shared.
David’s head was still spinning at being able to watch the who’s who of Hollywood do business in a private dining room. If it gained him nothing else, he’d met the actual decision-makers at some of the largest studios in the world. He could see how Paul would have loved to have been a fly on the wall or, better yet, one of the participants.
“He said that if you had anything to share...” Lexi floated.
“I might want to get invited back. It wouldn’t take them long to figure out who leaked the information,” David said to slow her roll.
“That was what Fiona said,” Lexi grumped. Then she changed the focus of the call. “She told me that your next date will be your third.”
If he thought about that statement too hard, his imagination would be flowing like beer at a kegger.
“Not that it’s any of your business...” David started but was cut off by Lexi.
“Let me stop you right there. If you start a sentence that way, you know it means you shouldn’t even be thinking whatever you’re about to say, right?” Lexi asked to give him a hard time.
“I’m not sure hooking up with Fiona is a good idea,” David tried.
“Are you dead sure about that, David?”
“Like a corpse.”
“You better explain yourself,” Lexi said.
“I shouldn’t do it just based on the hassle factor alone. It’s barely lunchtime, and you’re the second person to ask me about it. I don’t have the energy to fend off paparazzi at every turn, and you know that’s what this will turn into if I’m not careful.”
“We’ll see,” Lexi said, clearly not buying his reason.
David doubted he could have resisted if Fiona had gotten him upstairs that night.
“Did you get the names I sent you?” David asked.
“I’m not done talking about you and Fiona.”
“Well, get done because that’s all you’re getting.”
“Fine,” she huffed. “I sent them to both Kent and Frank to look into. Are you planning to do some kind of major business deal?”
“Not yet. I was told they’re the backing behind USC athletics. I got an in to talk to them after the spring game on Saturday and want to be able to have an intelligent conversation,” David explained.
“I’ll find out,” Lexi promised. “Now, back to...”
David hung up on her. He could hear her laughing at him from all the way over at the UCLA campus across town. David knew for a fact that he would have to plan the third date without her help, or he would never hear the end of it.
Chapter 58