“You okay?” Sara asked, peeking her head in the door.
“Yeah,” Ryan answered, his voice cracking just slightly.
Pretty sure everything was not okay, Sara cautiously entered his room and knelt at the edge of his bed. “Honey, your lip is bleeding,” she said worriedly.
“I was just having a realistic dream, and I bit down on it. It’s ok.”
“Are you sure?” she said reaching for a tissue. “Let me see.”
He studied her face as she stared down at his lip with genuine concern, tenderly dabbing it with the tissue. “I’m sure,” he answered.
Once she was satisfied with her nursing job, Sara glanced back up to find Ryan looking her directly in the eye. “You sure you’re ok?” she asked with a confused, almost self-conscious expression.
Then Ryan did something he’d never done before in his four weeks at the Ewing household. He wrapped his arms around her and gave her an unreserved hug, resting his head on her shoulder.
“Finally,” she thought as she hugged him back, her heart soaring inside her chest. She had been so sure for so long that it would happen, but she’d just started to allow herself to question, “What if it didn’t?”
Ryan loosened his embrace, but Sara wasn’t ready yet. She continued squeezing him, blotting the corner of her eye with the tissue she still held in her hand.
For the past month she’d stood up to the Avillage board. He wasn’t ready to start his education, she’d told them. They couldn’t push him.
Over the last several days her stand had only gotten harder, as she’d felt even more alone in her fight. Thomas, frustrated by their lack of progress, had begun to make the argument that maybe they should consider starting the board’s plan. They couldn’t possibly start making less headway with him. “Do you want them to take him?” he warned. “They can. And they will.” Thomas had slept on the couch that night.
But on this nondescript Tuesday morning, when she’d least expected it, Ryan had proven her right. In every way this was a breakthrough.
“Welcome, everyone. I’d like to call to order the first meeting of the board of directors of RTJ,” Prescott announced formally at precisely eight o’clock, the history of the moment not escaping him.
The first meeting was held in the Avillage board room two doors down from the office of James Prescott, who now stood at the head of a long, sturdy oak table with a panoramic view of the financial district as his backdrop. Seated around the table were the nine other board members. Six were early investors in Avillage — business executives mostly in their sixties and seventies. Two were chief executives of mid-sized companies. And the last was a baby-faced cardiologist in his first year out of fellowship, who looked almost as out of place in a suit as he did among the company he currently kept.
“The purpose of today’s meeting,” Prescott continued, speaking without notes, “is to go over some early financial estimates, discuss some of the progress we’ve made in the six weeks since open, and, hopefully, come up with some strategies to get things headed in the right direction before we release our first quarterly report.
“I‘ve been in communication with the adoptive parents on a weekly basis. Unfortunately, we lost about four weeks in the transition from orphanage to home, but we’ve now started most of the educational programs we’d prioritized the highest. Our boy’s actually already well ahead of where we thought he’d be in math despite the setback — he’s picking up concepts amazingly quickly.
“His tutor is billing out at 45 dollars an hour for 10 hours a week, and we’re picking that up. We’ve also got him working with an English tutor for 4 hours a week, primarily working on writing. That seems to be paying early dividends also, and she bills at the same rate.
“His mom is out of the house for four hours a day, leaving him with a Mexican-American nanny we’ve chosen, who’s got an exceptional track record for teaching conversational Spanish. He’s doing very well with that, and she only costs us 20 dollars an hour for 20 hours a week. We’ll keep the nanny until he’s fluent, but we won’t need the math or English tutors during the school year.
“His adoptive mother is playing games of strategy with him for about an hour a night, which I’m told he enjoys, and his dad is introducing him to the basics of the financial markets, obviously avoiding AVEX. Those services are of course free to us, and his parents have waived the parental stipend.
“We’re picking up the family’s healthcare by contractual obligation, which is about 900 a month, and he’ll be starting school at the Hunting Valley Academy for Math, Science and the Arts, which is clearly the top primary school in Cleveland and one of the best in the country — really a bargain at $24,000 annually.
“That puts our annual expenditures somewhere in the neighborhood of $60,000. Any questions or comments on any of that?”
“Any word yet on grade placement?” one of the executives asked. “60,000 times nine sounds a lot more palatable than 60,000 times eleven.”
“Hmm. What you’re proposing is a bit of a gamble,” Prescott said flatly, trying to conceal his delight that someone else was suggesting a course he fully supported. “Kids don’t immediately gain maturity by virtue of skipping a grade. Now of course, RTJ is slightly taller than average for his grade, and believe it or not, that’s an independent predictor for success in skipping grades — we have data on that.
“What’s harder to predict is how he’d do emotionally. Initially, it’s hard on all kids who skip ahead. Then, down the road, some kids have trouble building relationships with their peers, who are all a year or two older, especially around adolescence, but I don’t have any numbers to give you on that.”
“If we can save 120,000 bucks, I say we do it,” J.R. said casually, as nine heads turned in his direction. “Look, more than the $120,000, it’s the extra years of productivity, while we still have a high percentage of ownership. We have a very fixed time period during which we can extract a profit. If he gets out of college at 18 or 19 instead of 22, that could be a huge difference in lifetime earnings. Yeah, maybe it’ll be a little hard for him to adjust at first, but he’s a tough kid. I say we push for 3rd or even 4th grade this year — unless you have good evidence to say that these kids don’t do as well financially in adulthood.”
All eyes turned back to Prescott. “No,” he said pensively. “The data show that the vast majority of these kids do very well financially. The only gamble is that a small percentage — around nine percent — crumble emotionally and end up utter failures. And the majority of those kids who do fail are boys. We could always consider skipping a grade after we see how this year plays out.”
“He’ll be fine!” J.R. blurted out, unaccustomed to the standard decorum of a board meeting. “His dad skipped first grade.” Aside from Prescott, no one else in the room was aware that J.R. knew Ryan personally.
“Dr. Ralston had a close relationship with RTJ’s birth family,” Prescott quickly interjected, not entirely pleased that the information was now public. “And he maintains a close relationship with the boy, which is one reason we extended him the invitation to participate on the board.
“I really don’t think there’s a clear ‘right’ answer on this one,” Prescott said in a feigned conciliatory tone. “We’ll put it to a vote. All in favor of pursuing a higher grade placement?”