Page 4 of Semantics

“Maybe. I don’t know,” Sarai said. “Can we talk when it gets closer?”

“Sure,” Arlowe replied, looking down at her empty beer bottle.

Violet could tell that Arlowe was hoping for something that she could look forward to, given that she’d just ended her relationship, and she decided to help her friend out because she understood and felt similar.

“Hey, I like the idea,” she said. “I’ll make it work, whatever you plan.”

“Yeah?” Arlowe asked, looking back up at her.

“Yeah. We all will. Right, Enya? Sarai?”

“Uh… Yeah,” Enya said, nodding along with Sarai.

“Cool,” Arlowe replied.

◆◆◆

About five months later, they’d all gotten together for a long weekend in New York City, which was a place that they could all get to somewhat easily and where Violet’s family had a house that they could all stay in. That weekend, they’d talked about how they’d been about to start jobs that they’d been grateful for but also not all that excited about. Sarai had had an entry-level marketing analyst job lined up. Enya would be translating legal paperwork for an international law firm. Arlowe had gotten an engineering job at a tech company. Violet had had her family business where she’d been about to start from the bottom as an intern before continuing to go to school, unlike the rest of them, but that night had been when it all had changed.

After that night, they would all tell the story differently each time because they were a little tipsy and no one remembered who had come up with the idea originally, but the last night of that trip, someone had said it, and the next morning, they’d all woken up and talked about it again, completely sober.

“So, we’re really going to do this?” Arlowe asked. “Start our own company, with Violet in school full-time and being our CEO?”

“I think so,” Enya said. “We need the start-up money.”

“I can help with that,” Violet offered before she thought about what she was saying. “And yes, this is what I want.”

“Then, let’s do it,” Sarai said.

CHAPTER 1

It wasn’t where Violet had seen herself. Ten years ago, she’d been sitting in her parents’ brownstone in Manhattan, with the three women she’d met in Amsterdam the previous fall. They had been slightly drunk that night, yes, but the following day, they’d been sober, and before they had all flown their separate ways to go home, they’d discussed their plans. Violet, the one with the business degree and soon to be in her MBA program, would be their CEO. Sarai would be their head of marketing and sales – at least, at first, because she didn’t want to lead sales forever. Arlowe would be the one to code it all. Enya would be the one to tell Arlowe what to code and Sarai what to market and sell.

Violet would be more than just the company’s CEO, of course. She’d be their chief investor since she’d volunteered to use her trust fund – or, at least, most of it – to fund their venture and keep them afloat until their business started making money, and she would be the one in charge of the books, their chief legal counsel, their… well, just about everything else they needed, and she’d have to do that while she was in school full-time.

It had been Enya’s idea to build the best language translation app on the planet, and as a polyglot, she’d had the skills that they’d need to build the thing the right way, as well as the experience of learning languages, and they’d planned to take all of her tips and tricks and add them to the learning functions of the app. Part of their plan had also involved wearable hardware, but that hadn’t happened yet. Well, a lot of what they’d planned so far had yet to come to fruition.

It had been ten years since that New York trip. They’d worked remotely for the first two, while Violet had been in school, but as much as they’d all believed in remote learning, starting a business together with them being in four different places most of the time had been difficult, and it had gotten to a point where flying to get together every so often no longer made fiscal sense, and as the one footing the bill, Violet had known that better than any of them. So, they’d made the decision to move to the same city, and not just any city but the new East Coast version of Silicon Valley, where other start-ups had been trying to start up just like them, and they had opted to rent a four-bedroom house and live together.

That allowed them each to save money on rent and for them to use their garage as their office, which also saved them gas money on top of other things. It did make their electric bill astronomical, but that would’ve been the case no matter where they worked, so Violet wasn’t bothered by it. What did bother her was that they were all about thirty-two years old now, and their app, while in all the app stores, wasn’t doing much for them. They’d yet to make a single dime from their business after putting ten years into it and living eight years in this house. She had her father breathing down her neck to rejoin the family business, telling her that she’d had her fun, but she was in her thirties now, and it was time to stop with this nonsense. She had her mother trying to send her money without her father finding out and Violet telling her that she was fine, even though she really wasn’t. At least, she had her friends. They’d gone from being the three women she’d met one fall afternoon at an airport to the three most important people in her life.

Arlowe, Sarai, and Enya had been with her through everything: all the business stuff, yes, but also the breakups, the family issues, the anxiety of being the CEO of a failing company, and everything else along the way. She’d been returning the favor, of course, but Violet was still so surprised that after living and working together this long, they were all still together, still close, and still trying to make this happen.

“We need the hardware,” Arlowe stated in their daily stand-up meeting before she bit into a Red Vine. “The hardware would set us apart.”

“How, exactly? We’d just be the tiny company no one has heard of, trying to sell them something that they can get from another, much larger company that they already use,” Sarai suggested. “We need to get the learner part of the app to the point where it can compete with the other language apps of the world. If we do that, we will be able to fund the rest of what we want to do.”

“The hardware, if we get it right, will be better than any of the rest of them can build.”

“How, Arlowe? They have thousands of engineers, hardware and software ones, working on wearables,” Sarai protested.

“Ours is only going to be for languages.”

“And how is that better? Their wearables do everything, and ours would only do one thing? Explain it to me like I’m five.”

“Be really good at one thing instead of just mediocre at everything. They’ll use their AI to translate or something, and those suck,” Arlowe said. “Ours will be Enya-made.”

Enya-made was what they called it whenever Enya was the one creating the feature or working on a language, which was all of their languages because Enya was a genius.