His Naughty Lessons-Chapter 215: Digging for Secrets

** Harper **

Harper didn’t end up staying at Eli’s place on Sunday night. After finishing their desserts like normal, boring people, she hung around only long enough to make sure that Tyler didn’t return with vengeful flames trailing behind him, then went home — her boyfriend seemed quieter than usual for most of the night, either because of the headache or because he was trying to process everything that happened during the day, so she fought back her clingy impulses and gave him the space to take some calm rest.

Needless to say that it was hard for her to fall asleep herself that night, even with the help of the teddy bear. She showed up to the office on Monday in the state of a groggy zombie, yawning as she slumped into her chair.

"Morning, team leader." Lindsey swiveled around in her seat. "Too much gaming over the weekend?"

Harper chuckled, trying to wake up her sleepy brain. "Nah, family drama." She stifled another yawn and turned on her computer, adding casually, "How was your weekend?"

"Oh, it was great as long as that family drama of yours wasn’t about your new boyfriend. Please don’t tell me you’ve had your first fight already! I just nominated you guys for the golden couple of the year, so don’t let me down!"

"... You what?" Apparently Harper was indeed too sleepy to catch up with Lindsey’s logic flow. It was amazing that people were already considering Eli her "family" ... but what was that golden couple of the year about?

"Aah, surprise surprise. It’s a brand new project that has everything to do with how my weekend was!" Lindsey gestured to the cubicle behind them. "A couple of us were here on Saturday, and we did something fun on a whim. Check it out and prepare to be impressed!"

Harper followed the direction her coworker was pointing to.

A corkboard had appeared out of nowhere in the back of the room. A row of colorful name labels were lined up at the top, paired up in twos to mark separate columns. Below them, various tags and thumbtacks were pinned in clusters that indeed looked like voting, with little sticky notes attached here and there. A few of them under her and Eli’s names said:

[ Lavender field trip: first kiss? Sweetest eye candy ever! +50 points ]

[ Volleyball tournament: the PDA blinded me! +50 points! ]

[ Anyone remember the dolphin sighting? My conspiracy theory says it was a planned first date all along. +25 points ]

[ Thinking back on this project being the miracle that brought them back together, we should be so proud of ourselves! +30 points ]

[ ... ]

Harper stared at the board, stunned.

"You guys are ranked way up in the lead now." Lindsey pointed to the "final score" section written above the name labels. "Keep it up! I’m not typically into this kind of gossipy stuff, but I’ll ship my buddy to the end, so rest assured that you’ll always get my vote."

Harper: "..."

What an amazing turn of events after all the drama this past weekend.

She shook her head, amused and a bit speechless. If only Tyler was here to see how much her coworkers had witnessed ... Would he believe Eli then after all that evidence? Would he at least grudgingly give the two of them the benefit of doubt?

Thinking of which, she checked her phone again. Still no messages from either Eli or Tyler. Sigh. Hopefully neither of them was using all their time to brood and turn their next hangout together into even more of a duel scene.

"I’ll try my best," she said, both a promise to herself and to Lindsey. "Anyway, why were you here over the weekend? Is Brandon assigning extra work again that I’m not aware of?"

"Oh, no he wasn’t. I just came here to print out some of our intern resumes, since you know, I like to do some digging about their past projects ahead of time. And guess what? I actually found something really interesting."

Lindsey fumbled a bit in her file cabinet before pulling out a manila folder. "Take a look at this one. A very impressive resume with lots of experience in gaming tournaments, beta testing, graphics design, and school project management. But you know what’s interesting? This person is allegedly a rising senior at the same college I went to, so I couldn’t resist looking up the name, but I didn’t find it in the student directory! Then I got curious and started searching in the rosters for those tournaments listed here too. No matches either."

Hmm, interesting indeed. Harper took the folder from Lindsey’s hand, wondering which mysterious candidate it was.

A familiar name jumped into her eyes the moment she flipped the cover open. Emory Starling — the one with the initials ES that had caught her attention before.

"Wow, that’s ... potentially unfortunate," Harper muttered. "This was one of my favorite resumes."

Not just because it caught her attention with the initials, of course, and not just because the experiences listed were grand accomplishments worth bragging about. On the contrary, some of the design and testing projects had been prior internships at startup companies little known to the public, yet important to Harper because they were the producers of her favorite indie games. When she first saw the short yet concise bullet list of past relevant work, she had been impressed by how closely this candidate’s interests aligned with her own, and the resume had been high on her priority list.

"I know, right!" It took a gamer to know a gamer, and Lindsey was obviously thinking along the same lines. "It’d be so sad if all those awesome experiences are fake. But I also wonder, why would anyone do that? It’s not like those companies are famous or hard to get into, and it’s not like my school has a name like Harvard. Is it really worth the effort to make up lame lies like these and risk getting caught?"

Harper considered it. Fake resumes were a possibility indeed, but she didn’t want to assume and make a stupid mistake just like Tyler. "This candidate is coming on site in a couple of days, right?" She handed back the folder. "Maybe we should make a good list of questions to ask in detail about those invisible experiences. Figure out if there’s at least some truth to them. Maybe there was some weird mistake, or who knows, maybe this is secretly a rock star who uses an undercover pseudonym to try to get into our company lowkey." fгee𝑤ebɳoveɭ.cøm

She hadn’t meant the last part as a serious thought, but Lindsey’s eyes lit up in excited expectation at hearing it. "Ohhh, that would be an amazing discovery ... I’ll be right on it. Digging for juicy secrets has become my new favorite hobby these days!" Lindsey tapped on the corkboard to demonstrate. "I’ve spent a whole weekend digging already. See this dolphin sighting note? I was the one who made the conspiracy theory there! Tell me I was absolutely right about it?"

Harper: "..."

Her very last clueless friend had finally been infected by the gossipy office culture as well. Maybe it was becoming an increasingly plausible option to enlist her help to prove to Tyler all the juicy anecdotes she had managed to find.