Lucy set her phone on the desk. She pulled off the cardboard backing to straighten the photo, and out fell the slip of paper behind it: a smiling baby—not Lucy, simply the picture that had come in the frame. How long had her mom kept that other child beside Lucy? Long enough to forget to print one to take its place, long enough to no longer notice that she should.

On the desk, Lucy’s phone vibrated and lit up with a text.

ValleyStart: Team assignments are in! Meet Your Mates!

Lucy’s arm shot out like a rattlesnake, and her notebook fell, knocking into one of her mom’s monitors.

“Lucy!” Abigail Katz entered the room and rushed forward in her expensive flats.

“Got it!” Lucy’s tennis-trained reflexes saved the monitor before it took down the others like dominoes.

Considering Lucy had read and reread the acceptance packet about a thousand times and been waiting for the past two months to see who she’d be spending the next five weeks with, her restraint in not jumping on the ValleyStart portal instantly was extraordinary.

It’s actually happening.

Her pulse quickened, and she was almost dizzy as she circled one way around the desk, back to the hard chair. Her mom rounded the corner from the opposite direction, adjusted the tilt of the monitor, and sat down in front of it.

With the seven-inch height difference between them, Lucy could only see her eyes. And the tiredness in them.

Lucy would never deny that Abigail Katz worked hard.

But that was all she did.

“I’m sorry, Lucy.” Abigail smoothed the ends of her chin-length bob. The barest hint of gray dusted the roots—a constant battle, waged every three weeks as she colored it back to brown. “They needed some guidance in a branding meeting that wasn’t on my schedule.”

“Right,” Lucy said.

Abigail reached into the top drawer of her desk and pulled out two protein bars. “Just a quick lunch, then, okay?”

Peanut butter. Lucy hated peanut butter. “Sure.” She peeled back the wrapping. Not even peanut butter could ruin her ValleyStart high.

“All set for tomorrow?”

“Packed the car this morning.” She bounced (just a little) in her seat.

Abigail stopped chewing. “Not an Uber or Lyft?”

“It’s ten miles.”

“Right. Ten.”

Half the number of fender benders Lucy had been in. Who has time to spend learning to be a perfect driver?

“Fine. Whatever.” Lucy pretended there was no judgment in her mom’s question and forced a bite of the peanut butter. “I’ll leave the car.”

“Better plan. You won’t need it anyway.” Abigail set her own half-eaten bar down. “You have to focus. Palo Alto High School may have been competitive, but ValleyStart’s in another league. The top startup incubator for high school graduates in the country with only sixty accepted out of—”