I look away to keep from laughing. We’ve been here for three hours now, in the Engineering Center, working inside a replica of the Palo Alto garage where William Hewlett and David Packard created, you guessed it, HP, when they were just a few years out of Stanford. This version of it is made of glass and filled with group worktables and dry erase boards. I’ve started to feel like our workspace is mocking us, and Braden’s dumb, cynical sense of humor makes more and more sense every minute.

She makes a face at him. “Why does everyone keep asking that?”

“I mean,” I say before Braden can get another sour word in. “It is a class on entrepreneurship.”

She giggles and I am grateful. I’d feel bad if my teasing tormented her the way Braden’s seems to—but the joke was right there.

She runs a hand through her hair. It looks nice slightly disheveled in this way, almost better than when she floats into the room and it’s perfectly in place. “So what do we have then?”

I scan my notes. It’s Friday, and we’ve met twice now since we were given the assignment on Monday. “Well, we repitched Facebook accidentally, discussed a biomedical technology idea that would take years of R & D, discussed an emoji keyboard made entirely of puppies doing different things, and then finally you suggested an emergency alert app that would not make money.”

“So we’re nowhere.” Braden rests his head on the table. “Fabulous.”

“Do you think he’d really fail us?” I ask. I picture an F on my transcript, the first grade below A I would’ve received since the fifth grade. It feels like someone is wringing out my stomach.

“He couldn’t, right?” Sara looks at me with wide eyes. My heart twinges. She falls into the chair across from me, tossing her dry erase marker onto the table.

“I definitely think he would,” Braden says, face still on the table. “I think that was the whole point of his speech.” He raises his head, his hair now askew.

“What would that do to our GPAs?” Sara starts to crunch numbers in her notebook.

“Well, considering this is our first semester, we’re starting at zero,” Braden says, “and assuming we are each taking a standard load of classes, and get As in all of them, which will be no easy feat... We would have a GPA of 2.66 by Christmas.”

“Yikes.” Sara sets down her pen.

I look at my own notebook and the list of ideas that have been scratched out one by one.

The silence in the room is palpable.

I click my phone to check the time. “Yo, guys, I’m sorry, but I have to go soon.”

“What?” Sara says. “But we don’t even have an idea yet!”

“I know, I’m so sorry, but—”