Best And Brightest #1 - Best of the Best

This is the beginning of a story. The story comes from my friends Colin and Ryne, and from me. They are responsible for the high quality of the tale. I am responsible for the low quality of the execution. Anyway, Storytime.

Devonte Best wore his high school varsity jacket to the party at Jim Brightest's apartment the night before their graduation from the University of Chicago. It was his high school robotics team, he figured, that had set him on the path to his new life, his new job, his move to San Francisco.

It is a very suburban thing to create letter jackets for Mock Trial and Robotics and Journalism. Acknowledging the nerds as equals to the athletes is important for suburban schools as they cultivate an image of academic success which will encourage fancy parents to donate money to keep the Band in instruments and the Robotics kids in RaspberryPi's and the Artists (tortured by the drudgery of their Robin Sparkles suburban childhoods) in high-quality acrylics and pastels.

Devonte Best's picture was on the front of the Oak River North High School brochure still, four years after his graduation. He was wearing lab goggles, holding a robot part, and instructing students. He had been the captain of Robotics, the first Black valedictorian in school history, one of four of his classmates to get into Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the University of Chicago.

He picked Chicago because of the scav hunt. He picked Chicago because he thought he knew the city, he took the Metra downtown once a month to shop North Michigan Avenue with Ashlee and Caitlin and Leah, his friends from Hebrew School. (He wasn't Jewish, but his mother decided that Hebrew School would enhance his social prospects, so he went, from age six through High School graduation. He spoke fluent Hebrew.) He picked Chicago because it was close to his mom and dad, and to his brother Ryne, who preferred baseball to robotics, so much that he was already catching the eye of the Cubs as a sophomore.

In four years, he had learned to code in three languages, and to speak two more. He had never gone south of 63rd street, and he had always been friendly with the University Police. He was graduating with highest honors, and both his remaining grandparents would accompany his parents and his brother to the graduation ceremony.

Then, they would move him out. For the first time in his life, Devonte Best was leaving home. Study Abroad had been too far for his mother, who preferred road trips, who was terrified of even the concept of aircraft. He was going to San Francisco, with his best friend Jim Brightest. They had picked out an apartment in the Mission, Jim had been there the last two summers working as an intern at Jones Hernandez, the biggest DUI defense law firm in California. They had recruited him as a paralegal to boost his experience, before they paid for him to go to Stanford Law.

Courted by Google and Apple, Devonte instead chose a respectable salary at one of Silicon Valley’s most interesting startups. Boxxr was developing various high-tech “smart tupperware” which they claimed would revolutionize the way the kitchen left the home. For Devonte, choosing to work at a startup was obvious. What better way, he thought, to flex the ingenuity he has worked so hard to build up in robotics and Chicago’s scav hunt. He’d work at an up-and-coming tech startup filled with the very best and brightest the ‘Net generation produced. There, he’d build the resume and network to launch his own startup. His first step to changing the world.