My Youth Began With Him

15

- At Triumph Steel Works Corporation -

Jake's father was overwhelmed. He made plenty of phone calls and begged plenty of friends, but all his attempts failed to solve the problem.

It was a true disaster; all of their big clients canceled projects with them because they were terrified of offending Chase Corporations.

Meanwhile, the only Chase Corporations subsidiary company they collaborated with, Chase Corporations Real Estate, had also declared that it would never work with them ever again.

Their main sources of income had disappeared. Without the support of these major companies, he could only earn a small fraction of their original revenue.

How could he run the company when he couldn't even afford to pay the employees?

"Dad, what's wrong?" Jake immediately left his friend's dinner party and returned to the company when his dad called him.

"Something disastrous."

"What's so disastrous? Is it that serious?" confused, Jake asked.

His dad then told Jake everything, and in the end, he cursed, "Damn it, how did we offend Chase Corporations? Why would they release a death warrant against a small company like ours? How will we survive? The strong really like to prey on the weak these days. We can't afford to offend Chase Corporations. I called Chase Corporations' headquarters to talk to their executives, but they won't even give me a chance. What should we do? We worked so hard to get to where we are today. Will all of it go to waste now?"

Jake suddenly remembered something when he heard 'Chase Corporations'.

"Dad, let me try to deal with this. I've got a classmate at Chase Corporations."

"You have a solution?" Hints of hope sparked within him.

"Let me try to talk to him first."

After he spoke, Jake left the company in anger.

Then, he sent a message in his high school WeChat group, "Who has Andrew's number? Send it to me."

He waited a while, but no one answered...

With no other choice and no time to waste, he drove to Chase Corporations headquarters in a rush.

"I want to see Andrew Chase."

"Do you have a reservation?" the receptionist asked politely.

"No, I don't."

"I'm sorry sir, the president is very busy at the moment. You can't see him without a reservation."

"Stop this act, I'm his high school classmate."

"All the same, sir. Please don't make this harder for me. If you are his high school classmate, then you should be able to reach him yourself. I suggest that you call our president directly."

Jake wanted to break in, but Chase Corporations had extremely tight security; if he couldn't even get through to the first floor, how in the world would he be able to get to the top level, 56 floors from where he was?

As Andrew headed home in his humble Audi R8, Jake blocked him at the gates of the parking lot.

If Andrew hadn't stepped on his brakes in time, he would've run him over.

Andrew stopped the car with a bad complexion on his face and slowly lowered the car window.

"Get out of the car, Andrew. Let's talk," Jake spat out aggressively.

"I don't think there's anything we can talk about," Andrew remained full of pride.

The truth was that amongst all of his high school classmates, he didn't care much about anyone other than Jessica.