Jacques

Years ago I went to high school with a French guy who punched cobras in the face for fun. His name was Jacques. No one thought he would ever do anything with his life, but these days he’s a tech billionaire who owns his own island in the Pacific. We still text every few months. He likes to send me pictures of the dumb things he spends his money on. Last year he sent me a picture of a grid of underwater lasers he was installing around his island for security. The picture looked cool, but I didn’t respond for a few hours because I was at work. Jacques kept texting me to see what I thought. When I finally told him that I thought it looked cool, he seemed disappointed. He’s not a great texter. He made his money from an app or something. Everyone on the internet thinks he stole the idea for the app from his old business partner, a different French guy named Jacques, but I don’t know anything about that. He’s not a bad guy in small doses. He still loves our tiny town for some reason, so he comes back here once or twice a year. Whenever we go out to the bars together, he always wears a blank black baseball hat and giant mirrored sunglasses to hide his identity, but no one ever tries to talk to him.