The I.P.O. by Dan Koontz

smile returned. 
    His eighth birthday had been a family affair with Sara and Thomas and both sets of grandparents in attendance.  That was followed by his first “other birthday” blowout that saw his entire extended family in attendance.  Ryan’s beaming face fronted a sea of first and second degree relatives, arranged by height and age behind him, curling all the way up the grand staircase of the Ewing’s foyer.
    As an eight-year-old, he was pictured smiling sheepishly in a Speedo with his swim team, taking his first golf lessons (with the board’s blessing,) and soaking up the sun with his parents on vacation in Mexico.  At nine, he posed behind an oversized $35,000.00 check from the E.W. Scripps Company made out to Ryan Tyler Ewing, the youngest winner in National Spelling Bee history.  He had been told the money would be going into a college fund, but he figured most of it was probably heading to the Avillage board.  It hadn’t really bothered him; he had way more than most kids, and that wouldn’t be life-changing money for him anyway.  What had bothered him deeply though was that he’d been forbidden from defending his title the following year, without explanation.
    At age ten, a series of pictures marked his two months in Singapore as an exchange student at a Chinese-language immersion program at one of Hunting Valley Academy’s sister schools, followed by shots taken all over China on vacation with his family.  He’d pleaded with his parents not to send him overseas by himself, and he’d overheard bits and pieces of their arguing with the board on his behalf, citing his understandable predisposition to separation anxiety.  But the Avillage board had refused to budge.  And it turned out he’d actually enjoyed himself once he’d gotten over there.
    Age eleven saw a gradual shift toward more pictures with friends and fewer with his parents, although he did pose proudly next to his dad as co-champions of the Father-Son Invitational Golf Tournament at their country club. 
    After a single picture from his twelfth birthday party, a new picture he'd never seen before popped up in the frame, featuring a sheet of plain white paper with a hand-written message in pencil: "Check out your mom's purple shirt."  He didn’t get it.
    In the final shot before the loop restarted, he was lying on his stomach on top of his sheets, the back of his Cleveland Browns boxers prominently featured, craning his head up and back to squint perturbedly at his parents as they entered his room.  His dad must have already wirelessly uploaded the photo from just a few minutes prior.  Ryan couldn’t help but laugh.  But that was not staying on the frame.
    After finishing up his breakfast, he reached over and hit the sleep button on the frame, stood up to stretch, and then took a long nostalgic look around his room.  The pirate bed had been replaced by a mundanely conventional queen-sized bed.  The desk and chair were no longer kid-sized, the huge closet, stocked with far fewer clothes, seemed even bigger in its emptiness, and the color of the walls had changed.  But for a brief moment he could see the room just as it had appeared that first day.  The unique smell that every house has, which he’d become so accustomed to that he hadn’t noticed it in years, came back in a wave, and he sniffed it in with a long deep breath, gently closing his eyes as a lump began to develop in his throat. 
    He shook his head, embarrassed by his emotions, forced a half-smile, and headed for the shower.
    Ryan still hadn’t told anyone what he knew about AVEX ticker symbol RTJ, which was now hidden in an alphabet soup of symbols representing former orphans on the half-full back page of the New York Times Business section. 
    Strict rules restricted the press from revealing the identities of publicly-traded minors, but it had dawned on him after watching his stock price rise five percent the day after he’d won the spelling bee that his