Chapter 91 - Elfie Yskandar

The girls were thrilled to hear that there would be a classmate joining them for lessons that morning. Jasper didn't know what to think about it. The boy was slightly awkward and hoped that it wouldn't be a girl at the very least. He didn't know how to interact with others and girls were worse than boys. They were often noisy and if they weren't noisy, Jasper wouldn't know what they were thinking about. Boys were still easier to understand and he could guess because he was a boy himself.

When Danny introduced the small boy as Elfie Yskandar, the young entrepreneur heaved a sigh of relief in his heart. Elfie looked like someone he could easily get along with. The boy was small for a ten-year-old and Jasper wondered if he had enough to eat. He briefly considered sharing his lunch with the kid until Danny dug into his wallet to give Elfie some cash to buy his lunch later.

"Thank you, Dad- Danny."

"No worries, kiddo. Also, feel free to keep calling me dad. these three are family friends and I heard that you wanted to have a sleepover at the Wilde's?"

Elfie ducked his head down in shame. He knew he should have mentioned the idea to Danny first before asking Wilmer for permission. The counsellor was probably upset at him now for jumping the queue and consulting someone else other than him.

Danny saw the hunched shoulders and sighed. Although the boy was a marvellous informant and hacker as well as a genius programmer, Elfie severely lacked confidence in himself. the counsellor hoped that by bringing Elfie back to regular classes with the three new students, he would be able to form some friends of his age who shared special circ.u.mstances like him. As a parent, Danny felt that it was too dangerous for his talented adopted son to continue working on the huge crackdown. There were plenty of experts onboard and his kid has done more than his part as a freelance hire. The counsellor placed Elfie's interest first and no amount of government protection will save them from the shadows of the underworld if they knew who leaked the information.

"Hello, I'm Elfie Yskandar and I'm turning ten this year. This is Danny Wong, my legal guardian and my father. Yes, I'm adopted and that means I don't know my birth parents other than what was written on the adoption papers."

Alex and Scarlet didn't know how to react to it but Jasper did. He simply nodded at the new kid and told him it was cool. Elfie smiled brightly at that and decided to take a seat beside the boy with helmet-styled hair. It was an odd fashion sense but Elfie didn't question it. It was better this way because Elfie sometimes found it difficult to look at people in their eyes when talking to them.

"Where are you from?" Alex asked, curious about the boy's unusual features. Danny and Elfie looked nothing alike since Elfie was adopted but the boy's name intrigued the artist. She'd never come across anyone with a name that spelt differently from how it sounded. It was spelt with a "Y" on the whiteboard that Danny scribbled but clearly pronounced as an "I".

Elfie smiled, happy that the children were curious about him and welcoming. "I'm from Lebanon!"

Scarlet and Alex looked confused at the country's name but smiled anyway and introduced themselves. Danny ignored the chatter behind him and scribbled his lesson plan or the day on the board. It was nice to see his son interacting with children of his age but when the topic turned towards hobbies, the counsellor nearly dropped his marker.

"Oh, I like to hack into high-security walls and see how far I can go in my free time. I also code and can make really interesting scripts that can do very interesting things."

"Ok, that's enough chatter!" Danny stopped any further conversations and told the children to take out their textbooks. he would have to talk to Elfie later about revealing such information. While it wasn't uncommon for the children in the special class to be working on classified projects, it cannot be spoken openly.

The lesson went by quickly and Danny called out to Elfie to meet him in the counselling room just before he ended lessons. Alex was glad that Danny was behaving more like himself now and wondered how Jasper was doing. The boy was silent as usual but there was no indication about the matters that troubled him. Mid-year examinations were4 creeping up on them and while the blonde girl wasn't worried about her grades, the same couldn't be said for more than half of the delinquent class.

Scarlet pulled out her laptop to work on her final edits. Today would be the day she turned in the polished manuscript for Debbie to check. After the draft was finalised, Debbie had looked through the book of forty-thousand words and returned it full of correction pointers. Scarlet spent the week after that analysing them painstakingly and checking her previous drafts to the proposed edit points to polish the script. The writer then took an additional week to run through the polished script and screened it for potential errors.

Alex and Jasper left Scarlet to work on her manuscript in peace. They had better things to worry about. Alex was catching up on her homework while Jasper reviewed the topics coming up for the mid-term and planned his remedial classes for the delinquents. He was running out of time and ideas to raise the class average for all subjects. the boys seemed to not retain any knowledge and if Jasper switched subjects, they quickly forgot was taught previously. The cycle of cramming and forgetting made jasper frustrated.

While the special class regulars worked on their individual projects, Elfie was seated comfortably in Danny's office, sucking on a sweet his father tossed him.

"Elfie, do you remember how I told you that you had to be careful about disclosing what you do to others?"

The boy nodded and the counsellor sat down on the bed opposite of his boy. "I know Alex, Scarlet and Jasper are good people. However, the fact that they're related to Wilmer does not mean that they're automatically included in the circle of people you can rust about your job."

The hacker was confused. "But Wilmer..."

"Yes, Wilmer knows. However, his daughter, the blonde one, doesn't dabble very much and doesn't see very much about what's going on around her. Jasper and Scarlet might have guessed a few things but Wilmer is trying to keep them in the dark just like Orita. You can't drag them into that world, Wilmer and I want to resolve this in our generation. If possible, I didn't want to involve you either. This isn't your fight. It was started by Orita's parents and it will be ended by us."

Elfie didn't move and Danny worried that it might be too much for a ten-year-old to understand. Then, the hacker nodded with his head tilted downwards, hiding the sadness in his eyes away from his guardian.

"Yes, daddy. I won't tell them."

Danny sighed and hugged the small boy. This really wasn't right. No matter how talented children were, sometimes it wasn't right to involve them for political purposes. "They'll still like you and want to be your friend even if you have secrets. Don't worry too much about it. Everyone has a secret or two that they can't share with friends and family."

Elfie heard it but didn't respond. He wasn't so sure about it. Most children of his age often ran away and called him mean names when they found out about what he could do. The boy didn't know if things would be different this time. Just because they were in the same class didn't mean that they wouldn't treat Elfie differently from the children in the common class. After all, he saw the way the girls looked at him when he told them about his hobby.

Elfie held onto Danny's shirt tighter. That's right. He didn't really need friends of his age. All he needed was Danny and a.d.u.l.ts who understood what his talent was.