Chapter Eleven
The dining hall is nothing like my high school cafeteria.
For one thing, the food is actually edible.
There’s a make-your-own poke bowl station and a salad bar bursting with fresh vegetables grown on a campus farm.
But it’s the gelato machine that truly steals my heart: it has flavors like lavender honey and dark chocolate sea salt and white chocolate matcha swirl.
“What if I have just ice cream for dinner?” I ask Aisha.
She laughs. “It’s your life, babe. Our parents aren’t here.”
The classic problem of where to sit. At school, everybody kind of knew how to clump together: the mediocre athletes, the actually good athletes, the theater kids (who got absorbed by the band kids after budget cuts), the aspiring criminals, the current criminals, and so forth.
Lola and I had one goal: stay out of the firing range of any faction that was known to mistake chicken nuggets for ammunition.
Here, it feels like the factions haven’t formed yet.
Everyone is still jostling for a spot in the social hierarchy.
I wonder how clout works at Alpha Fellows.
Back home, it was this uncrackable formula involving Instagram followers, Friday night party invites, and whether you owned the latest iPhone.
But here, maybe it’s about how many programming languages you know or something.
Some girls who appear to know Aisha wave her over. There’s only one empty seat at their table.
She looks at me guiltily. “Oh, um, those are my school friends…”
“You should go sit with them. Don’t worry about me.” I spot Khoi several tables away, surrounded by guys. There are plenty of open chairs there. “I’ll find somewhere else.”
As I head over toward Khoi, something strikes me.
Shouldn’t he and Aisha be sitting together?
At school, the couples are all over each other every possible spare moment.
Honestly, it’s like softcore porn in the Chinook Shore cafeteria.
The administration is totally chill with that, but God forbid a girl wear spaghetti straps.
Maybe Khoi and Aisha want to catch up with their separate friends. It is the first day. And it’s really none of my business. Mentally, I hit delete on this sitch.
“Char! Long time no see.” Khoi is gouging his corn on the cob by taking random bites out of the cob, in no discernible pattern. Inwardly, I shudder. You can tell a lot about a person by how they eat corn on the cob. Khoi is obviously somebody who wants to see the world burn.
“Is your roommate here?” I ask.
“Obi found a concurrency bug in his code and started muttering to himself. Said he won’t eat until he fixes it or until Java releases a better threading model, whichever comes first. So… he’s probably going to starve.”
The other guys do intros. There are identical twins, Austin and Dallas, who demo themselves solving Rubik’s Cubes in sync.
Haru, who I immediately clock as a stoner—the lazy speech and bloodshot eyes are dead giveaways—and who has also played cello at Carnegie Hall.
Diego, who boasts half a million followers for his competitive programming TikToks.
With each introduction, I want to sink lower into my chair.
They’ve all done so much even though they’re the same age as me.
No, Austin and Dallas are even younger; they just finished ninth grade.
Ninth grade. When I was in ninth grade, my biggest achievement was convincing the cafeteria lady to sneak me extra tater tots.
When it’s my turn, I say, “I’m Char, short for Charise. From Oregon.”
Dallas (or maybe Austin) belches. “What kinda name is that?”
“I think my mom picked it randomly?”
My biological father was supposed to fly to America for my birth, but I arrived two weeks early, so at the hospital, Mom was drugged-up and alone.
She chose something that sounded pretty out of this baby name book.
I used to hate how unique it was. I went by Char, hoping people would assume it was short for something normal like Charlotte.
“Oregon is a cool state,” Haru says. For a split second, I’m relieved that at least someone is impressed by my background, until he adds, “They were the first one to decriminalize cannabis possession.”
“It’s irrelevant in tech, though,” Diego says. “Sandwiched by Seattle, which has Microsoft and , and San Francisco and Silicon Valley, which has everything else that’s important.”
I want to defend my home state, but I don’t know what to say. Somehow I doubt Diego is going to be interested in our thriving lumber business. He probably thinks “logging” is something you only do to debug code.
“So Char must’ve worked even harder to get here,” Khoi says.
I know he’s trying to help, but somehow it makes me feel worse, because it isn’t true.
I didn’t work that hard, and I’m not as accomplished as these dudes, so what am I even doing here?
Maybe Edvin Nilsen really did get the wrong Charise Tang.
“Oregon, what’s like, your schtick?” Austin (or maybe Dallas) asks.
I fiddle with my silverware. “My… schtick?”
“Like, everybody here has a schtick. My schtick is cubing. Haru’s schtick is celloing.”
“Not a word,” Haru mumbles.
Austin-or-Dallas barrels on. “Diego’s schtick is influencing. Khoi’s—”
Diego seems offended. “I’m not an influencer. The only thing I promote on TikTok is C++. Which is superior to Rust!”
“Oh.” I don’t even know what Rust is. “I don’t have anything like that.”
“It’s fine. It’s easier for girls to get in anyway.” Diego smiles benevolently, as if he invented affirmative action just for me.
“Please stop talking,” Khoi says.
“What? I’m not saying she doesn’t deserve to be here.” He looks me square in the eye. “Like, Oregon, I’m sure you’re smart.”
“Um, thanks?” Also, how do I get him to not call me that? I really don’t want to commit to that nickname for the next eight weeks.
“All I’m sayin’ is, I know someone who works on the admissions committee for Alpha Fellows.
She said that they were tryna improve the gender ratio this year.
So like, two thousand guys applied and eighty-five got in.
But two hundred girls applied and twenty got in.
That’s an admission rate of four percent vs.
ten percent. Simple stats.” Diego lounges back with his fingers laced behind his head.
It sounds more like, for whatever reason, not enough girls are applying to this program, but before I can point this out, Austin-or-Dallas glances up from his Rubik’s Cube. “Wait, for real? That blows. Our cousin Houston got rejected this year.”
Dallas-or-Austin turns to Diego. “If what you’re saying is true, that means that one of the girls here might’ve taken his spot.” He tosses me an accusatory look, like I personally dragged his cousin off the flight that would’ve brought him here.
I want to argue back, but before I can think of anything to say, Khoi pipes up. “No, it means that your cousin wasn’t good enough to get in.”
“You don’t even know Houston,” Austin says. “He was the national AP scholar for Arizona, meaning he got the most fives on the most exams out of anyone in the state. Just because he’s not like you—”
“Oh heyo, look who it is!” Khoi says a little too quickly. He stands up to side-hug a girl who’s walked over.
She reminds me of Sabrina Carpenter—petite, piles of brushed gold hair, heart-shaped face. Freckles dot her collarbone like constellations. Mini lime slices dangle from her ears.
The other guys fall silent when they see her. Behind my palm, I hide a smile. I bet that suddenly none of them care that she might’ve taken a spot from a more deserving boy.
She swivels her hand. “I’m Jenni, with an i.”
Dallas-or-Austin scoots over to make space at the table. “How do you know Khoi?”
“We met at nationals for Science Bowl.”
“Jenni is a botany goddess,” Khoi says. “She destroyed us on those questions.”
Even her laugh is pretty—it’s like wind chimes. “Don’t glaze me. I’m just a plant nerd.”
She settles into an empty seat. Haru starts peppering her with questions about how to genetically modify marijuana seeds, and whether it’d be feasible to do it in a small indoor space that gets poor sunlight, such as a dorm room (hypothetically, of course).
There’s this twinge of disappointment. It takes me a sec to realize why.
Because Jenni-with-an-i is a girl and looks like the human equivalent of golden hour, a subconscious part of me hoped she’d also be less accomplished.
That she’d prove Diego right, and I wouldn’t be the only one at this table with nothing going for her. Which is so messed up.
I look down at my melted gelato and realize I’ve lost my appetite. I push away from the table and stand.
“Char, where are you going?” Khoi asks. The others barely glance over.
“Bed. I had a long flight.”
“Oregon, if you’re not going to finish your pizza, can I have it?” Haru asks. Yep, classic stoner munchies. Wordlessly, I slide my slice onto his plate.