Chapter Twelve
Sunday morning, when I wake up for the opening ceremony, Aisha’s bed is empty.
Her absence reminds me of Olive’s, like she’s avoiding me.
I scour my brain for anything I might’ve done wrong.
What if she thinks I’m a hillbilly loser for not doing the SAT?
Maybe she doesn’t want to associate with me, this scoreless freak, when she could be with her glamorous boarding school friends.
I’m probably being ridiculous. Probably.
But just to be safe, I go to the College Board website and sign up for the August SAT at some nearby location.
Luckily, they still have my information from the AP exams—why does College Board own everything?
They’re like the Elon Musk of teenage stress dreams—so my fee waiver gets added automatically.
By the time I’m done, it’s already too late for breakfast—maybe for the best, considering how dinner went last night.
Now for the fun part: getting ready while my suitcase is still MIA.
At least my toothbrush made it into my backpack.
But clean underwear? Socks? Forget it. When I shower I lather myself with the bathroom’s chalky pink hand soap. Eau de Desperation.
God, I hope my luggage turns up soon. I sure can’t afford to replace everything.
Across the expanse of green grass, Kresge auditorium is an elegant one-eighth of a sphere, sliced by sheer glass walls.
It’s lit from within, a shimmering arc of white fluorescence.
It looks clean and futuristic, and it doesn’t look like somewhere I belong.
I’m tempted to go hide out in my dorm room with the leftover Fritos from my plane ride.
But if I can’t handle a mere opening ceremony, how am I going to get through the entire summer? It’s not like I have any other options. I can’t fly back to Oregon. I just can’t. I’d rather go live in a dumpster.
I force myself to head in.
Once I’m inside, I scan the half-filled seats. Everyone is chattering away like they’ve known one another forever. Nobody casts a glance in my direction. No sign of Aisha, either…
I find Khoi next to a Black teenager clutching a metal rectangular box. He introduces himself as Obi, Khoi’s roommate. Right, the kid who ditched dinner to cozy up with a concurrency bug.
“Do you know where Aisha is?” I ask.
“Oh. That… uh…” Khoi’s face goes blank. “No idea. She does her own thing.”
Yeah, okay. Between Aisha saying she isn’t serious about him and Khoi’s completely whatever attitude, I feel like someone should just throw the kill switch on this relationship.
But I’m not about to comment. Like, I’m too much of a broke bitch to be giving away my two cents nobody asked for. I turn to Obi.
“What are you holding?”
He tightens his bear hug around the box, as if he’s scared I’m going to nick it. “It’s an Nvidia A100.”
Sounds like a spaceship. “What now?”
“It’s a GPU.”
“Sorry?”
He stares at me like I just asked how to add two plus two. “A graphics processing unit. For doing big computations.”
“Okayyyy.” I don’t ask for more details, not wanting to give him another chance to make me feel stupid. “But why did you have to bring it here?”
“Obi’s GPU is very important to him,” Khoi says.
“Didn’t want it to get stolen. It’s worth fifteen grand.” Obi cuts his eyes to Khoi. “Not like this guy would understand. He doesn’t need to care about money.”
“Wait, why not?”
“Don’t you know? Last year he—”
“Wow, the architecture of this auditorium is fascinating,” Khoi interjects. “It’s one-eighth of a sphere. You know that’s called an octant?”
For some incomprehensible reason, that distracts Obi. “Whoa. What other geometry facts do you know?”
“Are you familiar with Ptolemy’s theorem?”
Khoi pulls out an iPad and draws the math proof, which is actually sort of interesting, but not interesting enough to make me forget that there was something Obi was about to say that Khoi didn’t want me to know.
Then the program director, a smiley woman with a HellomynameisCourtney name tag, steps out onto the luminous stage, and everybody falls silent.
She has some speech about how it’s an honor to be here and how Edvin Nilsen, the billionaire founder of Alpha Fellows, is sorry he couldn’t deliver the keynote. He got tied up with some last-minute business meetings.
Obi whispers, “Heard his company has been catching strays.”
I glance over. “Nexus? For what?”
But before he can answer, a girl turns around and does a very aggressive shush at us.
HellomynameisCourtney mentions some of the program alumni. Photos of famous tech bros flash on the screen. They even include a picture of this Forbes 30 Under 30 crypto founder who went to prison recently, which leads to some muttering.
“Why are they flexing about him?” someone mumbles from behind us. “He’s a horrible person!”
“Anybody who ever believed in crypto deserves to lose their money,” Obi shoots back. “Remember the FTX scandal? Or Pegasus? And NFTs are the most brain-dead invention of the twenty-first century.”
Khoi starts coughing.
HellomynameisCourtney glances up at the presentation and flushes. “Ah, sorry… I thought we updated this slide. But, uh, let this be a life lesson: technology is powerful, but humans are the ones who decide how to wield it. Being good is more important than being brilliant.”
Someone boos, and there’s another ripple of laughter. And I snicker, too, until I notice Khoi staring at me, almost like he’s disappointed.
Which, okay. He can think whatever he wants. It was just a silly moment, and everybody else was laughing too. It’s not like I actually believe in using tech for evil. I’m not about to build a drone that assassinates kittens.
Still, it gives me this pang of guilt, like I’ve let him down somehow, even though we barely know each other.
I forget all about that once the prizes are announced.
A current of energy zips through the audience.
There are some sponsor-based awards—I’ve heard that in previous years, internships at companies like Apple or were up for grabs—but the grand prize is $100,000 and “consideration for admission to MIT,” whatever that means.
I never thought about what it would be like to attend a school like MIT. I kind of assumed that stuff was for other kids. The College Confidential kids.
When the room has finally quieted down, HellomynameisCourtney explains the structure of the program.
There are three checkpoints. The first is two weeks from now, a written exam based on optional coursework.
The second, a project proposal, is a week after that.
And the last one, a final presentation and project submission, is at the end of the program.
During each checkpoint, we’ll be ranked publicly, like a Hunger Games for nerds.
But hey, even if I completely flop, they won’t feed me to robot dogs. Hopefully.
Before the first checkpoint, we’ll get college-level classes that teach us computer science.
That’s good, since I definitely need to play catch-up.
After the written exam, the program will be more unstructured, and we’ll spend most of our time working toward the second and third checkpoints with our team members.
The first checkpoint is individual; the other two are judged per team.
Our results on all three will be weighed as part of final judging.
Teams can be comprised of one to four people, but the prize money is split among everyone.
My heart sinks when she says we choose our own teams. I was kind of banking on those being assigned for us.
I mean, even in my head it’s a little pathetic. Like I need my teacher to help me find friends.
Kids are gesturing to each other in that yeah?
/yeah way that people in middle school do when picking dodgeball teams for gym, except now it’s not about who can fling a ball hardest—it’s about who wrote their first Hello World in the womb.
Of course people are going to choose their buddies or whoever won the latest genius prize.
Whatever. Yeah. I can work alone. Totally in my solo era. And I won’t even have to split the prize money.
But there won’t be any prize money at all if I don’t win.
If I don’t win, I’ll be crawling back to Chinook Shore with nothing but disappointment and a backpack stuffed with dirty laundry, and everything will be exactly the same as it always has been.
Scratch that. It’ll be even worse. Because now Michael hates me even more than before.
To win, I need to find teammates. I’m not deluded enough to think I can win by myself.
So it’s time to rizz people up.