Chapter Sixteen
But whatever. Maybe he doesn’t need to explain. Over the next several days, he keeps his word and helps me after class. We spend nearly every single spare moment together. We meet in his room because he has a monitor setup and a gaming chair, and Obi usually posts up in the student center anyway.
I learn a lot about Khoi. I learn that he is the most brilliant programmer I’ve ever met. I learn that he can subsist on a diet of strong coffee and blueberry muffins. I learn that he’s got God-tier patience when explaining stuff that’s not clicking for me.
My struggle isn’t really that I don’t know a certain syntax or library.
It’s that I’ve never approached coding as an art form, with underlying principles that spin into harmony.
I’ve always Frankensteined together scraps from the internet to fix whatever problem was in front of me.
It’s like the difference between engineering a car and duct-taping a motor to a trash bin that might get you across town before falling apart.
But talking to Khoi helps. It isn’t because he can explain Dijkstra’s algorithm and load balancing.
There are plenty of YouTube tutorials for that.
It’s that he operates on a different frequency.
He holds some deeper intuition about how everything connects.
But slowly, my brain also begins to see the same patterns.
Thursday is Juneteenth, so we have the day off. Khoi isn’t at breakfast and half of the Alpha Fellows are on a trip to Cape Cod, so the dining hall is nearly empty. After scarfing down a bowl of Lucky Charms, I go to his room to see if he’s there.
I freeze when I hear my roommate’s voice, bright as new pennies. I’m surprised she’s even here. Last night she zombie lurched in right before curfew, mumbled a few words to me, and then collapsed in bed. This morning when I woke up, she was already gone.
“I don’t think this is about your personal integrity, Khoi,” Aisha is saying. “I think this is about Char.”
Uh-oh. When people mention you behind your back, it’s never for a good reason.
“She’s my friend! I’m tutoring her!”
“And how’s that going?”
“It’s great. She’s brilliant. I think she’s going to do super well on the first checkpoint.”
I want to staple his lips together. Can’t he see Aisha is jealous of how much time we’ve been spending together? He should tell her that I’m a charity case and he’s carrying my ass. Maybe throw in a comment about how mid I look.
“And you claim this isn’t about Char? You should see how your eyes light up when you talk about her. Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt, kiddo.”
My heart skips a beat. What is she implying?
“Don’t call me kiddo, I’m older than you! I turned seventeen a few weeks ago!”
“Exaaaaactly. This is such typical Gemini behavior.”
“I’m a Taurus cusp—”
My phone chimes with a text from Lola. She’s been pinging me about her latest fling, Lifeguard Rachel, not to be confused with Prom Rachel. I scramble to silence the notification, but it’s too late. Khoi and Aisha have abruptly stopped speaking.
The door swings open. Aisha. She has dark circles under her eyes, and there are wisps of hair falling out of her ponytail. “Oh. Char.” She doesn’t try to smile.
“Sorry, am I interrupting?”
“I was just leaving.” She sweeps past me. Her vanilla-and-cinnamon perfume lingers in the air like a disapproving ghost.
Inside the room, Khoi is perched on his gaming chair, knees against his chest. He’s frowning.
“What was all that about?”
He shrugs. “Ask Aisha.”
I shift from foot to foot. “Is she bothered by the amount of time we spend together?”
“I don’t know. Maybe?”
Why is he being this way? “Dude, shouldn’t you be more concerned over how she’s feeling? Or, like, where she goes all the time?”
“Char, you don’t know what’s going on, so leave it alone,” he snaps.
I fight back a swell of irritation. “Chill out.”
His eyes are definitely not lighting up. They are in battery-saving mode. I don’t know what Aisha is on. If he actually liked me like that, he’d be nicer.
“Sorry.” He swivels to face me. “Isn’t there a trip to Cape Cod today?”
“I grew up on the beach. Didn’t seem that special.” And silly to lose a full day of studying. “Why aren’t you there?”
He grimaces. “Don’t know how to swim.”
“Whoa. Why not?” Even I know how to swim. With a pang, I remember that Michael is the one who taught me.
“When I was younger, the doctor said it’d be dangerous for me. My meds work pretty well now, so I could learn, but I haven’t gotten around to it.” When he sees my confusion, he explains, “Kids who get seizures are at greater risk of drowning.”
“Oh.” Now I feel like an ass for asking.
“It’s whatever.” He tugs at the collar of his shirt. “If you’re not going on the trip, do you want to study together?”
Maybe I should stop meeting with him. Sure, it’s not like we’re doing anything other than classwork. But I don’t want to make Aisha feel bad, and if there’s one type of code I wish I had a tutorial for, it’s girl code.
But I also need to ace the first checkpoint. And honestly, if Aisha does feel weird about all this, she should talk to me instead of whatever vanishing act she’s pulling.
“Yeah, that would be amazing,” I say.
The next week is a blur of cramming. I spend every spare moment memorizing algorithms, reviewing papers, and completing problem sets. At night when I close my eyes, I see syntax on the backs of my eyelids. I dream in code.
Most of the Alpha Fellows seem more chill.
When the weekend arrives, some of the kids leave for summer homes in Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard.
There’s another group that decides to do an impromptu day trip to New York City.
The camp organizes some activities—karaoke, a movie screening of a Steve Jobs biopic, a scavenger hunt around the MIT campus.
Khoi goes to most of those. I skip everything to study.
On Thursday, the day before the first checkpoint, Khoi has a doctor’s appointment, so I spend the afternoon studying with Jenni-with-an-i. Since there are an odd number of girls, she gets a single, so we camp out in her room.
She has stacks and stacks of flash cards, color-coded by subject. We take turns quizzing each other.
“Quickest worst-case possible runtime for a sorting algorithm?” I ask.
She squeezes her eyes shut. “I wanna say linear?”
“No, it’s n log n.”
“Oh, fudge.” She refuses to ever curse. She’s like a cookiebaking grandma trapped in a seventeen-year-old Sabrina Carpenter doppelg?nger.
“Okay, follow-up. What is the quickest sorting algorithm?”
“Is it radix?”
Before I can respond, a male voice shouts, “What the hell?” It’s coming from next door. Stella’s room. I don’t remember who her roommate is. Maybe that girl with the crypto cult.
Stella’s voice is high-pitched and frantic. “Lucas, calm down. Don’t make it a big deal.”
“Don’t tell me what is or isn’t a big deal!”
“It’s not about—”
There’s the sound of a door flying open and then toddler-like stomps. We poke our heads into the hallway. Lucas is storming away. Stella is in her doorway with her arms crossed.
“Are you okay?” Jenni-with-an-i asks her.
Stella’s face is screwed up and red. “Yeah. Fine. Whatever.” She retreats into her own room and slams the door.
“Good talk,” I mutter.
We go back inside Jenni-with-an-i’s room.
“I shouldn’t gossip, but,” Jenni-with-an-i says, which is the universal phrase for I’m about to gossip. “While we were in New York on Sunday, Stella told me she didn’t want to team up with Lucas. I guess he took the news poorly.”
“She didn’t want to work with her own boyfriend?”
“Something about wanting to do things herself. I don’t know the details. We got distracted by a Times Square street performer dressed like a giant baby. Rather disturbing. Babies shouldn’t have nipple hair.”
An image involuntarily pops into my head and I grimace.
But this conversation also reminds me that, oops, I don’t yet have a team.
I focused more on cramming once classes began.
“Do you want to team up together?” Jenni-with-an-i is sharp, organized, and friendly. She’d be a good person to work with.
“I’ve already agreed to team with Obi and Diego,” she says. “They have an idea for climate tech. I could ask if you could be our fourth member?”
I remember Diego’s spiel from the first day. I don’t need another lecture about how I only got in because of my chromosomes, but he does seem smart, and maybe that matters more. And I can’t afford to be choosy. “That’s nice of you to offer. I’ll let you know.”
Suddenly it seems obvious. The only person I really want to work with is Khoi. He’s been such a good friend, and he’s insanely talented. It feels icky to think this way, but he’s probably my best shot at winning.
He’s going to team up with his girlfriend, that goes without saying.
But Aisha is gone all the time. She can do what she wants, but I’ve done plenty of group projects where one of the members goes AWOL.
I don’t want to split the prize money with somebody whose greatest contribution is adding her name to the PowerPoint title slide.
No, that’s unfair to assume. Khoi skips class too, and he’s clearly brilliant. Maybe Aisha already knows everything and that’s why she’s never here. She’ll just waltz into the first checkpoint and breeze through the exam.
So when I see her tonight, I’ll ask if I can join them. I’ll happily third-wheel if it means I don’t have to go back to Chinook Shore.