Chapter Seventeen
Aisha doesn’t come back until fifteen minutes before curfew.
She takes two steps into our room and face-plants into her bed. Her topknot is frizzy and loose, as if she went for a five-mile jog in the Boston heat.
“Hi?” I say.
“Dead. Tired,” she mumbles into her pillow.
I feel a little bad talking to her about this when she’s exhausted, but I don’t want to wait until after the exam. There’s not that much time before the second checkpoint. “Uh, I wanted to ask you something.”
“Yes, you do talk in your sleep,” she says. “Mostly about operating systems.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know that. I wonder if sleep-me is better at computer science than awake-me. If so, I might as well take a nap tomorrow during the test. “That’s… not what I wanted to ask about.”
She flips onto her back and eyes me. “What’s up?”
“I was…” God, why am I suddenly so itchy? I’m trying to ask something reasonable. The worst she can say is no, and that’s the same result as not asking at all. That’s the wisdom people like to parrot.
But it’s not the same result. If I don’t ask, I can live in the delusion that maybe things could’ve been different had I simply tried harder. And delusion is important for my self-esteem, thank you very much.
“I was wondering if I could join you and Khoi for the hackathon?”
“Oh!” She jerks upright, and the sudden movement forces her topknot to surrender its last bit of structural integrity. With her hair losing its fight to gravity, she looks even more disheveled and bewildered.
She’s about to say no. I can feel it.
“Stupid idea, forget it,” I say quickly.
“No, no. I’m flattered. But…” She bites her lip. “Char, I don’t think I should work with anyone. I’m not even going to team with Khoi.”
“Huh?”
“You’ve probably noticed that I’m gone a lot?”
“Maybe a little,” I fib, not wanting to call her out.
She steeples her hands. “Don’t tell anyone else this, okay?”
“Sure.” Lola used to ask me that. I was always flattered. It implied she thought I had other friends to gossip with.
“I’m doing a dance program at Harvard. That’s where I’ve been going. Khoi knows.”
I blink, digesting this new info. “Okay… so why bother being here at all?” She can’t be using our dorm as a crash pad. The mattresses are lumpy and there’s no air-conditioning. Plus, her family lives nearby.
“I’m at Alpha Fellows because my parents don’t approve of dance.
They think it’s a waste of time. They want me to study computer science like my older brother.
” She makes a face that reminds me of the squiggly mouth emoji.
“Stupidly perfect Aditya. Mr. Valedictorian. Mr. Princeton. Mr. Google intern.”
“I’m sorry.” I can’t imagine what it’s like to have parents who care that much.
“But yeah, so I’d be utterly useless on a team. I’m going to do the bare minimum to get through this program so my parents are happy. You should still ask Khoi to team up, though. I know he really likes you.”
He really likes you. I try to keep my heart rate steady. She means as friends, obviously.
“Are you sure? He’s your boyfriend.”
“That’s…” Aisha seems to think hard about it. Then she shrugs. “That’s fine. It’s not like I’m around anyway.”
We brush our teeth in the bathroom. Aisha has this elaborate nighttime skincare routine comprising of gels and creams and serums. She offers me some of her snail slime, and I politely decline.
Some things simply don’t belong on your face, no matter what TikTok says.
Then HellomynameisBrenda yells for lights-out, so we go to bed.
As I lie in the dark, I wonder why I’m still anxious.
I should be relieved. Aisha didn’t say no, and I finally solved the mystery of her frequent disappearances. That explains why we saw her in Harvard Square the other day.
But it doesn’t explain why Khoi wanted to hide. This situation is not passing the vibe check.
What if that girl isn’t Khoi’s ex? What if she’s his current fling, and Khoi is cheating on Aisha? He was gone for a “doctor’s appointment” today, but what if that’s code for “sneaking off with my other girlfriend?”
No, I’m being ridiculous. Paranoid. Just because my sperm donor was, ah, monogamy-impaired, doesn’t mean every guy acts that way. Khoi has always been so genuine.
And I shouldn’t be thinking about any of this. The first checkpoint is tomorrow. That’s all that matters.
I start mentally listing out all the data structure implementations and drift off somewhere around min-max heap.
At breakfast, everybody is uncommonly quiet.
Jenni-with-an-i is at a table alone with her flash cards spread out over the entire surface.
I was planning to talk to Khoi about working together, but he’s busy holding court with a steady stream of kids who keep coming up to ask questions about the material.
Diego is furiously typing on his laptop.
Haru is sleeping with his hoodie drawn and cheek pressed against the table.
Obi has a copy of CLRS, the famous programming textbook, propped up against Haru’s head.
Even Aisha tries to care. “Char, do you know what language the coding portion is in? Is it Java? I only know Java.”
“Pretty sure it’s Python.”
“Shoot.” She frowns into her bowl of cereal. “Do you think I can learn Python in the next twenty minutes?”
I look down at my scrambled eggs and realize that my appetite is currently 404 Not Found.
At nine a.m., we all file into the examination room in Stata. Aisha, Khoi, and I find seats near the back.
The test is three-and-a-half hours long, no breaks. Pencil and paper only; we have to write our code out by hand. If we need to use the restroom, we’ll be accompanied by a proctor.
There’s a wave of grumbling as a gum-chewing college student walks around with a bin to collect our phones and smartwatches. He even forces Obi to take off his Oura Ring.
“Dude, I need my biometrics! How else am I supposed to monitor my body temperature?”
“You’ll live,” the proctor says.
When I fill in my name at the front of the testing booklet, my hand trembles. Then somebody touches my wrist gently.
“Don’t worry. You’ve got this,” says Khoi. He smiles.
My heart does this flip. Probably from nerves. “Thanks.”
“You had an amazing tutor, after all,” he adds, because of course he has to ruin it.
I can’t even come up with a clever clapback.
“You may start now,” HellomynameisBrenda says, and throughout the cavernous room, there’s the sound of paper rustling like wings against air.
About an hour in, there’s a commotion. Someone gets caught using homemade smart glasses to look up the answers, and he’s frog-marched out of the room by two college kids. Another hour later, Aisha stands to leave. I doubt she actually finished, but maybe she has to go back to Harvard.
At the three-hour mark, more people start handing in their exams. I’ve skipped a few questions, so once I reach the end, I return to the ones I set aside earlier.
In a database transaction, what does ACID stand for?
The A is atomicity, the C is consistency, the D is durability, but what is I? Is it independence? That doesn’t sound right. Is it supposed to end with a y like the others?
“Pencils down,” HellomynameisBrenda says. I scrawl independence-y before she snatches my paper away.
At lunch, everybody is buzzing about the test. What’d you get for the recurrence on the master theorem?
How about the amortized run time? For the multiple-choice section, I was getting a string of all Bs, that was freaky.
Wait, saaaaame! They’re such trolls. I don’t participate in the conversation. My brain is too mushy.
In the afternoon, while the camp counselors are grading, everyone fans out on Killian Court, the green lawn in front of the iconic dome that MIT uses on their marketing materials.
A few guys toss a Frisbee. Stella and Lucas make out in the grass, his hand inching closer and closer to her butt.
Guess they must’ve resolved their fight.
Obi teaches us a card game that he learned from his cousin in finance.
After several practice rounds where I do only marginally better than a potato, we’re all supposed to toss twenty bucks into the pot.
I don’t have that kind of money to lose, so I excuse myself.
“Aw, but it’s only twenty bucks! A Hamilton,” Obi says.
“Isn’t Andrew Jackson on the twenty?” Jenni-with-an-i points to one of the crumpled bills.
“Char, I could cover it for you,” Khoi says.
I shake my head. The offer is nice, but he shouldn’t pay for something frivolous like this. “I want to relax, anyway.”
I sit in a shady spot beneath a tree. It’s a beautiful day, everything made clean with sunlight. Somebody could take a snapshot of Killian Court right now and slap the photo on a college brochure. I’d be just out of frame. Maybe the toes of my sneakers would make it into the background.
Everyone else acts so comfortable. They know that they were handpicked to be here, that they are deserving of all this because they are brilliant and ambitious and young. I wonder when I’ll stop feeling like I woke up in the wrong life.
Sometime later, Khoi slumps down beside me.
“I lost all my money,” he says.
“Sorry for your loss.”
“Obi is a shark.” He leans against the tree trunk and shuts his eyes.
I should ask Khoi to team up. Like, right now. I don’t have the excuse of the first checkpoint anymore. The second checkpoint is in a week.
Why is this so mortifying? Jesus. It’s like even by asking, I think I’m good enough to collab with him. The famous Khoi Astor.
But if I don’t ask, it won’t happen.
Winning is too damn important. I need to get over myself.
“Khoi,” I start. “Do you…”
He’s looking at me expectantly. Something about his gaze makes my voice catch in my throat.
Maybe he’ll laugh at me for thinking he’d ever want to be on my team. He knows exactly how much of a disaster I am at computer science; he’s witnessed it firsthand these past two weeks.
No, Khoi wouldn’t laugh. He’s too nice for that. I know, I know. He’s never given me any real reason to think he’d be an ass about it. I don’t know where my fear comes from.
“Do you want to team up with me?” It comes out as one singular gust of a question.
I’m about to do the thing I did in the conversation with Aisha—tell him it’s stupid, forget it, dismiss myself before he gets a chance to—but he grins.
“I was going to ask you!”
Relief floods me. Wow. I can’t believe that worked. And I can’t believe I’m actually going to be teaming with him.
I’m sort of going feral inside, but I try to play it off like whatever. “Great.”
“Do you have any ideas yet? Because I had a few. There was this one TechCrunch article about this brain scanner that lets you beam your thoughts to dogs…”
As the midafternoon sun arcs through the sky, we brainstorm. Artificial intelligence that does your homework. A virtual reality simulator for first responders, like paramedics. An animated water-intake tracker.
I could see any of these ideas popping off. But none of them feel like my vibe. I’m not thirsty, at least not literally. I don’t own a VR headset and know squat about medical crises. And while it would be nice to have an AI cook my assignments, my grades aren’t in the desperation zone yet.
We’re riffing on the concept of Google Docs but for music composition or math collaboration or something when Dallas-or-Austin rushes past. He yells, “Brenda said that the exam scores are out!”