Chapter Thirty
There’s one major problem with my plan—the door to Lucas’s room is locked.
I jiggle the doorknob again, as if maybe it’ll magically click open. No shot.
“Do either of you know how to pick a lock?” I ask.
Both boys stare blankly at me.
Ah, yes. The most brilliant technical minds of our generation, foiled by a simple single-cylinder deadbolt.
We’re searching up lockpicking tutorials on YouTube when there’s the familiar ding of the elevator, signaling it’s about to open on this floor.
“Hide, hide,” Khoi hisses.
We scamper to the boys’ room across the hall. Of course now they’ve bothered to lock their door. Khoi fumbles for the key, and we’ve barely crammed our bodies into the room when footsteps echo down the corridor.
We keep the door cracked open and press our faces against the narrow gap. It’s an East Asian girl in a lavender babydoll dress. Stella from Texas.
I’m expecting her to pass by the boys’ section and head toward the girls’, but instead she pauses in front of Lucas’s door. Then she looks around surreptitiously, as if she’s checking that nobody else is nearby. It’s very James Bond.
She fishes a silver key out of her dress pocket and slides it into the lock, then twists.
Once Stella’s disappeared into Lucas’s room, Obi whispers, “How does she have a key to his room?”
I shrug. “She’s his girlfriend?”
“Is that normal? Khoi, you better not have given Char a copy of our key!”
Hey! “You’re worried now? You guys don’t lock your door anyway. That’s literally why we’re in this mess!”
Khoi shushes both of us.
The door opens again, and when Stella reappears she’s holding a transparent orange bottle with a white cap. A pill bottle.
Obi’s jaw drops.
Her eyes scan the other doors, as if she’s searching for a specific name. Then she’s strolling in our direction.
We all immediately clock what’s happening and scramble away from the doorway.
Obi dives beneath his bed. Khoi and I flatten ourselves against the wall.
My heart is in my throat, even though we’re not doing anything wrong.
Khoi and Obi are allowed to exist in their own room, and I’m their guest. But somehow it feels like we’re the ones sneaking around.
Stella pauses in front of the door. She places something on the floor and then walks away.
More footsteps, and the ding of the elevator again.
Another minute crawls by before anyone dares to move. I quietly tiptoe to the front of the room. Khoi gives me an approving thumbs-up, and I push the door open.
At my feet, there’s the bottle of Adderall, full of chalky blue tablets as if nothing happened.
It’s past midnight. We’re on my bed, pair programming. That’s not some euphemism for a sexual act. I’m writing code while Khoi’s looking over my shoulder.
He randomly mumbles, “It’s unfair that Lucas just got away with everything.”
Sure, the situation is absolutely freaking infuriating, but I don’t see the point of dwelling on it. There’s nothing we can do. Besides, Stella returned the Adderall.
I drum my fingers on my laptop keyboard. “Be better about locking your door.”
“Feels like you’re victim blaming.”
Why does he want to harp on this? The hackathon is so much more important than this petty bullshit.
I try not to sigh. “I’m not victim blaming.
Obviously it’s on Lucas to not be the human version of 4chan, but since he is the human version of 4chan, you have to install some firewalls.
Metaphorically speaking. Besides, we should focus.
” I nudge his knee with my own. “We can still kick his ass in this competition. That’s the best revenge. ”
After a beat, he nods. “You’re right.” He kisses my forehead and warmth spirals through me.
For the next two days, life seems totally normal again.
We build out SMS authentication with a Twilio integration so users can use their phone numbers to log into Hello World.
And Khoi buys more Google Cloud storage to support photo and video uploads.
I don’t protest, even though it feels like an unfair edge over other teams. It’s not against the competition rules.
While he’s setting that up, I fiddle with our translation features so immigrants can communicate in their mother tongue. I figured it would be an easy addition with the Google Translate API, but that was silly to assume. It’s so much more than what I signed up for.
Lots of languages, including Chinese, don’t use ASCII characters, so we can’t slap on our current font. And other languages, like Arabic, are right-to-left instead of left-to-right, requiring even more changes to the user interface. I stay up until four a.m. implementing everything.
On Wednesday, Khoi goes home to celebrate his uncle’s fiftieth birthday.
Obi is avoiding his teammates—apparently Diego and Jenni-with-an-i are fighting all the time, in the least surprising plot twist ever—so he and I work in the student center.
Obi has a strong rule about being within a twenty-foot perimeter of Tea-Do.
Around ten a.m., both of our laptops chime with an email notification. The subject line is check this out!! and the sender is some throwaway account. The cc’d recipients are a good fraction of the Alpha Fellows.
Confused, I click on the attached video.
It’s Stella. Or not exactly Stella, but some uncanny valley, plastic robot imitation of her. Her naked body is contorted like she’s a circus performer, and she thrusts her hips mechanically against some faceless guy. Her mouth emits a high-pitched, unnatural noise.
For two seconds, I’m more confused than anything else. Then things click.
A deepfake. Somebody must’ve slapped her face onto a porn actress’s body.
A sharp wave of nausea overwhelms me.
“Don’t click on the email you just got,” I tell Obi.
“Why?” He glances over my shoulder and glimpses the screen. “What is that?”
I slam my laptop shut. “Nothing worth looking at.”
He tilts his head, clearly unsatisfied. If I don’t spill, he’s going to open the email anyway.
“It’s deepfake porn of a girl at camp,” I say.
“Yikes, that’s disgusting,” he says. “People need to touch grass.” He navigates to his inbox and deletes the email without opening it.
“Why would anyone do that?”
“Thirsty? Bored? Insecure about their own pathetic, lonely NPC lives spent trapped in their mom’s basement?” Obi shrugs. “Why does any internet troll do anything?”
He turns his attention back to his own screen.
I force myself to forget about the email.
There isn’t anything I can do for Stella, and I have to debug.
Now that we have a multimedia integration, the Hello World data pipeline needs to be retooled to handle larger files and mixed formats.
It’s a spaghetti nightmare. I miss Khoi.
His skills are God-tier compared to mine.
An hour later my laptop battery is dwindling. And because I’m a genius, of course I left my charger in my dorm room. So I head back to Simmons to grab it.
When I stroll through the girls’ section, quiet sobs drift from Stella’s room.
Yeah, I feel awful for her. I only viewed the video for like, zero-point-two seconds, but that was long enough to traumatize me, and I’m not even the one who got deepfaked. But this isn’t my problem. I have a hackathon to win.
Still, it feels too heartless to walk away. Khoi would never do that. Khoi would be hacking into the MIT servers to track down this asshole, even for a girl he barely knows.
And she did return the Adderall. So maybe I owe her one.
I knock on her door. “Are you okay?”
“Go away,” Stella moans.
“What happened is really horrible,” I say. “I’m so sorry.”
There’s a pause, and then the door opens. Her face is tear streaked and puffy. Her usually glossy hair hangs in limp strands.
“How are you doing?” I ask.
A laugh-sob escapes her throat. “How do you think?”
We sit on the floor of her room as she quietly weeps. I don’t know what the move is here. I can’t even come through with Kleenex. If we were friends, I’d hug her, but we don’t really know each other like that. We haven’t spoken since that night on the yacht.
“You could go to the police,” I say. “There are laws against this stuff. And you’re a minor.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t want my parents to find out. Besides, I already know who did it.”
“Who?” I assumed it was some horny loser at camp. Which could be, like, half the people here.
“Lucas van den Berg.” She sniffles.
“Lucas… your boyfriend Lucas?”
“I broke up with him on Monday. After he stole your boyfriend’s Adderall.”
“Khoi’s not my…” I decide to let it go. She’s clearly not trying to hear about my situationship status. “Hey, it was nice of you to return it. That took courage.”
“Fat lotta good that did me,” she mumbles.
“I should’ve known Lucas would be nasty about the breakup.
I heard that after he got dumped by this other girl, he spammed her with scary anonymous texts for months.
She had to get a new phone number. But I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, since she couldn’t prove it was him… ”
“Lucas is a bastard,” I say.
Stella covers her face. “I’m scared he’s going to send more stuff.
Or send it to people at Andover, or my parents.
” She does this shaky gulp for air. “He always gets away with everything. He has that slouchy bored-skater-kid aesthetic, but he’s rich.
There’s a building at Yale with his family’s name on it. ”
“Well, it’s only Yale,” I say. “Not even Harvard.”
She doesn’t smile at the joke.
I switch tactics. “Stella, if you expose Lucas, Alpha Fellows will have to kick him out, even if he’s rich. You aren’t powerless here.”
“Do you actually think so?”
I’m not confident, but I nod anyway.
She sniffles some more. “How are we going to do that?”
We? Looks like I’m part of this now. Let’s be real, as soon as I knocked on Stella’s door, I was going to be part of this. And even though there are a million other things on my to-do list, I’m kind of living for the chance to take Lucas down.
I say, “We need to prove that the email came from him.”