Page 52 of Debugging Love

Danni

“He destroyed my code!”

Morgan, Kayla, and I are standing in the storage closet, the single overhead light casting long shadows on our faces.

Morgan’s mouth drops open, creating a shadow within a shadow. “Drew did?”

“Yes. And Chance.” Bitterness soaks my words.

Kayla crosses her arms and juts out a foot. “Is that what their bromance is all about?”

“Apparently. They deleted half of my code and rewrote the other half.”

“You have to tell Christopher,” Morgan says.

“It’s too late,” Kayla says matter-of-factly.

“Why?” Morgan asks.

“Remember when Drew rewrote Bruce’s API for the CRAP load? Bruce complained and Christopher didn’t do anything about it.”

“That’s because he knocked twenty minutes off the process,” Morgan answers.

They look at each other, and then slowly turn their eyes toward me, sadness tinging their expressions.

“They didn’t improve my app, they just hacked it to bits,” I say defensively. “This is different. It’s not time sensitive.”

Morgan rubs the back of her neck. “Drewispretty good.”

Nowmymouth drops open, shadows encroaching on my tonsils. “You’re defending him?”

“No. I’m just saying. We all know he’s smarter than us. Even Bruce. Bruce couldn’t get Drew to follow one of his design plans, and he couldn’t argue because Drew’s new design was over Bruce’s head with fewer lines of code.Muchfewer.”

“The number of lines does not determine the robustness of an app. An app is as good as it is understandable. If the next programmer coming along can’t read and debug the code, what good is it?”

“It mattered in Intro to Computer Science,” Kayla says. She pulls her glasses off her nose and rubs the lenses with her sleeve.

“That’s because professors are dumb. They’ve never worked in the real world with real programmers.” Fully convinced of my argument, I lean confidently against a shelf, cross my arms and my ankles, jabbing my big toe against the floor like a skilled ballerina.

Morgan and Kayla still have that saddish look on their faces. It’s deepened by the shadows and looks kinda ghoulish now that I think about it. “I can’t believe you’re defending Drew.”

“Chance was in on it too?” Morgan asks.

“Of course he was. Why do you think they’ve been joined at the hip all week?”

“Because they have a budding bromance,” Kayla offers while holding her glasses up to the light to check for smudges.

Morgan ignores Kayla’s comment. “I thought maybe Drew was training Chance.”

“No,” I say flatly. “Chance was in on it. Just like Zane was in on it when he rewrote half of my app without telling me, even though he knew how hard I’d worked to get that thing to Prod.”

“Zane rewrote your codeafterit went to Prod?” Kayla asks, not as aghast as she should be, in my opinion.

“Yes, he went to management and said he needed to fix it or there’d be audit findings. And they let him.”

“And then you broke up with him,” Morgan says.

I squeeze my arms against my chest and ball my hands into fists. “Sure. That’s how it went.”

---