Page 29 of Deep End

Lukas swallows. Straightens a little. “What?”

“Uncomfortable. For me. Doing the project together. If it’s not too weird for you?”

A beat. He pushes from the wall, and I hurry to do the same. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s get dinner. I’ll catch you up with what I have so far.”

“You don’t have to. I’m sure you have better things to do.”

“Actually.” I feel the ghost of his hand between my shoulder blades. The soft brush of his thumb at the top of my spine. It’s barely there, but it guides me in the direction of the stairs. Whispers at me exactly where to go. “I have absolutelynothingbetter to do.”

CHAPTER 14

STANFORD HAS A DEDICATED ATHLETIC DINING HALL, BUTthere’s enough of us that it barely matters. We’re right in the middle of dinner rush, which means crowds and loud noises. Lukas, a head and some change taller than most, spots a free table, tells me to hang on to him, and leads us there, our plates and drinks stuffed on his tray.

I look down at my fingers, how they fist the fabric at the hem of his hoodie for dear life. It’s like we’re friends. Like I have the right to orbit around him. I briefly disassociate and picture myself narrating this moment to the swimming coaches at my old club.Then Lukas Blomqvist ordered stir-fry with rice, thanked the lady who gave him extra, and when the crowds parted for him like the waters of the Red Sea during the exodus—

“You okay?” he asks.

I nod, taking a seat across from him and grabbing my plate. I’m a voracious eater—the alternative is not sustainable under my training regimen—but I find myself blinking at the mountain of food on his plate, then glancing away. I bet journalists ask him about his diet all the time. It must be annoying, people’s curiosity about thehoning and maintaining of his speed machine of a body. Intrusive at best, objectifying at worst.

“You don’t look okay,” he points out.

I force myself to spear a few penne. “What were you saying about the cell line?”

We talk about the project for twenty minutes. He’s very passionate about it, and it’s clear that it’s been a labor of love for him—but it’s just as clear that he’s stuck, and that building algorithms is not his forte.

“It’s because you’re using a recurrent network,” I tell him.

“There is a sequential element—”

“But it’s spatial data.”

He leans back, drumming his fingers on the table. “What would you do, then?”

“Convolutional neural network, for sure. It’ll be a million times better.”

“A million.”

“I—manytimes better. It’s feedforward. And the filter and pooling layers would . . .” His knit eyebrows tell me he’s not following. “Hang on.” I fish into my belt bag for something to write with, then look around for a flyer or a scrap of paper. Find none. I consider using the back ofmyhand.

Lukas’s, though, is so much larger.

“Here.” I reach across the table and grab his wrist. “You have your input, right?” I start drawing under his thumb and follow with the rest of the model. “You move to your first layer, the convolutional one, that picks up spatial features. Then pooling. Then there’s another—”

Booming voices, the rasp of scraping chairs, and I instinctively pull back. When I look up, three people have joined our table, and Kyle Jessup is sitting next to me.

“Luk, you piece of elk shit.” He steals one of my grapes fromLukas’s tray. “You left for yourthing. I had to deal with Coach Urso and the lane-separator saga.”

“He told me smooth separators were a go.”

“He toldyou. Second you disappeared, went back on it.”

Lukas massages the bridge of his nose. “I’ll talk to him tomorrow.”

“While you’re at it, mention the touch pad issue . . .” He cuts off and turns to the swimmer who sat next to Lukas, Hunter something or other. He’s coughing so loud, people around us are staring. “The fuck is wrong with you, H?”

“I drank a gallon of water during that bucket set. My tummyandmy nuts hurt.”

Lukas pats him forcefully on the back. “An elite athlete.” It’s directed atme, a hint of complicity in his eyes, like I’m a friend he shares jokes with. It has the unfortunate side effect of making the others notice me.

---