Page 2 of Seven Percent of Ro Devereux
“My app takes the idea of the kids’ game Mansion Apartment Shack House and pairs it with a science-backed survey to accurately predict your future. I worked with Vera Kincaid, renowned human behavior expert, to develop the survey. Once you take it, MASH chews up your data and spits out four key aspects of your future: the city you’ll live in, your profession, how many kids you’ll have, and who your partner will be.”
Not gonna lie, I get chills just listening to myself. And I can tell I’ve got these teachers on the hook—some of them aren’t even blinking.
“But instead of telling you about MASH, I want to show it to you.” I walk around the podium, pulling my phone out of my pocket. “So if you don’t mind, go ahead and download MASH from the App Store. And see for yourself.”
“Rose,” Ms. Thompson says, peering at me over her readers. Her phone’s lit up in her palm, download in progress. “This seeing-your-future thing. Is it really possible? Accurate, I mean?”
“Oh, yeah,” I say, and I can’t help it—I smile. “It’s really possible.”
“Crushed it,” Maren says. She kicks off her Birkenstocks and plants her feet on my dash. “Gupta’s voice when MASH told him he’s fated to be a novelist? I thought he was going to cry.”
“I thoughtIwas going to cry,” I say, shifting the truck into drive. “I can’t believe it’s over.”
“You pulled it off.” Maren’s head lolls back against the top of the passenger seat; the headrest busted years ago but she’s short, fits just right if she scoots down. “Miracle of miracles.”
Miracle of miracle of miracles. I barely slept this summer between afternoons at Vera’s to talk science, nights in my bedroom writing code, anxious hours waiting for the App Store to finally approve my beta. Clicking that MASH icon and having it open an actual app on my actual phone in my actual hand was pure magic.
“Now we just have to hope my dad’s convinced,” I say.
“How could he not be?” Maren looks at me, late-afternoon sun hitting her hair like alpenglow. “You found a way to see the future, Ro. Coded it all on your own in three months.” Her eyebrows hike up into her bangs. “You’ve got the goods—you don’t need a bachelor’s degree to prove it.”
“God,agreed.” I stop at the four-way intersection at the bottom of the hill. There isn’t a single traffic light in Switchback Ridge. “Can you say that again, but record it this time and text it to my dad?”
She laughs, rolling down her window to stick an elbow out. “No. But I bet if he takes the survey it’ll tell him he’s going to run his own restaurant one day, and he’ll be so happy he’ll let anything go.”
I sigh and don’t tell her what I’m thinking—that maybe he’ll take the survey and itwon’ttell him that, and it’ll be more than either of us can bear. My dad inherited Beans on the Lake from his dad, who inherited it from his dad before that. The Deve-reuxs have been slinging coffee in Switchback Ridge for three generations, but Dad went to culinary school. All he wants is a restaurant, but all he’s got are double-shot mochas, the occasional grilled cheese, and a full pastry case of muffins. What he also doesn’t have is money. So.
“When areyougoing to take the survey?” I ask. There’s a beep, and when we look up Dad’s passing us in his SUV, hand lifted in a wave and Vera riding shotgun.
“Still never,” Maren says, rolling her eyes. “My future’s a mystery and that’s how I like it.”
“Fair,” I tell her. “Only, your best friend in the whole world made an app all on her own, and it would be super best-friendly of you to experience it for yourself. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Iloveyou,” Maren says, drawing out theo. “So much. But there are some things we just shouldn’t know.”
I wave her off. “Some of us prefer a little insight, but okay.”
“Get the partner match up and running, and then we can talk.” Maren looks at me. “I’mdefinitelygame to circumvent the whole dating thing for the entire rest of my life if I can nail down my partner now, then go find them when I’m ready.”
Partner match—my biggest hang-up. I could only get MASH to hit three of its four categories: city, job, and number of kids. (My results: San Jose, software developer, zero. Check, check,and check.) Those three things follow from a user’s own survey responses. The partner match, though—you need more users, a critical mass of people to pair up. Get their consent, mine their data, and unleash the algorithm to match them based on their surveys. I could do a lot on my own, but not that. Which was a bummer, because figuring out who you’d marry was always the best part of playing MASH.
When we were in middle school, I’d sleep over at Maren’s and her mom would teach us all the stuff my mom wasn’t around to—how to French braid our hair and how to stop the microwave before the popcorn burned and, best of all, how to play MASH: a paper-and-pen future-prediction game she’d played growing up in the eighties.
We’d make lists for each category: four cities we’d want to live in, four jobs we dreamed of having, four boys who made our heads spin. A throwaway list of four numbers to represent how many kids we’d have. And, of course, the final category: mansion, apartment, shack, or house?
From there, one of us drew a spiral at the bottom of the page. And when the other told us to stop, we tallied the lines to the center and used that number to count down, checking off options on each list until we were left with the picture of our far-off adult lives.
Every category was fun—finding out you’d live on a beach in Florida, in a mansion with six kids, whatever—but knowing the name of your future husband? That’s where the real power was. We’d pick the cutest kids in our class, leaving ourselves with no bad options (save for the few times Maren snuck Miller’s name into my list as a joke).
We knew—distantly, somewhere—that the game was outrageous. We probably weren’t going to marry Eli Kim, the absolute dreamiest boy at Switchback Ridge Middle, and live with him in an apartment in New York City. It was unlikely either of us would make it out to San Diego to be lead ornithologist at the zoo. And that was before Maren told me she was bi; we didn’t even put girls on her list.
It was all completely fantastical, but seeing those new-penny-shiny futures written out on paper made them feel possible. It was like bottling up a daydream and drinking it straight. I wanted to re-create that feeling with the app, and I got there—seventy-five percent of the way.
“Unless a million people download my buggy beta,” I say, “you’re out of luck.”
Maren shrugs. “A girl can dream.”
When I pull into her driveway, red-sand gravel and pine-tree roots, Maren slides her shoes back on and hops out of the cab.
