Page 9 of Seven Percent of Ro Devereux
Vera doesn’t have kids of her own, but she’s always treated Dad like a son. Which makes me her honorary grandchild, which means she lets me get away with more than I should. So when I tell her how everything went down with XLR8, I’m expecting her to give me a signature Vera Kincaid wink and tell me I’ve got spunk. Instead, she frowns. Like, deeply. This is awitheringfrown.
“What?” I say. We’re on her back deck, a pine platform Dad built for her a few summers ago. The sun’s low in the sky and there’s barely a breeze, the air still and summer-lazy. It’s Wednesday and Dad isn’t speaking to me.
“There were other ways, I think, to go about that.”
“Maybe,” I say. “But maybe he’d never have come around, and all that work I did would’ve been for nothing.”
“For nothing?” Vera’s voice is more papery than it used to be, which is something I don’t like to think about. “A week ago you didn’t even know you’d get interest from an accelerator. That’s not why you made MASH, Rosie.”
She’s right—I never imagined this would happen. All I expected from MASH was a passing grade on my senior project and a stamp of approval from Dad. It was only ever supposed to be a demonstration, something I could hold up to show him what I’m capable of without a college degree. The last week has been like drawing a stick figure and having the curator of the Louvre offer to buy it—it’s so unlikely you don’t even think to want it, but once you know it’s possible, you feel like a failure with anything less.
“Okay, true,” I say. “But how could I pass it up? And how could he expect me to? Working for a company like XLR8 is my dream, and he knows it. And hestillsaid no.”
“This is one iteration of your dream,” Vera says. “Maybe he wants a better version for you.”
Better than a high-rise office in my own hometown? Better than a road map that takes us to Celeritas? Sawyer summed it up when I texted her after the XLR8 meeting:It’s all happening!!!
“I’m not sure it gets better than this.”
“You’re eighteen,” Vera says. “How could you be sure of anything?”
I roll my eyes, and she finally cracks a smile. “You betrayed him, Rosie. It was unlike you, and he’s hurt.”
And there, suddenly, is Miller’s face again: right behind my eyelids, stricken and silent as I turn away from him. Saying,Maybe betrayal isn’t so unlike you, though in reality he never says anything to me at all.
I blink, clearing him away. Vera watches me expectantly.
“Hurtisn’t how I’d describe it,” I say. My dad’s stony silencehas felt like a fortress—it’s hard to believe he’s the same man who listened to me buzz about MASH all summer long. Who met me at the dinner table after full days at Vera’s house so I could tell him about everything we were building together.
MASH has been my world for months; creating it felt like cracking some kind of sacred code. With every hour spent in Vera’s sun-drenched living room, life came into closer and closer focus.You ask this type of question, Vera taught me,to learn this type of variable about a person, to predict how they’ll behave in this type of scenario.
It was so clean. I’d found a way to make a math problem of human beings, to forecast every predictable behavior and translate it into code. A simple survey on a seamless, digital interface. An app that could give you the answers to life’s biggest questions.
We can explain it all, I told my dad in late July, when the algorithm was almost finished.There’s a way to make everything make sense, right here in our minds. You were meant to build this house, and be a chef, and everything else. It’s coded right into you.
He’d laughed, as bowled over by it as I was. The mood was light every time we talked about MASH. I didn’t tell him the other thing this algorithm was helping me explain away—the fact that my mother was always going to leave us. That her absence was just as logical and predictable and black-and-white as the rest.
MASH gave me a reason for everything, explained the unexplainable so tangibly. It was magic that demanded to be shared. And now, for whatever reason, my dad couldn’t see that anymore.
“Give him time,” Vera says, reaching over the table to pat myhand. For my whole life it’s been the three of us, and everything feels off-kilter with him mad at me. “And be careful. Not everyone you meet has your best interest at heart. But your dad always will.”
I groan, slumping in the patio chair. “Okay, I get it, I’m the worst daughter who has ever daughtered.”
Vera laughs, and it turns into a cough that she hides behind her hand. “No, but he is afraid to lose you. And you seem to have stopped caring about his approval earlier than he was expecting.”
“Idocare.”
“You just care for other things more.”
I’m not sure if that’s true, if I care more about XLR8 or if I just did something crazy in the moment because it felt right. It still feels right, if I’m being honest. It felt right to spend my whole day at the XLR8 office yesterday, pinging from conversation to conversation about code, product design, match parameters. It felt right to post the graphic XLR8 made to my Instagram this morning, the MASH logo andBig news coming Fridaynestled right there under my own handle, @rodev. It feels right and it feels like flying andgod, if my dad could just get on board, it would feel pretty close to perfect.
“Speaking ofmore,” I say, “you deserve equity in MASH. Whatever you want, I’ll talk to Evelyn.”
I expect her to roll her eyes at my clunky segue, but instead her face darkens, some unfamiliar storm passing over it. She straightens, pressing her small frame to the back of her chair. “Rosie, I don’t want to be part of this.”
I blink at her. “Why? I could never have figured out the sciencewithout you. It’s yours as much as it’s mine.”
“I helped you design a survey for a school project.” The breeze picks up, rustling through the fine gray hair that hangs to her shoulders. “Not something I expected to be tested on the world at large. It’s an imperfect science. Human behavior, it’s—”
