Page 3 of Seven Percent of Ro Devereux
“Hey.” She leans through the open passenger window, her face constellationed with freckles. “Good luck with your dad. You got this.”
“Right,” I say, shifting into reverse. “I totally got this.”
02
Turns out I do not, in fact, got this. This becomes immediately obvious when Dad plunks a plate of celebratory pasta carbonara in front of me and says, “I’m so proud of you, Ro. This is going to really make you stand out on your college applications.”
I look at Vera, but she just smiles. She’s Team College, too, that traitor.
“Hold up,” I say. Vera slides the container of parmesan toward me, but I don’t reach for it. “You saw what I made. I don’t need college; I’malreadydoing what I want to do. Why would I waste all that money when I can go get a job?”
“Ro.” Dad rubs his forehead. “What you did is so impressive. Let’s just celebrate it tonight, okay? We don’t need to fight about you leaving Colorado right now, let’s—”
“I’m not trying to fight.” I lift my hands in peace, and my forearm scar catches in the light. “I’m just saying. This project was the proof I don’t need college. That’s the whole reason I did it.”
“That’s thewholereason,” Dad repeats, raising his eyebrows at me.
“No,” Vera says firmly. She’s silhouetted by the window behind her, sun lowering through the pines. “You did this foryou, Rosie. Because you had a good idea and you wanted to see it through.”
I groan, because she’s right, as usual. Vera’s been our neighbor forever, since before my parents got married or had me or my mom left. I spent most of my childhood in her book-buried living room, huddled in front of the wood-burning stove while Dad worked and Vera told me about brains. About what it actually means—factually, biologically—to be human.
She ran a behavioral research lab at the university in Boulder until I was fifteen, when her cancer slowed her down too much to keep at it. Then she just taught me, instead: every little tidbit I begged her to share with me about how predictable behavior is, the lanes we’re born into, the patterns we follow. With my mom gone, Vera raised me and educated me. I was her shadow and her student—she’d make me a peanut butter sandwich, and then she’d teach me that there’s logic to all the rash, emotional, human choices we make. I gripped on with white knuckles, never speaking of my mother but always hoping there’d be a pattern in what I learned that could explain why she’d left me.
“Okay,” I concede. “It wasareason. A big one.”
“Eat your pasta,” Dad says, but he’s smiling. Five-o’clock shadow coming in, laugh lines around his eyes. “We’ll argue about this tomorrow.”
An hour later Dad walks Vera home, down our gravel road to her house at the end of the street. I watch them through the vaulted windows, his arm bent so she can hold on to it, her steps measuredand slow. College is something Dad’s always wanted for me that I’ve never wanted for myself; if I move out to Silicon Valley and start working, we’re set. Money for me, money for his restaurant one day, maybe. If I go to college, I push all that off for four years and Dad goes into debt. Seems pretty clear to me, but Dad’s stubborn. We have that in common.
My phone buzzes with a text from Maren.Any luck?
None, I think, but it’s too depressing to share with her yet. Instead I cross the living room to our lumpy old couch and collapse backward into the pillows, startling Esther out of the way. She’s eight now, a tabby we found behind the café. She’s got bristly whiskers and a serious attitude problem, but she’s ours.
Esther snarls and then curls up to give me the cold shoulder.
“Same to you,” I say, unlocking my phone and opening Instagram. It’s almost eight o’clock, the second-to-last Friday of summer. My feed is full of people in front of bonfires at the lake, camping in the Rockies, sitting on the hoods of their cars with their arms around each other. Normal, normal, all the way down. But then, suddenly, I see her.
Sawyer is my cousin, twenty-three and fully blessed in the genes department, beautiful as all hell. After she graduated from the University of Minnesota she couldn’t deign to take an entry-level job so she started selling her lifestyle on Instagram instead. Usually she’s out here shilling #ad eye cream to her nearly-a-million followers, but as I scroll across a video of her face something stops me, and then I realize what it is. The MASH logo, superimposed in the upper corner of her screen. I hit full volume.
“Hey, babes!” Sawyer says. She’s wearing fake eyelashes and herlips are as glossy as twin candy wrappers. “I wanted to share something a little different with y’all tonight—ready to go on a ride with me?” Her green eyes bug, lashes flaring. Distantly, I wonder when she started usingy’all.
“So there’s this new app called MASH, and it’s legitimately the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.” She pauses, leaning toward the camera and lifting a hand to whisper conspiratorially. “I’ll admit I’m a little biased, because my genius baby cousin made it. But y’all remember that game we played as kids? Where we’d draw a spiral on a piece of paper and—”
She’s still talking, but I can’t hear her over the blood flushing in my ears. What the fuck is this? I scroll through the comments, heart climbing into my throat.
Just downloaded!
OoOOOoooOOOoo this sounds so cool. I wanna see my future.
OMG getting this now. MASH + science??
Thanks for sharing @sosawyer this sounds dope af
No. No, no, no. I text her immediately, the last message in our thread from just this morning when she wished me good luck with approximately fifteen thousand emojis.
Sawyer, you have to delete that post, I say.The app’s just a school project, it’s not meant for anyone to actually use. I sent it to you for your eyes only!!
The seconds tick past. My skin’s gone all hot. Next to me, Esther starts snoring.
