Page 45 of Seven Percent of Ro Devereux
“She left this for you.” He reaches into his suit jacket and pullsout an envelope, passing it to me. “She wanted you to read it here.”
I stare at the paper in my hands:Rosie, there in her perfect, looping script. The same lettering I grew up looking at all over her house, splashed across grocery lists and in the margins of student essays.
“I don’t know if I can,” I tell him, and he puts an arm around me. We sit like that for a few long, silent minutes. Once I read this, there will be nothing new left of her. Nothing she will ever say to me again that I haven’t heard before. I close my eyes and tip my face up to the sun.
Rosie,
You’ll read this after I’m gone, surrounded by the great beauty of the earth and seated next to your father, the person who loves you most in the world. Or at least, that’s how I hope you’ll read this—but you’ve always been good at evading my plans.
There’s much to say, and I’m tired, and I know that no last conversation between us could ever be enough. I’ve studied human beings my entire adult life, but nothing in all my research has filled me with the kind of wonder I’ve felt watching you grow up. Listening to you share your ideas. You’re a miracle, just by being yourself.
What you’ve made with MASH is incredible. It’s a powerful idea, built on questions that you were brave enough to ask. Can we code humans out, the same as machines? Are we just as predictable? In many ways, we are. That’s why yourapp works. Nothing you’ve done is, scientifically, incorrect.
But as you walk this road without me, I want to make sure you know: We are not only the things you’ve proven us to be with this algorithm. There will always be a space that separates us from computers, a gray area in which we are shaped by the influence of new friends, and inevitable surprises, and love. Still, after a decades-long career in behavioral sciences, there are so many things about us I can’t understand. They are unquantifiable. They are what make us human.
I hope you’ll remember that the brain is malleable. That your answers to the survey questions will change, because what you love, and what you want, and who you are will change, too. These unpredictable shifts are supposed to happen. They are the good kind of scary.
You will become people you can’t even fathom yet. I wish I could be here to meet every version of you, Rosie. I know I would love each one more than the last.
Always, and even longer after that,
Vera
26
It’s Sawyer, Monday morning, who breaks the news. I get her text while we’re standing in line at airport security, before TMZ drops the story or E! posts it to Instagram or the TV at our gate beamsGood Morning Americawith a ticker across the bottom, making the announcement.
Her first text says only,Holy shit.
I read it through the haze of my brain fog, all my synapses addled by sleeplessness. I lay in bed all night staring up at my ceiling, thinking of Vera’s note.Nothing you’ve done is, scientifically, incorrect.But with her gone, with this warning the very last thing she left me, I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve done something wrong. I wish, more than anything, that I could talk to her.
Jazz nudges me toward the TSA agent, and I fumble with my ID as my phone buzzes again.
Hayes broke up with Josie. He matched last week and he met the girl without telling Josie and last night he dumped her to be with his match instead.
I stare at her text, and Miller reaches around me for a bin. I’m still looking at my phone when he drops his shoes in.
“Everything okay?” he asks, and I blink up at him. I hold out my phone and he leans in, his eyes tracking over the words before he looks at me again.
“Are these friends of yours?”
“Hayes Hawkins,” I say. “Josie Sweet? She’s one of our MASH influencers.”
Miller just shakes his head. He could name every Greek Titan and all their descendants in chronological order, but these two celebrities—best-dressed at last year’s Met Gala, creators of the most-GIFed kiss of all time on the Grammys red carpet—are nothing to him.
I thrust the phone toward Jazz instead, and she pauses from unzipping her hoodie to read it. This time, I get the appropriate reaction: her eyes go wider with every word.
“Shit,” she says. She swipes the phone from my hand and passes it to Felix. “There the fuck goesthatcontract.”
But of the four of us, Felix is the only one who really anticipates what’s coming. Who feels the plow wind of this storm in his bones.
“This is big,” he says, looking at Jazz, then Miller, then me. Since that night in the hospital Felix has been so careful with me, texting me to check in and reaching out to smooth my hair behind my ear and treating me with gentle kindness I didn’t know he had in him. But even still, he doesn’t sugarcoat this. “Guys, this isbad.”
By the time we get through security and to the trams, Jazz is on the phone with Evelyn. She’s talking so quickly I only catch snippets of what she says: “release a statement” and “firm on our position” and “expected collateral damage.” The seed of doubt Vera planted in me is rooting—growing new green shoots with every passing minute.
She’s devastated, Sawyer texts me.I could barely hear her she was crying so hard when she called me. Apparently this chick’s a waitress in Santa Monica.
I know what she’s saying:Hayes Hawkins left Josie Sweet, America’s forever fave, for a nobody waitress. And I’m already on edge, so I reply:There’s nothing wrong with being a waitress.
