Page 4 of Seven Percent of Ro Devereux
But it’s fucking amazing, Ro-Ro!And then,It says I’m going to be an actress in LA, can you believe??
Yes, actually. Sawyer lived in Switchback Ridge until I was nine, when Uncle Harding moved the whole family to Minneapolis for his new job. Since then we’ve mostly kept up over text and DM, but even when she’s pared down to pixels, Sawyer’s the most theatrical person I know.
Before I can respond, she sends another:Josie’s all over it, too. She just shared it to her Insta story!
I scramble back into the app and click through to Josie Sweet’s profile, Sawyer’s most A-list friend. She dropped her third album last year and, lo and behold, has just posted a story about MASH. I watch it with my jaw on the floor.
Dude you hav to delete and ask her to delte to.I fire off the text so fast half the words are misspelled.It’s not ready Sawyer seriously.
Looks ready to me, she replies, embellishing with three heart-eyed emojis.Check your downloads, lady!!!
Frantically, I open my app analytics. And there’s MASH, the logo Maren made, my stupid senior project, with twenty-six thousand downloads. As I sit there, the numbers tick up. Forty-four thousand. Fifty-two thousand.
By the time my dad walks through the front door, shuffling gravel into our hallway, there are one hundred ninety-two thousand downloads.
We look at each other, and his eyebrows draw together. “Ro?” he says. “What’s wrong?”
I look back at my phone: two hundred thirty thousand.
Shit.Shit.
03
My mother was half-computer. Or at least, that’s how Dad always describes her.
She grew up in Slate Lake, a vacation town even tinier than ours, three hours from Denver and buried in the mountains like flint in a riverbed. She was twenty-two when she came into Beans on the Lake with a backpack and a book about the Epson HX-20, the very first laptop.
She read that thing like it was poetry, Dad told me. Like it was beautiful.
They were married by twenty-three and parents by twenty-four and then she was gone by twenty-six, across the country to California without either of us to weigh her down. She reverted to her maiden name and disappeared into the ever-growing fold of Silicon Valley—every so often I’d come across an article that mentioned her, always unintentionally, always with the kind of jolt that felt like putting my finger in an outlet.
Technology’s beautiful to me, too. That’s one thing between us. The other is I look just like her.
There’s a picture from their wedding in the drawer of Dad’s desk, sepia-faded and folded in half right across their abdomens. They’re standing on the dock across the street from the café, past the pebbly beach. Dad’s smiling at something out of frame but my mother’s looking right at the camera, sharp-eyed in her white dress. Our hair curls the exact same, sun-lightened and wild, and even then—on a day like that—she looks ready to leave. Or that’s how she’s always looked to me, at least, biased by the knowledge of her going.
The way Dad tells the story, she did ask him to go with her. But he had the café, and back then his dream of turning it into a restaurant was right around the corner, something he could taste. And I was just two, and I had family here, and what was in California that we couldn’t get at home in our mountains? But my mom knew, same as I do now: the future. We weren’t the version of it she was looking for, so she went.
It was a clean break, muddied only by the birthday presents that showed up every year like clockwork. Colorful, noisy robots that taught me block coding before I could read. Board games with names like Hackerz and CodeMode. STEM books when I was old enough, and then software for the desktop Dad and I shared in the upstairs office.
When I was small I didn’t see the gifts for what they were: a bid to turn me into her, a once-yearly sowing meant to grow me into someone worthy of her attention. I only knew how their arrivalchanged my dad—the way his relaxed, six-five frame stiffened like a drought-season pine needle when he saw her return address. How all of him went brittle and unfamiliar.
So I pretended to hate the gifts, of course. Hid them under my bed, closed out of the coding computer game she’d sent me when I heard his footsteps on the stairs. Dad was my entire life: he’d built our A-frame cabin with his dad and brother; he drove me everywhere I needed to go; he cooked all my favorite foods. We talked about everything, the flow of his love like a conversation that never stopped. But my mother was the one thing that cast a pallor over him, that made him sad in a way that felt like a gut-punch.
I hated it. But right alongside that hatred, I loved the world she’d shown me. The clean logic of building code, the intangible magic of technology. So I hid it from Dad, and when I was eleven and sent her a letter for the very first time, I hid that, too.
Miller proofread it for me, tongue poked between his lips in concentration as he added in all the commas I’d missed. It was a long note, full of questions about her life. It ended pathetically, a shaky-handed scrawl ofWill you come visit me?
She didn’t come visit. She didn’t even respond. And then I turned twelve, and instead of a gift, she sent an unsigned birthday card with a hundred-dollar bill inside. I had failed her, somehow, by breaking the pattern—ending the unspoken truce that we’d never be in contact. I burst into tears in front of my bewildered father and it was Miller who found me, snot on my lips, in the woods behind my house.
I tried to give him the cash but he shook his head, helped meburn it in a pile of winter-crisp pine needles. The cards came every year after that, and every year we burned them together, right up until we didn’t.
Life kept moving: Dad didn’t convert the café, at first because Grandpa was still alive and loved that place just the way it was. Then he died, and Dad didn’t convert it because he wanted to honor his memory. We did every family moment there: birthday dinners, anniversaries, holidays with Sawyer and me snug between her parents and my dad. He and Uncle Harding are nearly identical in the photos, bearded and solid as tree trunks. But then Sawyer moved away, and it was only Dad and me, and there just wasn’t money. I watched Dad’s dream fade to gray, knowing my mother was out there somewhere living hers in full color.
And even though I don’t want anything to do with her, loving what she loves is right here in my genes. My predictable, human behavior. I love tech. I can’t help it. And I’ve got to get to California to make a name for myself in that world, make it mine the way she made it hers. I want it so bad it burns—to prove I don’t need that money we reduced to ash in the woods. That I could’ve done it without her all along. That I can give my dad the dream she stole from him.
He’s over forty now and if I let him, he’ll put it off forever. Take out a loan he can’t afford to send me to school, spend the rest of his life paying it off, never get out from behind that espresso machine. Dad knows how to make anything taste delicious—it was a game we played growing up, me and Miller and then me and Maren, gathering the weirdest ingredients we could find betweenour kitchens and presenting them to Dad for consideration. He transformed them like magic every single time.
And that’s what he’s doing now, when my phone rings. In the twenty-four hours since Sawyer posted about MASH, the app’s been downloaded 972,000 times. My server crashed. I didn’t sleep last night.
