Page 35 of You Had Me at Hello World
Most of the Alpha Fellows seem more chill. When the weekend arrives, some of the kids leave for summer homes in Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. There’s another group that decides to do an impromptu day trip to New York City. The camp organizes some activities—karaoke, a movie screening of a Steve Jobs biopic, a scavenger hunt around the MIT campus. Khoi goes to most of those. I skip everything to study.
On Thursday, the day before the first checkpoint, Khoi has a doctor’s appointment, so I spend the afternoon studying with Jenni-with-an-i. Since there are an odd number of girls, she gets a single, so we camp out in her room.
She has stacks and stacks of flash cards, color-coded by subject. We take turns quizzing each other.
“Quickest worst-case possible runtime for a sorting algorithm?” I ask.
She squeezes her eyes shut. “I wanna say linear?”
“No, it’s n log n.”
“Oh, fudge.” She refuses to ever curse. She’s like a cookiebaking grandma trapped in a seventeen-year-old Sabrina Carpenter doppelgänger.
“Okay, follow-up. Whatisthe quickest sorting algorithm?”
“Is it radix?”
Before I can respond, a male voice shouts, “What the hell?” It’s coming from next door. Stella’s room. I don’t remember who her roommate is. Maybe that girl with the crypto cult.
Stella’s voice is high-pitched and frantic. “Lucas, calm down. Don’t make it a big deal.”
“Don’t tell me what is or isn’t a big deal!”
“It’s not about—”
There’s the sound of a door flying open and then toddler-like stomps. We poke our heads into the hallway. Lucas is storming away. Stella is in her doorway with her arms crossed.
“Are you okay?” Jenni-with-an-i asks her.
Stella’s face is screwed up and red. “Yeah. Fine. Whatever.” She retreats into her own room and slams the door.
“Good talk,” I mutter.
We go back inside Jenni-with-an-i’s room.
“I shouldn’t gossip, but,” Jenni-with-an-i says, which is the universal phrase forI’m about to gossip. “While we were in New York on Sunday, Stella told me she didn’t want to team up with Lucas. I guess he took the news poorly.”
“She didn’t want to work with her own boyfriend?”
“Something about wanting to do things herself. I don’tknow the details. We got distracted by a Times Square street performer dressed like a giant baby. Rather disturbing. Babies shouldn’t have nipple hair.”
An image involuntarily pops into my head and I grimace. But this conversation also reminds me that,oops, I don’t yet have a team. I focused more on cramming once classes began. “Do you want to team up together?” Jenni-with-an-i is sharp, organized, and friendly. She’d be a good person to work with.
“I’ve already agreed to team with Obi and Diego,” she says. “They have an idea for climate tech. I could ask if you could be our fourth member?”
I remember Diego’s spiel from the first day. I don’t need another lecture about how I only got in because of my chromosomes, but he does seem smart, and maybe that matters more. And I can’t afford to be choosy. “That’s nice of you to offer. I’ll let you know.”
Suddenly it seems obvious. The only person I really want to work with is Khoi. He’s been such a good friend, and he’s insanely talented. It feels icky to think this way, but he’s probably my best shot at winning.
He’s going to team up with his girlfriend, that goes without saying. But Aisha is gone all the time. She can do what she wants, but I’ve done plenty of group projects where one of the members goes AWOL. I don’t want to split the prize money with somebody whose greatest contribution is adding her name to the PowerPoint title slide.
No, that’s unfair to assume. Khoi skips class too, and he’s clearly brilliant. Maybe Aisha already knows everything and that’s why she’s never here. She’ll just waltz into the first checkpoint and breeze through the exam.
So when I see her tonight, I’ll ask if I can join them. I’ll happily third-wheel if it means I don’t have to go back to Chinook Shore.
Chapter Seventeen
Aisha doesn’t come back until fifteen minutes before curfew.
