Page 37 of You Had Me at Hello World
But it doesn’t explain why Khoi wanted to hide. This situation is not passing the vibe check.
What if that girl isn’t Khoi’s ex? What if she’s his current fling, and Khoi is cheating on Aisha? He was gone for a “doctor’s appointment” today, but what if that’s code for “sneaking off with my other girlfriend?”
No, I’m being ridiculous. Paranoid. Just because my sperm donor was, ah, monogamy-impaired, doesn’t mean every guy acts that way. Khoi has always been so genuine.
And I shouldn’t be thinking about any of this. The first checkpoint is tomorrow. That’s all that matters.
I start mentally listing out all the data structure implementations and drift off somewhere around min-max heap.
At breakfast, everybody is uncommonly quiet. Jenni-with-an-i is at a table alone with her flash cards spread out over the entire surface. I was planning to talk to Khoi about working together, but he’s busy holding court with a steady stream of kids who keep coming up to ask questions about the material. Diego is furiously typing on his laptop. Haru is sleeping with his hoodie drawn and cheek pressed against the table. Obi has a copy of CLRS, thefamous programming textbook, propped up against Haru’s head.
Even Aisha tries to care. “Char, do you know what language the coding portion is in? Is it Java? I only know Java.”
“Pretty sure it’s Python.”
“Shoot.” She frowns into her bowl of cereal. “Do you think I can learn Python in the next twenty minutes?”
I look down at my scrambled eggs and realize that my appetite is currently 404 Not Found.
At nine a.m., we all file into the examination room in Stata. Aisha, Khoi, and I find seats near the back.
The test is three-and-a-half hours long, no breaks. Pencil and paper only; we have to write our code out by hand. If we need to use the restroom, we’ll be accompanied by a proctor.
There’s a wave of grumbling as a gum-chewing college student walks around with a bin to collect our phones and smartwatches. He even forces Obi to take off his Oura Ring.
“Dude, Ineedmy biometrics! How else am I supposed to monitor my body temperature?”
“You’ll live,” the proctor says.
When I fill in my name at the front of the testing booklet, my hand trembles. Then somebody touches my wrist gently.
“Don’t worry. You’ve got this,” says Khoi. He smiles.
My heart does this flip. Probably from nerves. “Thanks.”
“You had an amazing tutor, after all,” he adds, because of course he has to ruin it.
I can’t even come up with a clever clapback.
“You may start now,” HellomynameisBrenda says, and throughout the cavernous room, there’s the sound of paper rustling like wings against air.
About an hour in, there’s a commotion. Someone gets caught using homemade smart glasses to look up the answers, and he’s frog-marched out of the room by two college kids. Another hour later, Aisha stands to leave. I doubt she actually finished, but maybe she has to go back to Harvard.
At the three-hour mark, more people start handing in their exams. I’ve skipped a few questions, so once I reach the end, I return to the ones I set aside earlier.
In a database transaction, what does ACID stand for?
TheAis atomicity, theCis consistency, theDis durability, but what isI? Is it independence? That doesn’t sound right. Is it supposed to end with aylike the others?
“Pencils down,” HellomynameisBrenda says. I scrawlindependence-ybefore she snatches my paper away.
At lunch, everybody is buzzing about the test.What’d you get for the recurrence on the master theorem? How about the amortized run time? For the multiple-choice section, I was getting a string of all Bs, that was freaky. Wait, saaaaame! They’re such trolls.I don’t participate in the conversation. My brain is too mushy.
In the afternoon, while the camp counselors are grading, everyone fans out on Killian Court, the green lawn in frontof the iconic dome that MIT uses on their marketing materials. A few guys toss a Frisbee. Stella and Lucas make out in the grass, his hand inching closer and closer to her butt. Guess they must’ve resolved their fight. Obi teaches us a card game that he learned from his cousin in finance. After several practice rounds where I do only marginally better than a potato, we’re all supposed to toss twenty bucks into the pot. I don’t have that kind of money to lose, so I excuse myself.
“Aw, but it’s only twenty bucks! A Hamilton,” Obi says.
“Isn’t Andrew Jackson on the twenty?” Jenni-with-an-i points to one of the crumpled bills.
