Page 68 of You Had Me at Hello World
We’re searching up lockpicking tutorials on YouTube when there’s the familiardingof the elevator, signaling it’s about to open on this floor.
“Hide, hide,” Khoi hisses.
We scamper to the boys’ room across the hall. Of coursenowthey’ve bothered to lock their door. Khoi fumbles for the key, and we’ve barely crammed our bodies into the room when footsteps echo down the corridor.
We keep the door cracked open and press our faces againstthe narrow gap. It’s an East Asian girl in a lavender babydoll dress. Stella from Texas.
I’m expecting her to pass by the boys’ section and head toward the girls’, but instead she pauses in front of Lucas’s door. Then she looks around surreptitiously, as if she’s checking that nobody else is nearby. It’s very James Bond.
She fishes a silver key out of her dress pocket and slides it into the lock, then twists.
Once Stella’s disappeared into Lucas’s room, Obi whispers, “How does she have a key to his room?”
I shrug. “She’s his girlfriend?”
“Is that normal? Khoi, you better not have given Char a copy ofourkey!”
Hey! “You’re worriednow? You guys don’t lock your door anyway. That’s literally why we’re in this mess!”
Khoi shushes both of us.
The door opens again, and when Stella reappears she’s holding a transparent orange bottle with a white cap. A pill bottle.
Obi’s jaw drops.
Her eyes scan the other doors, as if she’s searching for a specific name. Then she’s strolling in our direction.
We all immediately clock what’s happening and scramble away from the doorway. Obi dives beneath his bed. Khoi and I flatten ourselves against the wall. My heart is in my throat, even though we’re not doing anything wrong. Khoi and Obiare allowed to exist in their own room, and I’m their guest. But somehow it feels like we’re the ones sneaking around.
Stella pauses in front of the door. She places something on the floor and then walks away.
More footsteps, and thedingof the elevator again.
Another minute crawls by before anyone dares to move. I quietly tiptoe to the front of the room. Khoi gives me an approving thumbs-up, and I push the door open.
At my feet, there’s the bottle of Adderall, full of chalky blue tablets as if nothing happened.
It’s past midnight. We’re on my bed, pair programming. That’s not some euphemism for a sexual act. I’m writing code while Khoi’s looking over my shoulder.
He randomly mumbles, “It’s unfair that Lucas just got away with everything.”
Sure, the situation is absolutely freaking infuriating, but I don’t see the point of dwelling on it. There’s nothing we can do. Besides, Stella returned the Adderall.
I drum my fingers on my laptop keyboard. “Be better about locking your door.”
“Feels like you’re victim blaming.”
Why does he want to harp on this? The hackathon is so much more important than this petty bullshit. I try not to sigh. “I’m notvictim blaming. Obviously it’s on Lucas to not be the human version of 4chan, but since heisthe human version of4chan, you have to install some firewalls. Metaphorically speaking. Besides, we should focus.” I nudge his knee with my own. “We can still kick his ass in this competition. That’s the best revenge.”
After a beat, he nods. “You’re right.” He kisses my forehead and warmth spirals through me.
For the next two days, life seems totally normal again. We build out SMS authentication with a Twilio integration so users can use their phone numbers to log into Hello World. And Khoi buys more Google Cloud storage to support photo and video uploads. I don’t protest, even though it feels like an unfair edge over other teams. It’s not against the competition rules.
While he’s setting that up, I fiddle with our translation features so immigrants can communicate in their mother tongue. I figured it would be an easy addition with the Google Translate API, but that was silly to assume. It’s so much more than what I signed up for.
Lots of languages, including Chinese, don’t use ASCII characters, so we can’t slap on our current font. And other languages, like Arabic, are right-to-left instead of left-to-right, requiring even more changes to the user interface. I stay up until four a.m. implementing everything.
On Wednesday, Khoi goes home to celebrate his uncle’s fiftieth birthday. Obi is avoiding his teammates—apparently Diego and Jenni-with-an-i are fighting all the time, in the leastsurprising plot twist ever—so he and I work in the student center. Obi has a strong rule about being within a twenty-foot perimeter of Tea-Do.
