Page 74 of You Had Me at Hello World
I push Khoi off me.
He caresses my face. His touch is gentle. “Char, what’s wrong? Did I do something?”
“No. No, you’re perfect. More than perfect.” I look away. “It’s not you. I don’t… want to get distracted.”
He frowns. “Am I a distraction?”
“Notyou, but this is.” If I’m down bad whenever I’m around Khoi, I’m clearly not focusing on Hello World. “Maybe… maybe we should stop doing this. At least for now. I want to full-send our project.”
His shoulders stiffen. “Are you dumping me?”
I straighten up. “No! No. I just don’t want to spend too much time fooling around. That’s what Edvin said.”
“Edvin Nilsen told you to stop fooling around with me?” he asks slowly.
My cheeks burn. “Well,no, obviously not like that, but he said I should focus on winning.”
“Char, why are you meeting with him anyway?”
“He’s mentoring me!”
Khoi raises an eyebrow. Ugh, I’m so jealous that he can do that. “Haven’t you met him, like, twice? Some mentor.”
“He’s busy. And didn’t he help with the project idea? It’s really nice of him to give advice when he’s, you know,Edvin Nilsenand I’m some stupid teenager.”
“Don’t call yourself stupid,” he says. “And Edvin gives me bad vibes.”
I tip my palms up. “I don’t get why you don’t trust Edvin. He hasn’t been sus at all.” Obviously I’ve heard the horror stories of rich, powerful tech bros taking advantage of younger girls. Who hasn’t?
But with Edvin, it hasn’t been like that. Not even close. Every time we meet, his assistant Janelle is there.
Khoi studies my face. It looks like he’s on the verge of saying something. But when he opens his mouth, all that comes out is, “If he’s a good guy, then I’m happy for you.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
The next morning, Khoi and I are in my room, fudging with performance improvements. He’s showing me how to benchmark our code to assess our latency bottlenecks—basically, see which parts of our code are slowing the whole thing down—when my phone rings.
It’s Olive. We haven’t spoken since I left Oregon. I’m so surprised, I pick up.
“Char?” Her breath comes out all choppy. “I’m worried for your mom.”
“What’s wrong?” My mind takes a dumpster dive through the possible worst-case scenarios. Car accident? Stroke? Tsunami? All three at once?
“My dad,” she says, and my heart sinks. “He’s been drinking more lately. He lost a lot of money back in June. It’s getting bad…” She doesn’t elaborate. She doesn’t need to.
“Olive. Do you have a safe place to go?”
“I’m at, um, Drew’s,” she says. There’s an awkward pause as we both remember I used to fool around with her man.“Your mom is trapped in the house. He won’t let her out. Or, like, hesaysshe can leave, but he won’t let her drive, and he’s always tracking her whereabouts on her phone, so basically she’s trapped.”
Panic rises in my chest, but I force myself to keep talking. “That’s awful. Did you call the cops?”
There’s a pause, and then she says, “He’s still my dad.”
Of course. I squeeze the phone tight. “So you left her there all alone?”
“Don’t be so judgmental,” she says. “You’re the one who ditched us first.”
I’m tempted to hang up right then and there, but I can’t. I’ve got to come up with a plan. “Okay. I’ll call the police, then.”
