Page 24 of You Had Me at Hello World
“What if I havejustice cream for dinner?” I ask Aisha.
She laughs. “It’s your life, babe. Our parents aren’t here.”
After we fill up our trays, we survey the tables. There are maybe a hundred students. Probably three-quarters of them are dudes. The few other girls are easy to spot, like 1s in an ocean of 0s.
The classic problem of where to sit. At school, everybody kind of knew how to clump together: the mediocre athletes, the actually good athletes, the theater kids (who got absorbed by the band kids after budget cuts), the aspiring criminals, the current criminals, and so forth. Lola and I had one goal: stay out of thefiring range of any faction that was known to mistake chicken nuggets for ammunition.
Here, it feels like the factions haven’t formed yet. Everyone is still jostling for a spot in the social hierarchy. I wonder how clout works at Alpha Fellows. Back home, it was this uncrackable formula involving Instagram followers, Friday night party invites, and whether you owned the latest iPhone. But here, maybe it’s about how many programming languages you know or something.
Some girls who appear to know Aisha wave her over. There’s only one empty seat at their table.
She looks at me guiltily. “Oh, um, those are my school friends…”
“You should go sit with them. Don’t worry about me.” I spot Khoi several tables away, surrounded by guys. There are plenty of open chairs there. “I’ll find somewhere else.”
As I head over toward Khoi, something strikes me. Shouldn’t he and Aisha be sitting together? At school, the couples are all over each other every possible spare moment. Honestly, it’s like softcore porn in the Chinook Shore cafeteria. The administration is totally chill with that, but God forbid a girl wear spaghetti straps.
Maybe Khoi and Aisha want to catch up with their separate friends. It is the first day. And it’s really none of my business. Mentally, I hit delete on this sitch.
“Char! Long time no see.” Khoi is gouging his corn on thecob by taking random bites out of the cob, in no discernible pattern. Inwardly, I shudder. You can tell a lot about a person by how they eat corn on the cob. Khoi is obviously somebody who wants to see the world burn.
“Is your roommate here?” I ask.
“Obi found a concurrency bug in his code and started muttering to himself. Said he won’t eat until he fixes it or until Java releases a better threading model, whichever comes first. So… he’s probably going to starve.”
The other guys do intros. There are identical twins, Austin and Dallas, who demo themselves solving Rubik’s Cubes in sync. Haru, who I immediately clock as a stoner—the lazy speech and bloodshot eyes are dead giveaways—and who has also played cello at Carnegie Hall. Diego, who boasts half a million followers for his competitive programming TikToks.
With each introduction, I want to sink lower into my chair. They’ve all done so much even though they’re the same age as me. No, Austin and Dallas are even younger; they just finished ninth grade. Ninth grade. When I was in ninth grade, my biggest achievement was convincing the cafeteria lady to sneak me extra tater tots.
When it’s my turn, I say, “I’m Char, short for Charise. From Oregon.”
Dallas (or maybe Austin) belches. “What kinda name is that?”
“I think my mom picked it randomly?”
My biological father was supposed to fly to America for mybirth, but I arrived two weeks early, so at the hospital, Mom was drugged-up and alone. She chose something that sounded pretty out of this baby name book. I used to hate how unique it was. I went by Char, hoping people would assume it was short for something normal like Charlotte.
“Oregon is a cool state,” Haru says. For a split second, I’m relieved that at least someone is impressed by my background, until he adds, “They were the first one to decriminalize cannabis possession.”
“It’s irrelevant in tech, though,” Diego says. “Sandwiched by Seattle, which has Microsoft and Amazon, and San Francisco and Silicon Valley, which has everything else that’s important.”
I want to defend my home state, but I don’t know what to say. Somehow I doubt Diego is going to be interested in our thriving lumber business. He probably thinks “logging” is something you only do to debug code.
“So Char must’ve worked even harder to get here,” Khoi says. I know he’s trying to help, but somehow it makes me feel worse, because it isn’t true. I didn’t workthathard, and I’m not as accomplished as these dudes, so what am I even doing here? Maybe Edvin Nilsen really did get the wrong Charise Tang.
“Oregon, what’s like, your schtick?” Austin (or maybe Dallas) asks.
I fiddle with my silverware. “My… schtick?”
“Like, everybody here has a schtick. My schtick is cubing. Haru’s schtick is celloing.”
“Not a word,” Haru mumbles.
Austin-or-Dallas barrels on. “Diego’s schtick is influencing. Khoi’s—”
Diego seems offended. “I’m not aninfluencer. The only thing I promote on TikTok is C++. Which is superior to Rust!”
“Oh.” I don’t even know what Rust is. “I don’t have anything like that.”
