Page 33 of You Had Me at Hello World
Khoi yanks me behind a bush. “Get down!”
I oblige, more out of confusion than anything else. We’re smushed up against each other, because this bush isnotbig enough to shroud two people from view. He smells like sandalwood soap. His too-quick heartbeat is on my skin. My entire body feels jittery.
A curious turkey approaches us. It’s my first time seeing one IRL. Beady eyes, razor-sharp talons. Those cute hand turkeys I used to draw in elementary school were a total lie. This thing looks like it eats other birds’ dreams for breakfast.
“Don’t touch the turkey,” Khoi whispers. “They can attack if provoked.”
I want to ask why Harvard has turkeys, but there’s a more urgent question on my mind.
“Why are we hiding from your girlfriend?” I whisper. “I thought you needed to talk to her. Isn’t that why you came to our room?”
“Yeah, but I needed to talk to her at MIT, not at Harvard. Does that make sense?”
“No, not at all!”
Why is he acting so sus? Maybe this isn’t about Aisha. Maybe this is about the person next to her. “The girl she’s with, is that your ex or something?”
“Why is that your first thought? How many ex-girlfriends do you think I have?”
“I don’t know, ten? Twenty?” Khoi could be a secret fuckboy.The sandalwood soap is a pretty damning piece of evidence.
“Twenty?” He seems genuinely offended. “Am I the world’s first underagedBachelorstar? Should I get ready for the next rose ceremony? Choose who I want to take to the fantasy suite?”
“You seem to know an awful lot aboutThe Bachelor.”
“My aunt is a die-hard fan!”
“Khoi, admitting you have an addiction is the first step to recovery.”
“I’m—it’s not—I don’t—I hate-watch it—ugh!” He shakes his head. “Okay, they’re gone. Let’s go back to campus.”
We hop on the 1 bus, and Khoi makes the mistake of answering yes when some woman asks if we have a moment to talk about our lord and savior Jesus Christ, and then he’s too polite to interrupt so we miss our stop. We end up in Boston. He offers to call an Uber, but I’m morally opposed to using rideshare services for walkable distances, so we trudge back across the bridge spanning the Charles River. By the time we get to Simmons, dinner has ended, so he buys us burritos from a nearby food truck.
And he never explains why we had to hide from Aisha. And he never denies that the other girl was his ex.
Chapter Sixteen
But whatever. Maybe he doesn’t need to explain. Over the next several days, he keeps his word and helps me after class. We spend nearly every single spare moment together. We meet in his room because he has a monitor setup and a gaming chair, and Obi usually posts up in the student center anyway.
I learn a lot about Khoi. I learn that he is the most brilliant programmer I’ve ever met. I learn that he can subsist on a diet of strong coffee and blueberry muffins. I learn that he’s got God-tier patience when explaining stuff that’s not clicking for me.
My struggle isn’t really that I don’t know a certain syntax or library. It’s that I’ve never approached coding as an art form, with underlying principles that spin into harmony. I’ve always Frankensteined together scraps from the internet to fix whatever problem was in front of me. It’s like the difference between engineering a car and duct-taping a motor to a trash bin that might get you across town before falling apart.
But talking to Khoi helps. It isn’t because he can explainDijkstra’s algorithm and load balancing. There are plenty of YouTube tutorials for that. It’s that he operates on a different frequency. He holds some deeper intuition about how everything connects. But slowly, my brain also begins to see the same patterns.
Thursday is Juneteenth, so we have the day off. Khoi isn’t at breakfast and half of the Alpha Fellows are on a trip to Cape Cod, so the dining hall is nearly empty. After scarfing down a bowl of Lucky Charms, I go to his room to see if he’s there.
I freeze when I hear my roommate’s voice, bright as new pennies. I’m surprised she’s even here. Last night she zombie lurched in right before curfew, mumbled a few words to me, and then collapsed in bed. This morning when I woke up, she was already gone.
“I don’t think this is about your personal integrity, Khoi,” Aisha is saying. “I think this is about Char.”
Uh-oh. When people mention you behind your back, it’s never for a good reason.
“She’s my friend! I’m tutoring her!”
“And how’s that going?”
“It’s great. She’s brilliant. I think she’s going to do super well on the first checkpoint.”
