Page 41 of You Had Me at Hello World
“Don’t be disgusting. Khoi has agirlfriend. We’re just friends. He was helping me out.”
“Must be nice to be a girl and be able to get that kind ofhelp.”
Wow. He’s no different from Michael. I can fly thousands of miles and never escape the misogynistic viciousness that comes from a lifetime of entitlement and resentment.
So I respond to Lucas the same way I responded to my stepfather. The only way I know how to cope. I leave.
Chapter Nineteen
I am a CIA operative, and my mission is to locate Khoi. This mission wraps up quickly, because turns out he is in the most obvious place possible: his dorm room.
Without knocking, I push the door open. He’s hunched at his desk, fingers flying over his mechanical keyboard. He’s coding.
Maybe I should leave. Like, he seems to be having a pretty good time with his computer. Heck, his computer would probably be better at getting through this conversation than me.
But he’s my teammate. And I’d rather talk this out than have it loom over us like some software update that keeps getting postponed.
“Are you okay?” I try.
“I’m fine.” He keeps his eyes pinned to his laptop screen.
“Stop coding. Look at me.”
He gives me the most obligatory two-second glance. “What is there to say? You read the article.”
“We don’t have to talk about that,” I say, and I mean it. I don’t really need to know about Khoi’s dad. It doesn’t sayanything about Khoi himself. I have a shitty biological father too. “If you want to discuss it, I’ll listen. But otherwise I’m just here to be your friend.”
He doesn’t say anything.
I grab Obi’s desk chair and sit next to Khoi. “What are you building?” He’s writing in Python.
“Just something silly. It’s an open-source Pokémon game. Not officially approved by Nintendo.”
For a few more minutes, I watch him make a subclass for Fire-type Pokémon. I suspect he uses coding to bury his sadness. I’m kind of becoming a Khoi expert.
“Are you going to leave?” he asks.
I shrug. “I’m sticking around to see how you implement the Psychic types.”
“You’re not going to leave.” He laughs. It’s the most bitter sound I’ve ever heard him make. “Okay, since you know about my sordid and shameful past, you have to confess something about yourself. It’s only fair.”
My immediate instinct is to tell him about the time I called my second-grade teacher Mom, but maybe it’s better to be more vulnerable. After a moment, I say, “It was my stepdad.”
“What?”
“You asked me before where the bruises on my arm came from. It was my stepdad, Michael. I was sneaking out to catch my flight, and Michael caught me. He didn’t want to let me go.”
“Why didn’t he want to let you go?”
“Because he loved me too much, obviously.” I smirk, but Khoi doesn’t laugh.
“You don’t need to do that,” he says.
“Do what?”
“Make a joke out of something horrible. You do that a lot.”
I blink, surprised by the observation. Nobody else has ever said that. “Hey, we all have our coping mechanisms. You have programming. I have my bad jokes.”
