If You, Then Me, Page 3

“Like pencils?” Gina shook her head. “You get an expense account to buy yourself a company car, not to buy notebooks and folders.”

  “I guess I could fix my mom’s car.”

  “Fix it? Just buy her a new one. You can buy me one, too. I want interest on that video I filmed for you. If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t have gotten it,” Gina said with a smirk as she ran up the steps to her house. “And don’t forget it.”

  “You can’t even drive.”

  “When you’re rich, does it even matter?”

  I smiled but didn’t believe her. Though it was fun to fantasize about, I wasn’t going to be rich. That kind of thing didn’t happen to me. Besides, there was still the issue of convincing my mother.

  I woke my phone. “Wiser, how do I convince my mom to let me go?”

  “Tell her that you were offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to participate in an incubator program for gifted young programmers and that you would like to go.”

  “So you want me to just tell her the truth?”

  “Honesty is usually best,” Wiser said.

  “But how do I convince her that it’s a good idea? I could go with the money thing, but she might not care about money. Or I could focus on the school part more than the winning part so she doesn’t think I’ll be dropping out.”

  “But that would be a lie.”

  “Not exactly,” I said.

  “Lying is never a good idea.”

  “It’s not a lie.”

  “According to Merriam-Webster, a lie is defined as: ‘to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive—’”

  “Okay fine, I get it.”

  “Why don’t you tell her that you want to go?” Wiser said.

  “Because she doesn’t care about what I want.”

  “I think you’re mistaken,” Wiser said. “She wants you to be happy.”

  I glanced up at our apartment. Through the window, I could see my mom scrubbing the dishes. Her face was pinched while she listened to the news on the radio. “Are you sure there isn’t an alternative?”

  “You could always ask her about the red hat,” Wiser said.

  “What’s the red hat?”

  “The red hat,” Wiser repeated. “A hat that is red.”

  I frowned, confused by her bizarre answer.

  “Right, but what is it?”

  “Your mother’s red hat,” Wiser said, her voice scrambling as she spoke.

  “But she doesn’t have a red hat,” I said.

  I looked down at my phone, but it had frozen again in the cold. I sighed and stuffed it in my pocket. There must have been a bug in the programming. I made a mental note to look into it and trudged back inside.

  No. That was what my mother told me after I’d told her about the Foundry. I was sitting in the kitchen, drying dishes while my mother chopped vegetables for the week.

  “Aren’t you going to think about it before making a decision?”

  “I don’t need to think about it,” my mother said. “I didn’t work this hard for you to drop out of school.”

  “But I wouldn’t be dropping out. I’d just be transferring to a specialized tech school for a year. It’ll be great for college and I’ll come back after it’s done, just with more programming classes on my transcript.” I glanced at my phone on top of the refrigerator and felt relieved that Wiser wasn’t awake to hear me.

  My mother squinted at me. “What is the point of this program?”

  “To teach me how to code properly. And to learn about business.”

  “Why would a sixteen-year-old need to learn about business?”

  “I don’t know. What’s the point of any school?”

  “To enrich your mind, sharpen your analytical thinking, and arm you with tools that will help you be independent, curious, and resilient in the face of hardship.”

  “Exactly. That’s exactly the point of the Foundry.”

  My mother looked at me like I’d broken the microwave again. “They’re trying to get you to drop out.”

  “No they’re not,” I protested. “It’s a school.”

  “There are schools here. You’re currently attending one.”

  “They’re going to help me build a company. And they’re going to give me money. They like Wiser. They said it has promise. They want to invest in it.”

  My mother let out a resentful laugh. “Invest? Do you know much I’ve invested in you? How long? Sixteen years. Where’s the return on my investment? And now a stranger calls and says he wants to invest in your phone friend, and you want to drop out of school and move to California?”

  “It’s not a phone friend. It’s a predictive outcomes application.”

  “You’re not going.”

  “It’s just for a year,” I said, growing desperate. “That’s all. It’ll help me get into college. It’ll make me a better student.”

  “You can only get into college if you finish high school.”

  “I know that, but—”

  She slammed her cleaver against the chopping block, startling me to silence. “You’re not moving to California, and that’s the end of it.” She must have seen the surprised look on my face because she collected herself. “Now go do your homework. The day is already half over.”

  I threw the dishrag on the table. Though I’d known my mother wouldn’t let me go, a part of me had been hoping that maybe this time she’d hear me. She never cared about technology; she thought it was just a distraction from real life. To her, programming was a weird hobby, nothing more than typing and swiping, so why would she understand now?

  I turned to go to my room when my phone chirped from the top of the fridge. It had turned back on.

  I thought about Wiser’s strange advice. What did I have to lose?

  “What about the red hat?” I said.

  My mother rarely looked surprised, so when she showed even the slightest hint of being caught off guard, it was notable.

  “What about it?” she said.

  I had no idea what the red hat referred to, so all I could muster was a shrug. “Never mind.”

  Three

  I’d retreated to my room without my phone and was too proud to go back to the kitchen and get it, so I turned on my computer and was about to play music as loud as I could when I saw that I had a message waiting for me on BitBop.

  NEW MESSAGE FROM U/OBJECTPERMANENCE:

  I know what you mean about feeling like no one you know really gets you. My friends are great and all but I can’t really talk to them about anything too deep. It’s like everyone gets scared, including me, and the pressure in the room increases and then someone makes a joke to relieve it and the moment is over and we’re back to being buddies again. I know that’s not exactly what you’re talking about, but it’s a similar sentiment.

  I’m starting to realize that I can’t please my dad. I know we don’t share details but my dad is kind of a big deal. He’s a programmer and an entrepreneur and is really good at what he does. He has this idea of who I’m supposed to be, but no matter what I do, it’s never enough. I just got this thing that I’ve been wanting for a long time, and instead of being happy for me, all he said was that the only reason I got it was because of him.

  He cares so much about my accomplishments and yet none of them end up mattering because I’ll never be self-made like he was. I’ll always have had it easier, and he’ll always see my success as something he did for me.

  Sorry to complain. It’s hard to talk to my friends about this stuff because, you know, male vulnerability, etc. Any emotion is a weakness . . .

  Side note, have you ever listened to film scores while coding? I just listened to the soundtrack from 2001: A Space Odyssey and it makes it feel like you’re saving the planet from a fireball when all you’re doing is searching for a missing semicolon ;)

  I felt a swell of happiness and for a moment I forgot why I had been in such a bad mood.

  We’d met on a data structures forum on BitBop. Someone had posted want
ing suggestions for the best music to listen to while programming. We were the only two who’d responded with something other than trance or EDM. He’d said Beethoven’s Fifth. I’d said Bach’s Cello Concertos. We’d been friends ever since.

  Here’s what I knew about ObjectPermanence: He liked science-fiction movies but also had a soft spot for romantic comedies, though he would never tell his friends that. He was smart and funny. He once alluded to practice, which made me think that he played a sport, though he could’ve been referring to band practice. Still, I liked to imagine him playing soccer, but Gina always insisted it was golf, no, worse—virtual golf. He liked corny programming puns (Why did the programmer need glasses? To C#). His dad was some important tech person, and though that didn’t necessarily mean that he lived in California, he had commented once on a post about In-N-Out burgers, which made me think that he did. His family had money, but they weren’t nice to each other. And most importantly, I could talk to him about anything and know he would get it and wouldn’t laugh at me or think I was strange. I’d never met anyone like that before, especially not a boy.

  I read his message again. I just got this thing that I’ve been wanting for a long time.

  The fact that he’d written it the day after I’d been accepted to the Foundry made me wonder. Was it possible that he’d gotten in, too? For a moment I’d almost convinced myself, but then realized what I was doing and shook it off. No, it had to be a coincidence. The “thing” he “got” could have been anything—an award at school, a summer internship, a new car. There were only twenty spots at the Foundry. Was it really possible that the boy I was talking to online had also gotten one?

  I put on the soundtrack from 2001: A Space Odyssey and listened. The music was eerie and strange enough that I could almost believe that I was in an alternate but similar universe where my mother was fine with me going to the Foundry and ObjectPermanence was somehow going as well. I closed my eyes and pictured him listening to the same music. It almost felt like we were in the same room. I began to type a response when there was a knock on my door.

  I turned down the music. “What?”

  My mother opened the door. “Can I come in?”

  I sighed. “Fine.”

  Her hands were still wet from cooking, and she wiped them on her apron and sat on my bed next to me. “Your voice invention,” she said.

  “Wiser,” I reminded her, for the umpteenth time.

  My mother handed me my phone. “Show me how it works.”

  I woke my phone and asked the first question that came to mind. “Wiser, if I miss this opportunity to go to the Foundry will I ever get another one?”

  “Opportunities are a combination of good timing and hard work. If you keep working hard, statistically you will have a much better chance of getting more opportunities.”

  I could feel my mother looking at me, but I couldn’t bring myself to meet her gaze. I was too upset. “Wiser, if I don’t go to California, will I regret it for the rest of my life?”

  “People only feel regret over things they could have changed that were within their control. Going to California is not in your control, therefore you should not feel regret over it. However, you may feel resentment.”

  “Wiser, am I going to be stuck in Massachusetts for my entire life?”

  “I don’t predict the future,” Wiser said. “But I suspect that if you’d like to leave, eventually you will.”

  That made me feel a little better.

  “How does it work?” my mother asked. I tried to think of the last time she’d asked me a question that wasn’t about a chore she’d given me and couldn’t think of one.

  “It scans all of my online data and any publicly accessible data and comes up with personalized responses to my questions,” I explained. “It gives me advice.”

  “And you made it yourself?”

  I nodded.

  “This Laura Slang. What are her credentials?”

  I smirked. “Lars Lang.”

  She listened quietly while I told her about the Foundry, about Lars’s game company and his social-networking site. I spoke carefully. Whatever was happening, I didn’t want to ruin it. The fact that she was even asking made my heart rate pick up, though I didn’t dare get my hopes up yet. When I was finished, she said nothing for a long while.

  “Does he have a phone number?”

  I wrote it on a piece of paper, which she folded into her apron before glancing around my room. “This place is a mess,” she said. “I’m doing a load of laundry. Bring me your dirty clothes.”

  As I watched her leave, I felt what I could only describe as cautious but near explosive excitement. I didn’t know what had happened between our argument in the kitchen and now, but I didn’t mind. I listened to her footsteps disappear down the hall, then turned to my phone. “Wiser, what’s the red hat?”

  “You clearly haven’t read any of your mother’s published papers. In a 1997 article called ‘The Spirit of the Immigrant,’ she writes about leaving Taiwan as a teenager to go to college in the United States. She’d received a scholarship from an American university to study political history and economics, but her parents were opposed to it. They didn’t approve of her moving abroad to study such a frivolous subject when she had already passed the entrance exam at home to go to pharmacy school. Your mother told them she was leaving anyway, with or without their permission. They didn’t speak until the morning of her departure, when her mother gave her a small parcel packed with food for the trip, along with a red knitted hat. ‘For the winters in Massachusetts,’ she’d told her daughter. In that way, she gave her daughter her blessing.”

  My phone was warm in my hand, as though it were another palm. “Thank you,” I whispered to Wiser. It was the first time I really understood that I had created something that might be great.

  Through the ceiling, I could hear someone upstairs vacuuming. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine it was the waves of the Pacific crashing against the rocks, blue and glittering in the sunlight. I was going.

  “Wiser, what else do you know that I don’t know?” I asked her just for fun. It was too broad of a question for Wiser to properly answer, though I figured I’d try anyway.

  “You never really know what another person is capable of,” she said.

  “Like my mother?”

  “I do like your mother,” she said.

  Lars Lang was right; the programming could use some improvement. I opened my phone and made a note of it. It didn’t occur to me to ask Wiser more. I didn’t realize that she might not have been talking about my mother at all; she might have been talking about me.

  After careful deliberation and multiple hours of phone conversations with the Foundry staff, including one particularly mortifying series of questions about the level of adult supervision in the dormitories, my mother reluctantly agreed that I could attend. The months that followed passed remarkably slowly. I had to finish the school year, which meant returning to normal life until June as though nothing had changed.

  At school, I was the girl with the weird name who knew a lot about computers. I wasn’t unpopular but I wasn’t popular either. I had a few acquaintances from advanced math, but outside of spending time with Gina, my social interactions primarily consisted of my classmates asking me to fix their broken phones or help them with a homework problem. So when word got out that I got accepted to the Foundry, which most nonprogrammers had only vague knowledge of, the news was stretched and twisted until it made no sense at all. Did you hear? Xia Chan was dropping out of school to move to San Francisco. Xia Chan was being hired by a tech company in Northern California. Xia Chan was going to work on a top-secret project in the Bay Area. Xia Chan now worked for the government; she was probably CIA.

  “I heard you were a secret agent,” Jay said from the desk next to mine. Jay and I had been in advanced math together since we were in middle school. He liked to tell people that I was the best in our class, but he was just being modest. He often managed t
o get just one point higher on tests than I did, which never ceased to infuriate me.

  “I can’t confirm either way.”

  “I knew it,” Jay said with a smirk. He was perpetually disheveled and clumsy, with oversized hands and feet, like a puppy.

  “Hey,” Mr. McDonough said from the blackboard. “Can either of you confirm the location of this point on the curve?” He cracked a smile. “But seriously, congratulations, Xia. The Foundry is an incredible place. They’re lucky to have you.”

  I blushed. “Thanks.”

  “So what’s your mission?” Jay whispered. “And are you looking for some genius young student to recruit as your sidekick?” He sat up straight, like he was on a job interview.

  I laughed. “It’s classified.”

  He sighed and copied the equation on the board. “At least when you’re gone, I won’t have anyone else messing up the grading curve for me.”

  “Don’t get too comfortable,” I said. “I’ll be back in a year.”

  The next three months passed in a haze. People stopped whispering and staring at me and seemed to lose interest. If I was a secret agent, I was a boring one.

  At home, my mother and I didn’t talk about my impending departure. She acted as though nothing was happening, and I was scared to bring it up for fear she’d change her mind. The snow turned to slush, which turned into mud, and then suddenly it was spring, and my classmates were talking about camp, Gina was starting a part-time job at her parents’ restaurant, and my mother was getting ready to teach summer school. And the most surprising thing happened. I felt sad.

  Though I was excited to leave, I didn’t like that everyone was making plans without me, that life was just going to carry on in my absence. Worcester didn’t seem as bad as I remembered it—the birds were out, the trees were budding—and I found myself noticing all of the things I’d taken for granted. I’d miss our apartment, the way you had to turn the shower knob one centimeter forward, then two millimeters backward to get the water to the perfect temperature. I’d miss the cracks on my ceilings, which I’d fallen asleep to every night, connecting the riddles in the paint to my own constellations. I’d miss my street, seeing the landlady watching TV in her living room, and sitting on Gina’s stoop and passing the time until her mother called her in for dinner. I’d miss waking up to the sound of my mother’s feet padding around the kitchen while cooking breakfast, and ending my day to the sound of her car pulling up the driveway. I’d miss knowing she was there while I slept, that if I called out, she’d appear at my door, and though she wouldn’t say she loved me, I’d know from her face that she did.