The Dating Game

by Kiley Roache

  “Really? It’s like a dream job for me.”

  “Yeah, I mean they paid well and it’s a great résumé builder.” She stands and pulls her bag over her shoulder. Pausing, she looks at me. I realize she is waiting. I quickly dump everything into my bag and pop up to follow her.

  “The culture was just pretty brutal for women,” she says. “Full of bro-grammers. I would lead my group and then never get picked for projects. Was mistaken as an assistant like three times.”

  We make our way out of the now-half-empty auditorium.

  “One night I was working late and someone thought I was there to take out the trash.”

  “Oh God, that’s terrible.” I squint as we step out into the sunlight.

  “Yeah, it’s unfortunately not unique to Instafriend either.”

  I cringe.

  “If I can give you one piece of advice, kid—start your own company. I think that’s the only way women are going to advance in tech, by doing their own shit. You need to strike out on your own, by any means necessary. That’s what I’m tryna do.”

  I nod vigorously, taking mental notes. She spikes her cup, now just ice slightly stained a coffee color, into the recycling bin.

  We are approaching the split between the main academic quad and the turn toward my dorm. I don’t know which way she’s going, but I don’t want this conversation to end.

  “Do you want to go to the library or something?” I ask. “Work on the homework?”

  “I wish I could.” She checks her watch. That’s how cool she is—she actually wears a watch. So vintage. “But I have to get going. I have this wine-night thing with my dorm-mates from freshman year.”

  “Is that a thing?” My eyes go wide. “Like, drinking on a school night?”

  “I mean, not finals week, but week one, sure.” She pulls her phone out of her bag. “It’s gonna just be upperclassmen tonight, but here, let’s exchange numbers and hang another time.”

  We type in our numbers, and when she hands my phone back she says, “I’m glad there’s another brave soul with me in this class.”

  I wonder if that comment should make me feel good or bad for my whole walk home.

  Chapter Four

  Roberto

  “But how would you make it profitable?” Braden interrupts Sara, who was midway through pitching an idea. She pauses, her marker halting on the dry erase board.

  “What do you mean?” She stares at him, eyes like daggers.

  “How would it make money?” Braden asks again, drawing out his words, as if the problem before had been him speaking too quickly.

  I look away to keep from laughing. We’ve been here for three hours now, in the Engineering Center, working inside a replica of the Palo Alto garage where William Hewlett and David Packard created, you guessed it, HP, when they were just a few years out of Stanford. This version of it is made of glass and filled with group worktables and dry erase boards. I’ve started to feel like our workspace is mocking us, and Braden’s dumb, cynical sense of humor makes more and more sense every minute.

  She makes a face at him. “Why does everyone keep asking that?”

  “I mean,” I say before Braden can get another sour word in. “It is a class on entrepreneurship.”

  She giggles and I am grateful. I’d feel bad if my teasing tormented her the way Braden’s seems to—but the joke was right there.

  She runs a hand through her hair. It looks nice slightly disheveled in this way, almost better than when she floats into the room and it’s perfectly in place. “So what do we have then?”

  I scan my notes. It’s Friday, and we’ve met twice now since we were given the assignment on Monday. “Well, we repitched Facebook accidentally, discussed a biomedical technology idea that would take years of R & D, discussed an emoji keyboard made entirely of puppies doing different things, and then finally you suggested an emergency alert app that would not make money.”

  “So we’re nowhere.” Braden rests his head on the table. “Fabulous.”

  “Do you think he’d really fail us?” I ask. I picture an F on my transcript, the first grade below A I would’ve received since the fifth grade. It feels like someone is wringing out my stomach.

  “He couldn’t, right?” Sara looks at me with wide eyes. My heart twinges. She falls into the chair across from me, tossing her dry erase marker onto the table.

  “I definitely think he would,” Braden says, face still on the table. “I think that was the whole point of his speech.” He raises his head, his hair now askew.

  “What would that do to our GPAs?” Sara starts to crunch numbers in her notebook.

  “Well, considering this is our first semester, we’re starting at zero,” Braden says, “and assuming we are each taking a standard load of classes, and get As in all of them, which will be no easy feat... We would have a GPA of 2.66 by Christmas.”

  “Yikes.” Sara sets down her pen.

  I look at my own notebook and the list of ideas that have been scratched out one by one.

  The silence in the room is palpable.

  I click my phone to check the time. “Yo, guys, I’m sorry, but I have to go soon.”

  “What?” Sara says. “But we don’t even have an idea yet!”

  “I know, I’m so sorry, but—”

  “It’s the first weekend of the year.” Braden cuts me off. “The kid wants to actually go to college, Blondie.”

  She bares her teeth at him. “Don’t call me Blondie.”

  “I’m sorry, Sara, I really am.” I swing my bag over my shoulder. I leave before she can reply.

  I step onto the engineering quad, strictly organized with its rectangular buildings and perfect, half-circle hills. I hop on my bike and head toward the Cal Ave train station.

  When I’m at school, I’m not far from home, at least as the crow flies. But it is quite the journey on public transportation.

  I pop headphones in my ears as the train pulls up to the station. It takes me a while to find a seat among the young employees of Silicon Valley. Twenty-somethings who prefer to live in bustling San Francisco rather than the sunny suburbs near the tech campuses, they usher through a sort of reverse commute every day.

  When the train gets to SF, I hop off the Caltrain in favor of the BART, which is faster but has far less seating, to cross the Bay. Outside the window, trendy places with purposely misspelled names like Flur and Cheeze that sell artisan rugs and fifteen-dollar truffle-infused grilled cheeses give way to chain stores, diners named after their owners and taquerias with pictures of the food on the wall.

  Telephone wires run overhead and street art and tags start to pop up on the sides of buildings. It feels like I’m thousands of miles, not a few zip codes, away from where I started. Here, a yard is a decent patch of grass in front of a house that looks like the kind you’d have drawn as a kid—a solid square with a triangle on top. In Silicon Valley, yards are rolling, professionally landscaped hills surrounding castles the likes of which I’d seen only in picture books or episodes of My Super Sweet 16.

  I know we are leaving the “nice neighborhoods,” the ones people move to “for the schools” and brag about by underlining their zip codes on envelopes or tagging their location on every Instagram post. But there is something more real about the towns that pass outside the window now. Everything is less polished, sure. And yeah, grass springing up from cracks in the concrete is less aesthetically pleasing than cobblestones. But at least it’s a sign of life.

  This is an actual neighborhood. A town people have lived in for a while.

  The buildings here did not just spring up with the influx of Google employees during the second “gold rush” in Northern California. Here, people know each other. They grow up and work hard here. They have first birthday parties with paper cups of soda and homemade piñatas, first jobs with aprons, and first kisses on d
ares. They didn’t swarm in after college with a degree and a résumé, take from the land and swing back out to retire young. They establish roots here, or at least, they do as best they can.

  “Coliseum Station,” the staticky voice informs the BART passengers as I hop off the train. The sun is setting, sending streams of light through the fog gathering close to eye level. It’s only a few blocks to my house from here, and even now I feel relieved. The first week at school has been great, but also an overstimulating amount of new things. It feels nice to be somewhere familiar.

  I walk the few blocks to my street quickly, anticipation building the closer I get to home.

  As soon as I round the corner onto my block, I hear a young voice call out, “Robbieeeeee!”

  I take out my headphones and turn to see my seven-year-old neighbor, Mateo.

  “¡Hola!” I say.

  He smiles a gap-toothed grin as we do the secret handshake we perfected when I babysat him last summer.

  I ruffle his hair. “Man, you need a haircut.”

  “You sound like my mom. She’s been saying that all week.”

  I laugh. “Well, your mom knows what’s up.”

  He wrinkles his nose.

  “Hey, I brought you something!” I swing my backpack to my front.

  His eyes light up as I pull out the Warren University T-shirt I got him from the bookstore.

  “Awesome!” He grabs it from my hands and stares at the blue letters for a second before pulling it on over the T-shirt he is wearing. It covers up half his basketball shorts, looking almost like a dress on his small frame. Well, an adult small was probably not the right decision. I should’ve shopped the kid’s section.

  “It’s a little big, but you can grow into it.” I ruffle his hair.

  He nods vigorously. “I can wear it when I go there!”

  Behind him, the front door swings open. “Roberto, I thought I heard you!” Mateo’s mom waves as she steps outside.

  “Mom, look!” He points to the letters on his chest.

  “¡Qué bonita!” She smiles. “Did you say thank you?”

  “Sí.” He turns to me and shakes his head. “Gawd, who does she think I am?”

  I laugh. His mother just looks at me and shakes her head, smiling in a tired but amused way.

  “I’m here to see my dad,” I tell Mateo. “And you should go in for dinner, but I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

  He nods and gives me a high five before sprinting inside.

  Oh, for the days when I ran everywhere I went.

  Mateo’s mother pats him on the back as he races past and waves at me before she closes the door.

  “¡Hola, Papa!” I say as I push open the door to the house where I grew up. My key gets stuck as usual, but after a few tries I get it loose. I close the door and then click the lock back in place.

  “Roberto!” My father steps out of the kitchen. He pulls me into a big hug. I breathe in the smell of his aftershave and home.

  “¿Cómo estás?” He steps back, hands still on my shoulders, and examines my face. “¿Te han dado de comer en la universidad? Te veo muy flaco! Do you need food? Something to drink?”

  I laugh and shrug him off. “Sí, I’ve been eating.” I step into the kitchen. “I’ll take something to drink though.” I grab a Jarritos Lime from the refrigerator. It’s been my favorite flavor since I was five, and he always buys it. As the door closes, the photograph of my mother, smiling as she holds me just days after I was born, swings up before settling back into its spot. I feel a pang in my heart. My dad has had this picture up for years, but the effect on me never really goes away.

  Next to it, my Warren acceptance letter is tacked on with a magnet.

  I remember the day he put it there. The whole block came over to party when I got in. A few kids who used to call me a nerd and throw things at me from the back of the classroom even timidly offered a That’s really cool, man.

  I sit down at the light wood table. Across from me, where my father must have been sitting, a newspaper is open to the crossword, half-done. A pencil lies across the top, and along the margins, the Spanish translations of words are written in my father’s clean, plain handwriting.

  He sits down and pushes the paper to the side. “How was your first week at school?”

  I start into stories about dorms and classes, and he asks if I’ve met any nice girls.

  I know it isn’t exactly a typical college move, to come home the first weekend. But I also know my father is lonely. My mother has been gone almost ten years now.

  About three months from the ten-year mark, actually. A fact we’ve been keeping quite a close eye on.

  It all started when I was seven, so young I barely understood what was going on. One day my mom went to work and didn’t come home. It wasn’t until a few hours after she was supposed to be home, and my dad was pacing a hole in the kitchen floor, that we got the call.

  There had been an ICE raid on the restaurant where she worked. Unlike my dad, who was born in the States after his parents emigrated, my mother’s parents had crossed the border when she was three. Oakland was the only home she remembered, but that meant jack shit to the immigration officers.

  She wouldn’t be deported for two more years. But that was the day it felt like they stole her from me. They detained her, held her for a five-thousand-dollar bail we couldn’t immediately come up with. For two months, she was held in county jail. I remember that time in flashes of pain. I try not to think about it, but images come up. Waking up with screaming nightmares, sweating through Spiderman pajamas. The strange kitchens and living rooms I’d go to after school, staying with a rotation of moms from church who offered to watch me so my dad could work extra shifts to put toward bond.

  And the sterile room for visitors to the jail. Once a week, for an hour, timed so exactly, so harshly, so inhumanely. Seeing my mom, but knowing she wasn’t coming home with us. Watching the clock on the wall loom and click past the minutes, getting closer to when they would take her away again.

  And even when we finally had enough saved and got her out, it hung over our heads, that clock. We were reminded of it every week, when she had to check in with ICE. Every minute we were moving toward the day of her hearing.

  Two years after she was initially apprehended, her court date arrived. They said she had a right to a lawyer, but “at no cost to the state.” Since my parents still owed money to family and friends who helped with bond, that “right” didn’t mean much. There was no translator either, and this was before my mom had much English. The whole thing lasted five minutes, and then they deported her, sending her back to a country she had no memory of, to live with extended family she’d never met. Taking her away from me.

  I had never been to an airport before that day. I’d always imagined going under different circumstances, heading on an adventure overseas or to Disney World. But I did not want to go there like this.

  To stand in that big concourse, bustling and sterile, and say goodbye to my mom. I was at an age when I thought it wasn’t okay for boys to cry, and I had told myself on the way there I wouldn’t. But of course I did. I cried harder than I ever had, and ever have since. I screamed and clutched her jacket and, when the time came, had to be pulled away from her. At eighteen, I still have nightmares about that day.

  Once she was deported, she had a ten-year bar before she could try to come back to the States. Because my dad was a citizen, we heard we could apply for a waiver. So instead of trying to come back to us under the radar, my mom stayed in Mexico, saved money and waited. And then she submitted an application, and waited some more.

  And then a bureaucrat decided that since my dad could work and I was doing okay in school and physically healthy, her absence did not create “extreme hardship” for a US citizen, and denied the waiver. As if birthdays and Christmases and Mother’s Days and first days o
f schools passing without my mom wasn’t extreme enough hardship. As if three or four trips a year to visit her, knowing she couldn’t visit us, wasn’t extreme enough hardship. As if breaking our family up across an invisible line wasn’t extreme enough hardship.

  After the waiver was denied, the only thing we could do was wait.

  So not getting to stay and party the first weekend of college? There were much more unfair things.

  “I’ve started seeing more of those buses on my way to work, going to those tech places,” my dad says. “Los vecinos are mad.”

  I nod. I’d read the articles and Facebook posts complaining about the buses and the gentrification they represented.

  “Is it bad that I keep thinking I can’t wait to see you go by in a bus that says Google on the side?”

  I laugh. “It might be. I do the same thing though.”

  “At least you will wave to me when you pass through the neighborhood, instead of clutching your bag like some of these people.”

  “Dad, if I make it onto one of those buses, you won’t be living in this house anymore.”

  He smiles faintly. I have been talking about buying him a big house with a pool and granite countertops since I got the magnet school letter in eighth grade.

  “Ya veremos...” he says. “I don’t mind it here too much though.”

  I nod and think of Mateo and the rest of the neighbors. I know what he means, but I also know I will work until I don’t have to read news reports on shootings with my heart racing, hoping not to see my neighborhood, my cross street or, God help me, a name I know.

  My father prepares me food even though I tell him I already ate, and then we sit in the living room and watch his shows. He tries to explain all the backstories and relationships between the characters to me, and I don’t have the heart to tell him I watch this only with him so he really doesn’t have to.

  During commercial breaks he asks me about school and I ask him about work. He still watches TV live, so we can’t fast-forward. I’ve tried to explain that we can stream Netflix on my computer if he wants. But I think he likes to watch shows as they air. It gives some structure to his week, each show associated with an evening. Mondays and Wednesdays are Law & Order SVU. Thursdays are Grey’s Anatomy, and then a call to my mother to discuss the episode to pieces. Sundays and Mondays mean the guys coming over for the game. Television is an event for him in a way it just isn’t for my generation.