“I’ve got my Outlook set to auto-e-mail them once every three weeks,” he said. “Stay in their minds, just in case.”
Todd nodded admiringly. “Too bad you can’t link it with Hook,” he mused aloud.
“That’s what you should do instead of insurance,” Kyle told Cameron.
Cameron lifted an eyebrow, considering, then went back to his texting.
—
AN HOUR LATER Todd and a blonde were both drunk and not watching the game. He had no idea what her name was, but she had enormous breasts and seemed like she didn’t have a lot of STDs. He checked his phone: it was almost seven. Maybe he could hook up with this girl before he met Louisa, as a warm-up.
Todd felt his phone buzz.
Louisa LeMay: Hey—Heading to Brooklyn to check out a new DJ. It’s in the middle of nowhere so probably just crash out there. Sorry to bail!
Todd shook his head and blinked to adjust his tipsy eyes.
He read it again. And again. Was she serious?
Todd searched his brain for an explanation: were there cabs in Brooklyn? He typed back: No worries. What’s the address? I’ll send a car.
“Are you okay?” the girl asked, but he ignored her, watching his phone.
After a few minutes, he put the phone in his lap and reached for his BlackBerry, answering a few e-mails to distract himself. But when he looked at the phone again, there was still no text. He reached for the pitcher of beer. “Where’d that chick go?” he asked Kyle, realizing the blonde was no longer at his side.
“Think she left, dude,” Tom said.
“I think we should make a move,” Jake said. The game was finishing, and he hadn’t found a girl. “Who’s up for Houston Hall?”
—
“WILL YOU GO down on me?”
“No,” Todd said simply, rolling the girl over onto her stomach.
“Why not?” she giggled, looking back over her shoulder as she arched her back and pressed herself up onto her hands and knees. “Pretty please?” She was raising her eyebrows flirtatiously.
“Maybe later.” He smiled a fake smile, turning his eyes from her face to her ass and jamming two fingers between her legs.
“Oh!” she giggled. “Oh, yes! Yes, yes that feels soooo good . . .” She turned her head back to the bed frame in front of her, and he positioned himself on his knees behind her.
He massaged her **** long enough to get her ***, which wasn’t difficult, and quickly unrolled a condom down his ***** *****. He gripped her **** and pressed himself ****** ** *** as she moaned. Her *** was annoyingly bony. The skinny girls looked better in clothes, but it was less fun when they were naked. And given that he would never be seen in public with this girl, he’d just as soon she was twenty pounds heavier with some flesh on her ***. Maybe he should have gone for her friend instead. But that girl’s face had been so beat. If only Louisa hadn’t bailed. Fuck! The thought made him angry and he took it out on the girl, levering back and forth, pulling and pushing her **** around his ****, looking down to admire his washboard abs. God bless Morgan. She wouldn’t still be a lesbian if she caught a glimpse of this. And Louisa wouldn’t have gone to Brooklyn. The girl in front of him groaned and moaned and made squeaking “Ohs!” which he tried to ignore. He was drunk and needed to concentrate.
Climaxing had been taking longer lately. Last week he’d been having sex with a girl he’d found on Hook and he hadn’t been able to come at all. He’d tried every position he knew, but nothing worked. He thought it was a fluke, but he’d been behind this girl for like fifteen minutes now and nothing was happening. Think about Morgan and her girlfriend, he coached himself, imagining them here, in front of him, making out. Nothing. This girl’s ****** felt like a watermelon. It was work, he concluded: he’d been working too hard, getting too stressed about the deal. Maybe she’d take it in the ***? He snuck a finger toward her **** to test her reaction.
“Oooohh! You’re so dirty!” she cooed.
“Do you want it there?” he leaned forward and whispered.
“I’ve never done it before.”
Score.
“I want to be your first,” he heard himself say soothingly.
“I don’t know . . .”
“Relax. It’ll be fun.”
She bit her lip and closed her eyes. She was drunk, which would help. “Okay. There’s some lube in the nightstand. We need lube, right?”
Todd kissed the girl’s mouth. Screw Louisa: he didn’t need her. He carefully pulled her **** ****** apart and pushed slowly so she wouldn’t tense up. She didn’t. What a pro.
“That feels . . .” she started. “That feels . . . good. Oh yeah, that feels really”—she hiccupped as he pressed ***** *******—“really good,” she stammered.
Yes, that was it. ***** *****. He ****** ****** and ****** and **** ****, grunting, his brain melting into a blur as he sighed and fell over onto his back, hardly noticing as she curled her head into his shoulder and he passed out.
—
THE SUN WAS STARTING to rise when he woke up, and he shook his head to remember where he was. A blonde girl was drooling on his chest and he laughed as it came back to him. He pushed her away gently so he wouldn’t wake her up.
He pulled on his jeans and slipped out of the apartment without a sound. It was seven a.m. and he wondered how far he was from the office. His head was pounding—they’d been at Houston Hall until at least three in the morning—but he’d made it a great night and he’d make it a great day, just like he always did.
JUAN
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 9; SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
Are you seriously still at the office? Juan instant-messaged Neha when she responded to an e-mail he’d sent with the user demographics she’d requested. It was midnight in California, which meant it was three a.m. in New York, and the first e-mail she’d sent him that day had been time-stamped 7:15 a.m.
NEHA: Yes.
JUAN: Do you ever leave?
NEHA: Every few days.
He started to write LOL, then realized she wasn’t kidding. He’d worked those late nights back when Hook started, but he’d been building something, not entering numbers into documents no one was ever going to read.
JUAN: Do you like it?
NEHA: What?
JUAN: Investment banking.
NEHA: Sure. I think I’m going to get a promotion soon.
JUAN: Nice! Will that make your hours better?
NEHA: Probably not.
JUAN: Then why do you want it?
NEHA: You do less grunt work as an associate.
JUAN: Is that what Beau is? An associate?
NEHA: Yeah.
JUAN: He seems to have better hours. He’s usually hanging out with Julie when you guys are out here.
NEHA: That’s because he’s rich. He only got the job because his dad’s a client of the firm.
JUAN: Oh.
NEHA: Ugh. I am so sick of Tara.
JUAN: Why?
NEHA: She’s just so self-absorbed. She acts like her stuff is SO important and it isn’t—Todd does all the models. All she does is make sales decks.
Juan really liked Tara. She was friendly.
JUAN: I guess I hadn’t noticed.
NEHA: BRB.
Juan read the message and hoped he hadn’t offended her. He liked Neha. She was anal and worked way too hard, but she had an underlying feistiness that Juan thought was funny. He and Brad had decided to try to get her drunk at the party they were planning for the day Hook went public, just to see what would happen.
Juan went back to the database where he was pulling statistics on how many active users there were in various parts of the world.
This database was one of several that stored all the connections, ratings and private comments every user had made since downloading the app. Juan hadn’t looked at them since he
and Josh had first developed them, but doing so now made him realize the massive influence Hook now had with its five hundred million users. He especially liked the map of the world that had a dot for every user currently logged in, in their live location. There were millions of dots, all over the world, and Juan’s skin prickled thinking about all those people using a product he helped create.
He zoomed into Europe and down into France and then Paris and the Eiffel Tower and twenty-seven dots clustered around it. He clicked on one of the dots to see where the account was registered: Hamburg, Germany. He watched more information load and marveled at how cool it was that Henric Baumann was presently matching with Amelia Guilb—
Wait: why could he see their names?
Juan blinked at the computer. Provided information, like a user’s name, was supposed to be separate from what they tracked, like user location. He clicked on another dot: Benjamin Thibodeaux. He clicked Benjamin’s name and the computer prompted him to “Return to Database.” He clicked the link, but it redirected him to a different database than either of the two he’d been working in: this one cross-correlated private and collected data.
“What?” Juan looked at this new database. It was a list of all users, with columns of data indicating all prior history. There was a search field in the upper right corner. The IM box appeared again on top of the database.
NEHA: Sorry. Just got harassed by this stupid analyst.
JUAN: All good.
“I wonder,” he said out loud, then shook the thought away. He didn’t know where it had come from, but this database shouldn’t be here, and he definitely shouldn’t pry.
Then again, it was here, and he should at least know how it worked. She probably didn’t have a profile anyway.
But when he typed in her name, he found that Neha Patel, birthdate 12/03/92, zip code 10019 did, in fact, have a profile. He opened her information. She’d created an account two years ago and spent a month logging in around Manhattan. She’d swiped right for four guys but none had swiped right for her. She’d messaged one of them and then viewed his profile thirty-two times in four hours, but he’d never replied. She herself had only gotten thirty-six right-swipes, no reviews, and just one message, from a fat forty-two-year-old who looked like a serial killer.
Maybe they should use part of the funds from the IPO to create a service to help girls like Neha. They could develop an algorithm that would help her know what she needed to do to increase her likability, and that would increase her confidence, and then maybe she’d find someone, or at least feel less rejected.
As it was, he didn’t blame her for not using it anymore.
Then again, Juan had stopped using Hook, too. And he had better stats than that. Didn’t he?
Juan paused at the thought. Surely looking at his own information wasn’t breaking any rules.
Juan typed in his name, and the user information started to load. He decided he should get a beer for this, and went to the fridge. The office was empty, leaving him alone with the view of the Bay lights sparkling outside the floor-to-ceiling windows at the end of the room.
It would be nice to have a girlfriend, he thought, at moments like this. To show her this office, and sit with beers watching the lights shoot back and forth across the water.
Juan had never had a girlfriend. It wasn’t that he wasn’t interested in girls, or that he didn’t like a lot of them. And if he was being honest, he knew it wasn’t that girls weren’t interested in him. He’d just never really found one that was good enough. He needed someone smart and funny, sure, but he needed someone who got where he came from, too, and appreciated that he needed to take care of his mother back in East Palo Alto, and needed to not talk about his father’s murdered body in Juárez. But the girls he met in San Francisco . . . their lives were just too uncomplicated for them to understand all of that.
Juan sipped his Pacifico and opened the summary page for his own profile. He had 12,012 right-swipes and 180 reviews that netted him an average score of 8.7 out of 10. He looked at the distribution: 75 percent were 10s or close to it; 25 percent were 1s and 2s. He choked on his beer and realized he’d been expecting all perfect scores.
He clicked a positive review first: it was from Isabel. His heart caught in his throat. He’d been in love with Isabel his entire childhood. But she was cool and he was a dweeb and when they got to middle school she dated Roberto, who was two years ahead. Juan got a scholarship to the Menlo School and left her, along with all his other friends, in the ghetto public schools in EPA.
Isabel had given Juan a perfect 10 in every category: looks, ambition, sex, humor, commitment and intelligence. She’d tagged #takehometomom and #bestguyever and written in: “This boy is a PRINCE; get him while he’s HOTTTT <3.”
Juan felt his cheeks burn and all his old feelings rush back like he was thirteen and in love for the only time.
Juan skipped to a bad review. It took him a minute to recognize the name, but when he saw the face he remembered Lydia Karr from Berkeley. They’d been in a Math 51 study group together and he’d had too much to drink once at a party and made out with her on the dance floor. He hadn’t seen her since graduation in 2009, but the review was from six months ago. She’d given him 1s across the board, tagged #heartbreaker and #f*ck*gasshole and written: “Seems like a great guy until you realize he thinks he’s better than everyone. What an asshole. Stay away.”
Juan blinked. He didn’t think he was better; he’d just been through more. And he hadn’t been mean to her: they’d only made out once when they’d both had too much to drink. He closed the page. This is why he didn’t use Hook, or hook up with girls.
A text message on his iPhone gave him an excuse to look away, and he clicked out of the database.
Julie: New roommate is awesome!
He smiled at the phone. Julie thought everyone was awesome, but it was good to have her approval of their new roommate, Amanda.
Juan: GREAT! Dinner party Friday? See if she’s free and I’ll make empanadas.
Julie: Done!! Are you still at the office? We’re at that Kelly Jacobson fundraiser in the Mission if you want to join?
Juan: Still here. See you at home.
Everyone had been talking about the benefit to raise money for the dead girl’s memorial fund. It’s not that Juan didn’t care, he just knew how the story was going to play out and wanted nothing to do with it. Stanford kids like Kelly got their drugs from the East Palo Alto kids he’d grown up with. With Carl Camp’s war on drug dealers raging, Juan instinctively felt it was only a matter of time before his community got blamed for her death and the two sides of the track grew even more distant.
Juan clicked back into the database and typed to see if Julie had ever reviewed him. She had, giving him all 10s, except on commitment, where she’d given him a 1, #impossiblyhighstandards.
Did she really think that?
He had to stop.
He finished his beer and started to shut off his computer, but something made him turn back. What about Kelly?
He paused, staring at the screen, his fingers hovering above the keys. She was dead: how could it be violating her privacy when she was dead?
He typed in her name. There were over eighty million views since her death, with ratings ranging from 1, with tag #slut, to 10, with tag #victim. He filtered the results by date and scrolled to the beginning. She’d started using Hook last July, and met up with a few guys in New York. She’d used it again in New York on December 28 of last year. She’d logged in in California several times this year, but never rated anyone and only had one meet-up. Juan felt bad for her: she wasn’t a slut like the media said, or if she was, there were about 459 million Hook users who were a lot worse.
He got up to go, then turned back to look at the date of her single meet-up this year: March 6. He stopped, feeling his palms start to sweat. When had she died?
J
uan held his breath and Googled her name. He clicked on her Wikipedia article and blinked to make sure he was reading correctly. Time of death recorded as 4:47 a.m., March 6, 2014.
Juan clicked open the entry in the database. The time of meeting with the other user was 2:18 a.m. He clicked the map and scrolled into 558 Mayfield Avenue, Xanadu residence, Stanford University.
Despite all his attempts to not pay attention to the story over the past weeks, he knew Kelly’s friend had dropped her off, alone, at one a.m. The news had never said anything about her being with someone else afterward.
He clicked the profile of the other user, bracing himself. But the profile wouldn’t load. He refreshed. Nothing. Finally, a box popped up with the words PATH CORRUPTED.
“What the—” Juan blinked.
“You’re still here?”
Juan jumped. Josh Hart was standing in front of his computer: where had he come from?
Juan willed the blood back into his face and quickly clicked out of the windows open on his screen. “Yeah, just finishing up some things for Nick,” he said.
He could feel Josh’s eyes peering into him from above the desk.
“Everything going okay with him?” Josh asked. His face twitched. Juan knew Josh well enough from their long nights programming together to know his face only twitched when he was nervous or angry.
“Yeah.” Juan nodded, his heart still racing, wishing Josh would go away. “Everything’s great.”
“What are you looking at?” Josh said.
“Just some stats,” Juan lied to cover. “It’s crazy how much guys in New York flirt.”
“They’re like rabbits.”
“Yeah.”
Please go away, Juan screamed in his head. It felt like Josh was choking him with his gaze.
“Do you want to go to the symphony next week?” Josh asked. “I have a spare ticket. There’s a group of us that always go. And I was thinking it’s really been too long since you and I hung out.” The cadence of his voice was different, like he’d rehearsed the line.
The Underwriting Page 17