by Barry Lyga
“I’m serious. You do always have a smart comeback, and you’re a fast talker.” Madison counted out on her fingers. “What about debating?”
“We do have a good debate team,” Indira said.
“Debate team.” Cassie nodded. The two words felt right in her mouth. But more importantly, they would get her mom to ease up a bit. Hopefully.
10010600101
When the debate team met later that week, Cassie slipped into a seat in the back of the room just before the door closed. The meeting was held in one of the science rooms, so she had an entire lab table all to herself and a comforting view of the backs of the other team members. The room featured an impressive array of tech, including mini-projectors and voice tracking. At first glance, it didn’t seem like a horrible group. And when she’d told her mom that she’d joined, Rachel’s eyes had nearly bugged out from excitement and, behind that, relief.
The debate team president, an affable senior named Phil, jumped to the front of the room and began explaining how things would operate while he fiddled with his tablet, trying to get something to stream to the big screen mounted on the wall. Cassie tried to pay attention to his words, but her eyes mostly stayed on his fingers. They were jabbing at the touch screen in a way that made her wince.
“Dangit,” Phil muttered under his breath, interrupting himself and whacking the tablet. “Can someone ping the tech squad?”
Cassie shifted in her seat. She was well acquainted with the earlier version of the app Phil was using, thanks to some work she’d done at her old school. And thanks, of course, to her dad, who had taught her that the only way to master new technologies was to get your hands in there and play around with them. All Phil needed to do, probably, was —
The door opened. A dozen pairs of eyes tracked to the sound. And in walked Mr. CODE IS POETRY. (This time, though, his shirt said LIFE IS A HACK in the same white font. Menlo Regular, she thought.)
Immediately, Cassie shifted her eyes, hoping he wouldn’t notice her. (Again.) Heat pooled in her cheeks. She felt a driving need to gulp some fresh air, but there were only a few measly windows in the lab room, and students were probably not allowed to open them anyway. She kept her eyes on the scuffed lab table, suddenly very interested in the graffiti etched into it. She ran her fingers over Nate <3s Liza and tried to pretend she wasn’t on fire.
She hadn’t seen CODE IS POETRY guy since that first day of school … and not for lack of looking. After a few days of surveying every classroom, every hallway, every corner, Cassie had started to wonder if she’d imagined him. He was nowhere to be found. Once, she thought about asking Sarah or even Rowan, but she’d never been able to form the words she needed to describe him. She couldn’t picture herself asking, “Hey, do you know a guy with the most intense eyes you’ve ever seen who swoops down on you like a mysterious, sexy vulture?”
See? It was ridiculous. Who thinks vultures are sexy?
He was staring at her. Full-on staring, Cassie realized, her jaw growing slack. And she was staring back. She felt a cool wave wash over her, and for the first time in ages, a smile threatened to break out on her face. There was something about him, about his aura (and Cassie scoffed internally at even thinking the word aura), that made it impossible for her to look away. How had anyone at Westfield ever gotten anything done with a guy like him around all the time?
“Thanks for coming, Carson,” Phil said.
Mr. Mysterious had a name. Carson. She rolled it around on her tongue, trying out the taste of it, the shape of it. It knocked against her teeth like a drum: Car-son, Car-son. “No prob,” Carson said easily, breaking his side of the staring contest. “I’ll get you guys set up here.”
Cassie studied him as he approached the front of the room. Phil continued talking to the team members, but his words fell away and the room’s sounds muted as Cassie watched Carson fiddle with the big screen, starting the reboot process. She shook herself back to attention and tried to avert her eyes, but it didn’t work. Cassie had the distinct sense that Carson took up more energetic space than should be allowed for one person.
“Just as soon as my buddy here gets us going, I’ll show you all a short highlights reel from last year, where …”
Phil droned on and on, and Cassie desperately wondered if this was what debate team would be like: people talking about things they knew nothing about, and Cassie having to pretend she cared. Was this really worth it? But then her eyes landed on Carson again; his shoulder blades were sharp under his shirt. Cassie’s fingers itched to touch them, to trace them …
Oh, man. What was happening to her? Her anger just … evaporated. She felt so chill that she could have kicked back and propped her feet up on the table.
Then she frowned. The stream still wasn’t coming across, no matter how insistently Carson’s fingers punched away at the tablet screen. She remembered a time last year when her streaming had crapped out on her. Turned out to be a minor DNS daemon that somehow hadn’t gotten upgraded on her phone, so it couldn’t see the receiving streaming box on the network. She’d managed to fix it pretty easily. Would the code she’d changed then fix this problem?
She sighed. She knew it would. The question now was, should she tell Carson? What if he was offended? What if he thought she was showing off? What if —
Cassie stood up. Code superseded romance. Always.
“Uh,” Phil said, noticing Cassie nearby. “Yeah?”
She pointed at the tablet. Or, if she was being honest, at Carson. “I think I can help him fix that.”
“Oh, cool,” Phil said. “Step aside, Carson. Let the lady show you how it’s done.” A few people chuckled while Carson straightened to his full height just as Cassie reached him.
She’d met him only once, of course, but she’d replayed that memory countless times. And in all those replays, she’d somehow forgotten how her mouth lined up so perfectly with his when they were facing each other.
“Um. Hi. Sorry, I j-just …” Cassie stuttered. She was so close to him.
“This code is kinda wack,” Carson said, saving her from herself. He held out the tablet, his eyes as earnest as they’d been the first time he’d seen her. “If you wanna try …”
“I do,” she said quickly, then felt herself turning purple when she realized what she’d just said. I do. As if they were exchanging vows. Oh, God. She should just go jump out the lab window now.
She hunched over the tablet and began tapping the screen. After a few seconds, the coding muscles took over. Cassie could only imagine Rowan’s response if she ever tried to explain how she felt most like herself when she was knuckle-deep in code, in work so all-encompassing that everything else, the debate club and her mom and the president’s daughter and even Carson, just fell away.
She couldn’t remember a time when she wasn’t fluent in code, when it wasn’t as natural to her as breathing. Harlon would work at all hours of the day and night on a big project, for weeks or months at a time, before burning out and crashing — hard. He’d been showing her his work, testing her on her knowledge of the technologies he’d created since she was six. Working in that way, figuring out the universal language that each piece of software spoke in its own dialect, was an irresistible puzzle. It was just who she was.
Had been, she corrected herself. Since Harlon had gone, she hadn’t touched a keyboard or a compiler. Not until now.
“So, Menlo Regular, huh?” She kept her focus on the code, but couldn’t believe she’d just blurted that out. What an idiot. He probably didn’t even know what font was on his shirt. Who knew stuff like that other than weirdos like her?
“It’s got good spacing,” he said. “It’s the Xcode default for a reason. And it keeps a lot of my code on one line when I’m in the Terminal.”
She shrugged with a diffidence she didn’t actually feel. “I’m an Inconsolata girl myself. Looks good at all sizes.”
He considered this. “At least you don’t use Courier.”
“Or Monaco,” she replied.
He chuckled. Her cheeks flamed, and she was glad she wasn’t facing him.
A few moments before she actually fixed the problem, she knew it was going to happen. She’d found the first domino and was about to knock it down, and that in turn would cause a chain reaction of falling, piece after piece, until the code was perfect and the fix was in place. Rather than go through the laborious process of updating the tablet again, she was just fixing the twisted bit of code from memory. It was literally only ten lines that had changed over the update, but they were important ones.
Over her shoulder, Carson must have seen what she was seeing, too. His voice, low and serious, murmured in her ear. “Whoa. I wouldn’t have thought to try that.”
A dam inside her broke, rushing gratitude throughout her bones. She finished typing, recompiled the app and watched its search icon spin … until it found the room’s main screen. She met Carson’s eyes and let herself break into a grin. He grinned back.
“That is the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen,” Carson said, his voice pitched low.
She wondered for a moment if she should hashtag him for a microaggression, but … it actually didn’t bother her.
“Awesome!” Phil said loudly, clapping his hands twice, and it occurred to Cassie that he really had a knack for interrupting. “Hey, I didn’t catch your name. You’re new, yeah?”
Cassie nodded, hyperaware of Carson’s presence just behind her right shoulder, of how all of the debate team was watching her, waiting for her to say something. “Cassie,” she choked out.
“Well, Cassie, thanks for jumping in. Maybe you should join the tech club instead of debate team, right?” Phil laughed. Then he heartily patted Carson’s shoulder in that way only boys did.
“Maybe,” she said, finally remembering that these people — with the exception of maybe Carson — meant nothing to her. “I didn’t even know there was a tech club.”
Behind her shoulder, something shifted. Carson. He cleared his throat and murmured, “We meet tomorrow. You should come by. Deets,” he said, and held out a slip of paper.
Cassie stared at it. Who wrote things down? Still, as he paused against her gaze, she found the bravery she needed to adjust her body enough so that she could see him again, so that their mouths could line up like they were meant to. So that she could see his eyes again. Maybe they’d be enough to hold her in this envelope of fiery satisfaction that had settled on her for at least a little while longer.
“I should,” she agreed, and took the paper from him, jamming it into her pocket. And then Carson nodded, knocked three times on the table and left.
*
“Submissions, please!”
Indira grinned. “Me first! OK, ready?”
Rowan, Madison and Livvy nodded, their eyes flashing almost as bright as their smiles. Cassie nodded, too, although less enthusiastically than she assumed Rowan would have liked. She felt like Rowan had assigned them homework.
But, she reminded herself, this was what these girls did. What her friends did, she corrected herself. Rowan wanted them to post a joke that would start trending, and what Rowan wanted, she usually got. Get something trending, and a slew of Likes, and you …
You …
You get nothing, really. Like Rowan had said that one day — it just disappears the next time you post something. No one goes back and looks at the thing you did yesterday that got all those Likes.
I bet Carson isn’t wasting his time trolling for Likes. Cassie blushed just at the thought of him. Girl, what has gotten into you?
With a sigh, she sipped her slushy coffee drink, then wiped some stray whipped cream off her upper lip as Indira read her joke aloud. Her slushy coffee drink was, she realized, a misstep with this crowd. She’d arrived at the café first — she’d left early in case she couldn’t find it — and impulsively used the remainder of her gift card to buy the frothy shake, caramel and all, only to be asked by Rowan when she finally arrived if she was a child, otherwise why would she drink a milkshake like that, and why didn’t Cassie drink strong black coffee like everyone else?
While the girls cracked jokes, Cassie checked her phone, staring at the baby photo the first daughter had posted that morning. The president’s daughter was pretty in a modified way, with perfectly straight, white teeth, trendy-but-not-edgy hair and expertly contoured makeup that made it hard to determine what she really looked like. Her husband was generically handsome in a sort of bland way, with no remarkable physical qualities, good or bad. The baby, in all its wrinkled, blotchy ugliness, didn’t really look like either of them, but the more Cassie stared, the more she realized the perfect joke was tickling the front of her brain.
As she mulled it over, Rowan was busy roundly rejecting every idea presented to her. “We need something no one would dare say. Something outrageous enough to make waves and get some attention,” she urged, finishing her coffee. She fixed her eyes on Cassie. “What about you? I think it’s high time you proved your wit, don’t you?”
Four heads swiveled to look at Cassie, who looked longingly at the final dollop of whipped cream, knowing that she absolutely could not eat it with them watching her. “Um,” she stalled.
Rowan raised one eyebrow. Indira pursed her lips. Madison and Livvy smirked. Message received, Cassie thought. It was now or never: Cassie had to show them she wasn’t some sad sack who needed them to teach her what kind of coffee to drink. She’d been well known at her old school, respected. She knew things. She was no Sarah.
Cassie felt that spark inside her light up, a kindling of the old Cassie, the one who wasn’t always so pissed off, so brimming with poison. Her eyes grew fierce. She would show them.
Maybe her silly coffee drink was a muse, because just then, the perfect wording for that perfect joke landed in her mouth. She practically spat it out.
“Too bad the abortion didn’t take. #BetterLuckNextBaby.”
It felt like the entire coffee shop fell silent, but of course that couldn’t be true, Cassie realized. Behind her she could still hear the clinking of spoons against saucers, the shaking of cinnamon on lattes, and the ever-present dings and beeps of a connected world. But at the cozy little table Rowan was presiding over? Silence.
Cassie’s stomach fell. She’d forgotten that Rowan’s family were big supporters of the president. She opened her mouth to take it back.
But then: a whoop of shocked laughter so loud and deep that the barista had to shush them.
Tears streamed from Indira’s eyes. Livvy’s mouth had formed an O so large that it looked like she would permanently stretch out her lips. Madison was doubled over, her shoulders heaving, the dregs of her coffee spilled over the table.
And then there was Rowan, who relaxed back into the cozy armchair she’d commandeered, crossed her arms and grinned. There was a hint of wickedness in her smile that made Cassie wonder if Rowan was about to steal her joke, send it out herself and get all the credit. Buoyed by the dramatic responses from the other girls — and before Rowan could steal her thunder — Cassie grabbed her phone and thumbed out the message. She hit Send.
“Done,” she said, her casual tone hiding her racing heart and sweaty palms. Panic and guilt swept through her, quickly knocked away by reason: the president’s daughter was gorgeous and rich and powerful and had millions of followers. Her dad was the president. Cassie’s dad was dead. She was a nobody. Goddesses didn’t worry about the ants around their feet.
Rowan grinned even wider. She had a sheen in her eyes that Cassie mistook for pride. “Edgy, funny and timely. Well, well, well. Cassie McKinney, now you’re really one of us.”
*
303 users have Condemned @CassieMcK39 for “Too bad the abortion didn’t take. #BetterLuckNextBaby”
289 users have Liked @CassieMcK
39 for “Too bad the abortion didn’t take. #BetterLuckNextBaby”
Oh, snap. That’s a sick joke! REBLINQ: @CassieMcK39: Too bad the abortion didn’t take. #BetterLuckNextBaby
2100 users have Condemned @CassieMcK39 for “Too bad the abortion didn’t take. #BetterLuckNextBaby”
LOL! Hahahahaha REBLINQ: @CassieMcK39: Too bad the abortion didn’t take. #BetterLuckNextBaby
Dude, abortion’s not funny, this chick is sick. #SickChick REBLINQ: @CassieMcK39: Too bad the abortion didn’t take. #BetterLuckNextBaby
I mean, she’s not wrong. REBLINQ: @CassieMcK39: Too bad the abortion didn’t take. #BetterLuckNextBaby
4569 users have Liked @CassieMcK39 for “Too bad the abortion didn’t take. #BetterLuckNextBaby”
*pops popcorn* This thread’s gonna be funny. REBLINQ: @CassieMcK39: Too bad the abortion didn’t take. #BetterLuckNextBaby
TRENDING NEWS ALERT: We’re keeping an eye on a recent BLINQ from @CassieMcK39: tnewsalert.hive.gov/4211
This feels kind of … out of bounds, no? REBLINQ: @CassieMcK39: Too bad the abortion didn’t take. #BetterLuckNextBaby
18 403 users have Liked @CassieMcK39 for “Too bad the abortion didn’t take. #BetterLuckNextBaby”
Who is this @CassieMcK39? Hey @Bombastic_Fantastic99999 can you doxx her?
I appreciate a gal who can zing a sitting pres. REBLINQ: @CassieMcK39: Too bad the abortion didn’t take. #BetterLuckNextBaby
Seriously, what are they teaching kids in schools these days?
She should be expelled. REBLINQ: @CassieMcK39: Too bad the abortion didn’t take. #BetterLuckNextBaby
20 050 users have Condemned @CassieMcK39 for “Too bad the abortion didn’t take. #BetterLuckNextBaby”
*
By the time Indira suggested they grab dinner and Rowan had decreed sushi, Cassie’s BLINQ had garnered thousands of reBLINQs and she had a solid “neutral/viral” ratio. It was the first time she’d shared anything that even remotely approached viral. The air seemed to crackle around her; her body felt jumpy, like it knew something she didn’t.