A compliment. It was disarming.
“How’d you learn to play?” he asked.
“My dad. He’s something of a scientist. He may not know how to heat up canned soup or keep track of his wallet, but he knows about angles.”
Felix walked closer so he was standing at her side, then leaned over with his forearms on the table. “Good thing you’ve got your mom to keep it all together.”
“Usually. But she’s working full time and going to school this year. So, I get to heat up canned soup and find wallets on my own.” She felt her face warm. “Sorry. I’ll find my shot.”
“No, don’t be sorry.” Felix was quiet for a second. “My mom stays busy, too, but with ridiculous stuff like spas and beach trips. And my dad likes to keep track of things a little too much. But canned soup and wallets have nothing on angles. What angle are you going for here? Seventy degrees to pocket the purple?”
“What else?” She got in position and hit. But she hit too fast, and the spinning purple stripe shimmied away from the pocket and flew along the green felt, too far to the left.
“Close,” he said. And with a series of smooth, fast shots, he pocketed all of his balls, including the eight ball. He bowed forward slightly and held his right hand out for a conciliatory shake. “Nice game. And conversation. Maybe we can play another round?”
Gin started to reach out her hand, her fingers tingling at the thought of what it would be like to touch his broad palm, his knobby fingers.
But suddenly, Caitlin was there, laughing and wrapping one arm around Felix’s shoulder. “No one can beat the Felix-meister.” She squeezed her body closer to Felix and gave Gin a conciliatory wink. “But you’re nice to be such a good sport.”
Gin pulled her hand back fast and tucked her hair behind her ear, ignoring the clenching feeling in her stomach. “Any time.”
As Caitlin tugged Felix off to a group at the corner, he managed to give Gin a small wave.
The restaurant suddenly felt too warm, too loud, and she headed for the door. Outside, she walked to the edge of the building—far enough to get away from the crowd but still in a safe and well-lit area. It was the suburbs of Washington, DC, after all. She leaned against the cool brick wall and watched cars zoom down the street and people funnel in and out of bars. A breeze blew, and she shivered.
She sat there for at least fifteen minutes, studying a patch of dark sky, annoyed at herself for not checking TimeKeeper before she came. Obviously, it would’ve been better if she had gone home. She started walking back, ready to tell Hannah she wanted to leave. Before going inside, she happened to look across the street.
There was a row of elm trees, their fall leaves shining yellow in the light of a streetlamp. And in the middle, directly under one tree, was Felix. Arms at his side, looking up.
Gin searched the tree branches, her heart beating faster. It was dark and hard to see from so far away, and at first, she was sure there was nothing.
But then a patch of leaves moved. Something was in a branch above him. She stepped forward, eyes squinting. Then she saw it.
A crow.
It hopped twice and cocked its head, watching.
Her breath stopped, and she felt a shiver reach down into her stomach. And she decided, then and there, it had been enough waiting, enough mystery. She would cross the street and stand at Felix’s side and ask what, exactly, the crows were all about. She took a deep breath and looked down the street for traffic.
But as she was about to start across, the door to the pizzeria opened, and a group of laughing teenagers filed out. Gin stepped back to the brick wall so they could pass. Then she looked back across the street.
Felix and the crow were gone.
Gin stopped the car in front of Hannah’s house, as Hannah finished her monologue on what Aidan was like, the half-byte version being that he was “nice but too preppy.”
“You do tend to go for the grungy deadbeats more,” Gin said.
Hannah giggled, her lips pressed together, stifling a smile.
“Wait a minute.” Gin turned, getting a better look at Hannah. “You like him, don’t you?”
Hannah scrunched her nose. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. Let’s just say I was mildly surprised. He wasn’t bad.” She wound a strand of her light hair around her finger. “Anyway, I better go—thanks again for the ride.”
As Hannah walked in, Gin drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. Maybe somehow, at some level, Love Fractal was working. Which meant maybe there was a chance it’d work for Gin, too.
When Gin got home, she saw the email from Lucas. He had sent the program. All Gin had to do was run it.
She opened it and typed in the address of the first school’s intranet. After a few long minutes, a little box flashed on the screen showing it was finished.
She downloaded the data file, took a deep breath, and clicked.
It was full—rows and rows of data on students’ extracurriculars, class schedules, yearbook photos. Technically, it was all public information, but it would have taken her months to gather it without the program.
And this data was only from one school.
There was no way she was going to sleep now. She rubbed her hands together, outlining the data extraction steps in her mind: clean it, graph it, split it into test and training sets, then fit the model for some good cross-validation.
To do all of that would take the entire weekend, if she was fast, efficient, and somewhat lucky.
No, not lucky. That left too much to chance. Fast and efficient would be enough.
// Eleven
It smelled like pancakes. Which meant it was Sunday.
If there was one event hardcoded into TimeKeeper, it was Gin’s dad’s pancake breakfast every Sunday. Even though he could barely heat up a microwave dinner, he could somehow make pancakes.
Gin rubbed her eyes and stretched. She should shower. She couldn’t remember the last time she had worked for that long. If it weren’t for the pancakes, she wouldn’t be sure it was Sunday.
Saturday felt like a dream. Gin had worked all day and most of the night, careful to go to sleep before her mom’s shift ended in an effort to avoid another lecture.
But it had been worth it. She had run the data in different ways and had come up with thirty-two distinct groups of students. The final step was to figure out which groups were most compatible.
Then, when someone took the Love Fractal’s questionnaire, they’d be placed in a group. Algorithms would search through compatible groups, finding people with a facial structure similar to the participant’s preferred look, and would present those as the top matches.
Gin’s stomach rumbled, and she slipped downstairs, quiet as she passed her parents’ room where her mom was still sleeping.
Her dad was sitting at the table in his white undershirt and pajama bottoms, his hair sticking up in tufts. He was writing furiously in a notebook, three plates with five pancakes each already on the table.
“Hi, Dad,” she finally said.
He put the notebook down and looked up. “How’s my Gin-Gin this morning?”
“Good.” She started in on a wedge of the still-hot pancakes, the syrup thick and sweet. “How’s whatever you’re working on?” She was suddenly starving and wondered if she had even had dinner the night before.
“Fine, fine. It’s all very nebulous right now. But I feel it forming. Like making pancakes. When the bubbles start to burst, and you know to flip. That’s what it feels like.”
“That’s good, right?”
“Yes, definitely.” He waved his fork in the air a few times as though it helped him think. “How about you—any bubbles bursting in your work?”
“Maybe. I’m making progress on this one program.”
“Very good—what’s it about?” He leaned forward, his eyes suddenly lit up.
The last thing Gin wanted to talk with her dad about was a dating program designed to help h
er find a boyfriend. “Just something for class. But I’ve been meaning to tell you, Ms. Sandlin paired me up with Felix Gartner. I think his dad is the head of Odin or something.”
Her dad stopped mid-bite, the syrup dripping to his plate. “Grant Gartner?”
“That’s him.”
“I knew Grant Gartner had a son, but I didn’t know he was your age. Is he a good modeler?”
“Yes. And he’s smart. The weird thing is, I think he works with crows—like trains them or something.” If she couldn’t work up the courage to ask Felix about the crows, she could at least ask her dad.
“Hmmm, that’s interesting. I feel like I remember something about Grant Gartner keeping a crow as a pet. I’d have to look it up.”
“Maybe it’s like a weird hobby?”
Her dad snorted. “If there’s one thing I know about Grant Gartner, it’s that he’s a man who doesn’t do hobbies. If he has crows, there’s a purpose to them. But this boy—Francis?”
“Felix.”
“Felix. Is he a good partner? A team player?”
“Yes, he’s fine.”
“Good.” Her dad looked up, thinking. “Grant Gartner. Someone should study that man’s mind. Somehow he always manages to be one step ahead of everyone else. Like today—there’s another article here . . .”
He flipped through the paper and pointed to a story on the front page of the business section. Odin unveils Amethyst 2.0. Gin glanced through the article—it was all about Odin’s latest steps to create a mobile phone that used quantum cryptography. Several companies had announced similar technologies months earlier, but somehow Odin beat them to the production line.
“Grant Gartner is the sort of man who gets what he wants. Who knows—his son might be, too.” He rubbed his hands together. “More pancakes?”
She shook her head. She never wanted more pancakes. She’d only made it through a whole stack twice. Anyway, hearing her dad talk about the Gartners made her feel unsettled.
“I’m going to get back to work.” He stood, patting his stomach. “That bubble is growing. And if I’m near my whiteboard, it just might pop.”
Gin cleaned up, setting her mom’s plate of pancakes at the side of the stove. Most likely, they wouldn’t be eaten until dinner.
By early evening, Gin’s head hurt. The new and improved Love Fractal was ready for testing. If she wanted, she could outline a testing protocol. But her brain was full. And she was tired of staring at her computer screen.
TimeKeeper’s first recommendation was to go for a walk to clear her mind, but it was drizzly and cold. So she took recommendation two; she texted Hannah.
Hannah wrote back right away, saying she was about to meet Aidan at a coffee shop to “really interview” him this time—whatever that meant—and that she’d update Gin later.
There was nothing else to do. Gin tried a movie, but even that couldn’t hold her attention. She was suddenly antsy, and she started scrolling through Love Fractal, scanning the code, glancing at the photos.
She clicked through the photos from her school, and it didn’t take long to come across him. Felix. With his easy smile and shaggy hair.
And before Gin knew what she was doing, she had started the model.
Headshots popped up, and she rated them. Pleasant, pleasant, neutral, unpleasant. The questionnaire opened, and she answered the questions honestly as though she were seeing them for the first time.
Soon, the model was processing her answers. Thirty percent, fifty percent, ninety percent complete.
It felt like a dream, seeing the progress bar move along. Like she hadn’t just run this program she’d worked on for so long, this program that would hopefully change her life.
And then, it was finished.
Finished. Results were waiting at the click of a button. Not just any results, but her results with the new, expanded, statistically significant data set. She hadn’t planned on taking the test so soon. But she just had.
She bit her lip, hard. Her finger was poised above the mouse. One click, and she’d know.
She should wait to look. It’d be better to run the program on herself after the testing was finished. These results likely wouldn’t be valid. Seeing them could even skew her efforts to finish the program.
Then again, maybe it wouldn’t hurt anything. Maybe she should see her results. Maybe it would even help.
With a deep breath, she clicked.
And there, on her screen, were three photos. Three guys. And her heart dropped.
She stared at the photos, trying to figure out why she felt disappointed. To begin with, none were from Monroe, which wasn’t a surprise now that she had data from nine local high schools. But somehow, she had hoped to know at least one.
And second, these guys weren’t exactly what she’d hoped for. It was hard to put her finger on why. They sounded smart enough: one on math team, two in all honors classes. And they were relatively cute.
She looked harder at their photos, willing herself to feel something. A bit of attraction, maybe. But there was nothing, not even a spark.
Maybe that was normal. When Hannah first saw her matches, she had laughed. And now she liked Aidan. Once Gin spent some time with these guys, she might be surprised.
She closed the program and, without another thought, started reading ahead for physics.
A few chapters in, there was a knock at Gin’s door, and her mom peeked in.
“I got ice cream. And was thinking of ordering that new movie—the one with Daniel Radcliffe. Want to watch? It’s not Harry Potter, but it’ll be fun.”
Gin left her book open but pushed it to the end of her bed. Ice cream and a movie sounded surprisingly good.
“Okay. I guess I could use a break.”
It wasn’t until they were halfway through the movie, and Gin had eaten two bowls of ice cream that everything finally made sense: Gin wasn’t disappointed because of how the guys looked or who they were.
It was about who they weren’t.
None of them were Felix.
After school on Monday, Gin sat against the cool brick building, waiting for Hannah. It was one of those sharp, blue, late-October afternoons, when everything was shiny. The tips of bird wings, the pale limbs on trees, the chrome on cars. Students got on buses, sports teams jogged to the athletic fields, the marching band streamed out of the band room with flashing instruments.
“Hey.” Hannah stood there, looking down. “You look lost in your thoughts. Or maybe just lost?”
Gin stood, brushing off her pants. “No, I’m good. Let’s go.”
“Actually, would you mind if I got a ride with Aidan? He has a break before practice and was going to show me this old music store in town. Apparently, he plays guitar.”
Gin’s mouth dropped. “No way. You mean, this is actually happening?”
Hannah tossed her hair and laughed. “Hard to say. There’s something about him that’s . . . attractive. And I don’t just mean he’s cute, you know? But I still have Noah to think about. I’m taking this seriously. This is actual research.”
“Okay, do your research. I’ve got to finish the model anyway. But if Love Fractal works, it’d be incredible.” That was an understatement. A fully functioning dating model might be the thing that got Gin into Harvard, possibly with a scholarship so she could afford it.
Aidan walked out of the front doors, and Hannah squeezed Gin’s hand. “All right, I’m outta here.” Then she was off, headed towards Aidan, her face set to her casually interested look.
As Gin pulled her bag over her shoulder, an old, white 4Runner drove by, duct-taped and dented and totally out of place among the student body’s fleet of Range Rovers and Audis.
Gin glanced up at the driver and couldn’t help shaking her head. Leave it to Felix—the richest boy in school—to drive a clunker.
Felix looked in Gin’s direction, and their eyes met for a second. He raised his eyebrows, as if sayi
ng hi, but she busied herself with her phone. When she finally looked back up, the car was gone.
// Twelve
It was Tuesday night, almost Thanksgiving break. Homecoming had come and gone and not surprisingly, no one had asked Gin to go. Decider helped her keep the dance in perspective—Focus on the big picture now, and there will be time for fun later.
Maybe by prom, she’d have hit it off with one of the guys from her results.
Hannah had gone to homecoming with Aidan. A casual date, nothing serious—which by Hannah’s standards could definitely mean she was falling for him.
Outside, it was cold and gray, the best weather for studying, and Gin had resolved to stay holed up in her room. College applications weren’t due for another month, but she wanted to have everything ready early. Between the applications and her computer simulations, it felt like most of her work was focused on a future life.
Which probably wouldn’t be approved by crazy Mr. Ryan and his Ancient-but-not-obsolete Worldviews class. Not that he was actually crazy. Or that she disliked the class. She found it fascinating. Like the other day, as part of a unit on Asian history, they were talking about haiku, the sparse, 5-7-5 poetry invented by a Buddhist monk. It was all about using a few words to express a moment in time. Not past or future, but something in the present. Not the idea of an experience, but the experience itself.
Which was ironic since reading someone’s haiku was reading his idea of the experience, but Gin didn’t point that out.
Mr. Ryan had written one on the board in his yellow chalk:
Old Pond.
A frog jumps in—
Plop.
They had talked about the poem for a while in class. How it contrasted stillness and action. The frog as a sign of spring. What an old pond actually was. How it made them feel. Gin had raised her hand to point out that the words didn’t fit the 5-7-5 pattern, to which Mr. Ryan reminded her that the poem was originally written in Japanese.
She YouTubed the poem when she got home and found an old video that started with a low frog ribbit, moved to a strange burst of swing music, then showcased a woman reading the poem in Japanese: Furu ike ya; kawazu tobikomu; mizu no oto. That was followed by sounds of water dripping as the English version of the poem was read in a low, toadish voice.
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