If You, Then Me

by Yvonne Woon

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  It was the first time neither of us seemed to know what to say, and we stood there awkwardly, unsure why we suddenly had nothing to talk about.

  “You forgot your sandwich,” a man who was presumably his dad called from the driver’s seat and held a Tupperware out the window. He was blasting music, bobbing his head, and grinning like he took pride in embarrassing Mast in this particular way.

  Mast took the Tupperware sheepishly. “My mom is under the impression that I have no access to food outside of her house.” The song rose to a crescendo and his dad drummed the steering wheel, making Mast wince. “Are all dads this passionate about Led Zeppelin?”

  “It’s a dad rule,” his dad called out, then stuck his head out the window and waved at me.

  I could see the family resemblance. He looked like Mast might in twenty years if he gained forty pounds and replaced all of his T-shirts with golf polos. I liked him immediately. He looked happy and untroubled, like a man who’d stopped caring what other people thought about him and had whittled down his priority list to the real pleasures in life.

  “I’m not embarrassing him, am I?” his dad asked me with a grin.

  I laughed. “Not at all.”

  We stood there awkwardly until Mast interjected. “Right, Dad, this is my . . . colleague. My classmate. I mean, my friend, I guess.”

  “Hello, friend, I guess,” his dad said.

  “I’m Xia,” I said.

  “Right, this is my Xia,” Mast corrected. “I mean, not mine. I don’t own her or anything. This is just Xia.”

  His father seemed amused by how Mast’s face was turning red. “Hello, just Xia.”

  “Isn’t it time for you to go?” Mast said to him. “You have that afternoon appointment . . . ?”

  “Appointment?”

  Mast gave him a threatening look, and his dad slowly nodded in realization. “Oh, right. The appointment. Well, it was nice meeting you, just Xia.”

  “You too,” I said.

  Mast looked relieved as he drove off. “Well, that was smooth,” he said. “It’s almost like I was nervous or something.”

  “It’s normal to be nervous around illustrious colleagues,” I teased.

  Mast laughed and flushed all over again. “I know this is a little unprofessional, considering we’re colleagues and all, but since we shared a straw, I was wondering what you’re doing on Friday night.”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Me neither. Want to do nothing together?”

  I tried not to smile. “I’d love to.”

  Thirteen

  The message had been sitting in my inbox for almost sixteen hours before I noticed it.

  It happened like this. I went back to my dorm room after talking to Mast and sank into my bed for an unspecified amount of time and stared at the sun stretching across the ceiling, smiling and feeling like I had passed through a portal to a parallel life, where I got everything I wanted at exactly the right time.

  I eventually roused myself and started my programming assignment, which was particularly annoying, even for Kowalski. While I sketched out a binary tree, then crumpled the paper and sketched a new one, my mind kept drifting to Mast. What would we do on Friday? Though the week hadn’t started yet, I already wished it was over so I could get to our date faster.

  Frustrated with my assignment, I pushed my papers aside and opened BitBop, wondering if anyone had advice on balanced binary trees. That’s when I saw it.

  A new message from ObjectPermanence, which had been languishing in my inbox since the night before. Normally I checked at least once a day to see if he’d written me, but I’d been so distracted by Mast that I hadn’t even thought about ObjectPermanence since the day before.

  NEW MESSAGE FROM U/OBJECTPERMANENCE:

  I figured I’d send this on the off-chance that you’re up. I have to admit, I’m a little drunk, but drunk in a good way. Do you drink? I do sometimes, but I try not to because it makes me feel dumb, and then I wake up the next morning wondering if I said anything stupid. I wonder if I’ll feel that way about this message [insert nervous laughter].

  I had a good night tonight. When I’m happy, I think of you. Is that weird to admit? I’ve never met you and here I am sitting in my room in the middle of the night, wanting to tell you about my evening.

  Which brings me to your message. Of course you know me. “Knowing” someone doesn’t just mean knowing facts about them. I know plenty of facts about my dad, for example. I know where he lives, what he looks like, what he orders at restaurants. But I don’t know what makes him happy, what he worries about at night, what scares him or makes him feel like he’s alive. So do I really know him? Not like I know you.

  Or maybe you can never really know someone. If you can, I’m not sure I even want to. What would be the fun in that? I think the best kind of relationships are the ones where you never stop getting to know each other. It means you’re changing. It means you’re alive.

  That’s part of the reason why I like you. Even though I feel like I know you, I can never predict what you’re going to say next. I love that.

  But if you really need to know details, here are a few.

  I eat corn on the cob typewriter style. I sleep on my stomach, hugging a scrunched-up pillow. I’ll always eat ice cream cake with a fork, no matter how many times people shame me for it. I love peanut butter and banana sandwiches. I listen to the same song on repeat until I get tired of it, then I move on to a new one. I always wished I had braces when I was a kid because they seemed cool. I still care very much about what other people think of me, you especially.

  I hope you’re having a good night, wherever you are. Did you figure out what you’re going to do about school?

  I let out a long exhale and sank into my chair. He was still there, as real as Mast, as real as a wet drunken kiss.

  I wondered what had happened that made his night so great, and, indulging myself, I clicked on his username. It was a hobby of mine, perusing his post history to see what he was doing. Rarely did I find anything interesting. ObjectPermanence was particularly good at commenting without revealing any hard information about himself, so when I saw that he’d created a new post just hours before, in a programming subgroup that I didn’t subscribe to, I assumed it would be more of the same.

  I clicked on his post, innocently titled, Question about Database Programming Assignment, ready to skim it, but didn’t even make it to the second sentence before I froze.

  So I have this assignment where I’m supposed to design a data structure that stores a sequence of elements and supports a series of operations that our teacher provided in time O(log n).

  My heart raced. It couldn’t be.

  He went on to list a series of operations that looked unbelievably familiar. He was asking for help with an issue he was having designing a balanced binary tree—an issue that I was intimately familiar with because I’d been working on the exact same assignment.

  I shuffled through my desk until I found Kowalski’s assignment and compared the wording to ObjectPermanence’s posting. I felt suddenly light-headed. They were almost identical.

  Was it possible that somewhere else in the country, a programming teacher was assigning the exact same homework to ObjectPermanence as Kowalski was assigning to me? How many teenagers even took programming classes this advanced in high school? The more I thought about it, the more I knew there was only one answer.

  ObjectPermanence wasn’t a stranger at all. All along, he’d been right here, at the Foundry.

  “Object permanence is the understanding that objects exist even when we don’t perceive them,” Amina read from the internet.

  I’d abandoned my homework and was sitting on her bed with my laptop, scrolling through ObjectPermanence’s post history, scouring it for the hundredth time for some new detail that might reveal his identity. After my discovery, I’d texted Gina, then burst into Amina’s room and told h
er everything.

  “For example,” Amina continued to read, “when a ball is resting on a bed and then is subsequently hidden under a blanket, we understand that the ball still exists, even though we cannot see it, hear it, smell it, taste it, or touch it. Object permanence is a function of early memory. Infants usually begin acquiring it at four months old, and fully grasp it by their first birthday.”

  “It’s a good username,” I said.

  “It is,” Amina conceded. “The irony is that you have seen him. You just didn’t know it.”

  I sank into her pillows. “I still can’t believe it.”

  “Who do you think it is?”

  “Mast,” I said. “I know it is.” It had to be. I needed it to be.

  All of ObjectPermanence’s messages lined up exactly with my timeline with Mast. On the night of the welcome dinner, ObjectPermanence wrote to me that he’d done something he wasn’t proud of. That was the same night that Mast had conveniently omitted the fact that he was doing AI, too, and that his real name was Ben. Mast had later said that he liked romantic comedies, which ObjectPermanence had also admitted to. Then, on the night after the DrinkMaiden party, he’d messaged me that he was drunk and that he’d had a good night. That was the same night that Mast had kissed me.

  “Do you actually know it, or do you ‘know’ it?” Amina asked, with air quotes.

  “The latter, if we’re being technical,” I admitted, “but I feel pretty confident.”

  Sure, there were a few troubling differences, most notably that his dad didn’t exactly work in tech, and that they seemed to have a good relationship unlike ObjectPermanence and his dad. But really, what did I know about Mast’s dad? They seemed to get along the one time I saw them together, but maybe Mast felt differently.

  “Well, there’s one way to find out.” Amina tore a piece of paper out of her notebook. “There are fifteen boys at the Foundry,” she said, writing their names down. “Let’s narrow it down. What do we know so far about this ObjectPermanence?”

  I’d been working on a list of everything I knew about him, which I’d compiled from all of his messages, comments, and posts. I read it to her. “He likes the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.”

  “Not helpful.”

  “He has a sister. Just like Mast.”

  “Older? Younger?”

  “Unclear.”

  “Okay, well, we can at least cross out Andy Chen and Ben Goldstein, who are only children.”

  “He likes peanut butter and banana sandwiches.”

  “Who knows.”

  “His dad works in tech and sounds like an asshole.”

  “The tech part is useful,” Amina said. “That means we can cross out Ravi and Marcus.” She leaned over her computer and started typing. “I have to double check what Josh Steinman’s dad does. Oh—yeah, we can cross him out, too.” She paused, as if not wanting to break it to me. “And we can also cross out Mast.”

  I bristled at her suggestion. “I think that’s a little premature.”

  “His dad is a professor at Stanford.”

  “Yeah, but he’s a professor of Business and Technology.”

  Amina looked unconvinced. “I don’t know. If my dad were a professor, I’d call him a professor. I wouldn’t say he worked in tech.”

  “But you might if you were talking anonymously online.”

  I could tell Amina was trying to humor me. “I don’t know.”

  “What does working in tech even mean, anyway?” I said. “He could have a patent or something. Maybe he’s consulting with a tech company. I just think that we shouldn’t cross him off until we have more information.”

  Amina tapped her pencil against her lips. “Yeah, okay, maybe. We can keep him for now.”

  Though it was obvious that she was only keeping him on the list because I wanted her to, I felt relieved. It still could be him.

  “He’s from the Bay Area,” I continued. “Because he said he’s going to school nearby. That fits with Mast, too.”

  “So we can cross off Mike Manning, Drew Farmington, and Micah Levine, and I’m going to go ahead and cross off Josh Horowitz and Mike McCalaster because they like guys and therefore probably wouldn’t be flirting with you in such an overtly hetero way. What else?”

  “He sleeps on his stomach. He eats corn on the cob typewriter style.”

  Amina looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language.

  “You know, left to right. It means he’s neat and treats things gently.”

  Amina raised an eyebrow. “I’m pretty sure you can’t read that much into a piece of corn, but it’s your fantasy.”

  “He eats ice cream cake with a fork—”

  “What?” Amina said interrupting me. “He’s clearly a psychopath. Are you sure you really want to know who this guy is?”

  “He’s not a psychopath and yes, I’m sure.”

  “He listens to the same song on repeat.”

  “As does everyone else.”

  “And never had braces as a kid but wished he did.”

  “Could be useful, if you can extract that information from the remaining names. Anything else?”

  “He’s smart,” I said. “And kind and funny.”

  Amina rolled her eyes. “Okay, tender heart, but I’m asking for hard data.”

  “That’s data,” I protested.

  “It’s subjective. You have no idea how his online persona translates to real life. Maybe he’s super quiet. Maybe he’s a jerk. Maybe he can only be funny in writing.”

  “I highly doubt he’s a jerk in person. But okay, I’ll humor you. So who’s left?”

  Amina handed the paper to me. The final list read:

  Mast (Ben) Matsuo*

  Mike Flores

  AJ Pierce

  Mike McCalaster

  Josh Steinman

  Micah Levine

  Drew Farmington

  Andy Chen

  Ben Goldstein

  Mike Manning

  Josh Horowitz

  Arun Krishna

  Marcus Varner

  Arthur Kim

  Ravi Vora

  *maybe

  “Mike Flores, AJ, Arun, Arthur, and Mast,” I read, ignoring Mast’s asterisk.

  “What if it’s AJ?” Amina said, horrified.

  “It can’t be. There’s no way.”

  Amina winced. “Or Arun. He’s so arrogant. He name-drops almost every sentence. Next time you talk to him, count how many times. The number will astound you.”

  “ObjectPermanence would never do that,” I said. “It can’t be him. Or Mike Flores—he’s dating Kate. He wouldn’t be talking to another girl online.”

  Amina gave me an apologetic shrug. “People do all sorts of things you’d never expect them to do online. You have to entertain the possibility that it could be any of these guys. Maybe Arun is totally different online. Maybe Mike flirts with other girls when Kate’s not around. Maybe AJ contains multitudes.”

  I considered Arthur. I didn’t know much about him other than our brief but endearing encounter at the party and that he was there to work on his start-up, Dare Me, which was basically an enhanced version of Truth or Dare and was already wildly popular. He was a little class-clowny, though seemed friendly and generally inoffensive. Still, I’d always pictured ObjectPermanence as a little less goofy. “I guess it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if it turned out to be Arthur. Not that it will be. Because it’s Mast.”

  “You do realize that if it is Mast, that means he was messaging another girl right after kissing you.”

  “But that other girl is also me, which makes it not as bad,” I reasoned. “And also his message was about how good of a night he had.”

  “Are you trying to convince me or yourself?”

  I ignored her question. “And anyway, I was messaging a boy right after kissing Mast, so it kind of makes us even.”

  Amina crossed her arms. “Mast doesn’t fit all of the criteria.”

  “But the crit
eria he does fit is so perfect that maybe we don’t have all the information we need. I mean, come on. The welcome dinner? Having a good night at the party?”

  “But all of those things could work for AJ, too,” Amina added. “Think about it. At the welcome dinner, he was the one who humiliated you. He was also at the party and was drunk, and I’m pretty sure he was having a good time, as was basically everyone else.”

  It couldn’t be AJ; didn’t she see that?

  “ObjectPermanence also said that I wouldn’t like him if I met him in person,” I said. “And at first, I didn’t like Mast in person.”

  “You didn’t like AJ either,” Amina countered.

  “I don’t like AJ, as in present tense, as in ongoing,” I corrected.

  Amina shrugged. “It fits.”

  “Do you want it to be AJ?” I said, growing exasperated.

  “Of course not. But I think you want it to be Mast so badly that you’re overlooking key data points.”

  “It could be him,” I insisted. “Everything fits. Well . . . mostly.”

  Amina gave me a pointed look. “Exactly. Mostly.”

  I hadn’t convinced her, but I didn’t care. Sure, some of the details didn’t match, but as ObjectPermanence had said, you don’t need facts to really know someone. It was Mast. I could feel it. All I needed to do was find a way to prove it.

  Fourteen

  Romy’s Steakhouse was perched in the hills of Portola Valley. The drive up, through winding roads, made my already-nervous stomach flip. It was an old wooden lodge surrounded by fog that had crept in from the forest and settled around the windows, as though the restaurant naturally warranted privacy. The lot was full of expensive sports cars when the Foundry SUV dropped me off. They gleamed like gems as I walked past them toward the door.

  The restaurant hadn’t been updated since the 1970s. It had white tablecloths and moody floral paintings and green light fixtures that gave it the ambience of a grandfather’s study.

  “I’m here to meet Mitzy Erst,” I said to the host, who looked like a boy from a period movie set in a pioneer town.