If You, Then Me

by Yvonne Woon

  “Yeah,” I said, wondering what I had done to betray myself. “Why?”

  “You’re just checking your phone a lot,” Mast said.

  “I’m just waiting for something from Mitzy,” I said. “She said she was sending me some ideas.” It was a two-part lie, as Mitzy and I rarely talked about Wiser anymore. In fact, she’d never really offered any ideas about programming. Our meetings were mostly about building my personal brand, which we did by posting pictures of us at restaurants and boutiques and spas.

  “Ideas for Wiser? Is she your business partner now or something?”

  “Not exactly. More like a mentor.”

  “Oh.”

  “What? Why are you making that face?” I asked him.

  “What face?” he said. “This is just how I look.”

  I bit my lip.

  “Are you sure everything’s okay?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, forcing a smile. “I’m just in a funk.”

  “Don’t you think it’s a little rude of her? I mean, you’re skipping a lot of classes to go have lunch with her.”

  “I’m not skipping that many classes,” I said. “And every time I meet with her my stock goes up.”

  “Yeah, but stock isn’t the only thing that matters.”

  “I know that,” I said. We were fighting? Was this our first fight?

  As if reading my thoughts, Mast softened his expression. “Look, I’m sorry. I’m not trying to make you feel bad. It just seems like she’s being a little selfish with your time.”

  “She’s trying to help me,” I said. “Without her, I’d probably have the lowest stock in the class.”

  “That’s not true,” Mast said.

  He meant it as a compliment. I should have taken it as one and been happy, but I knew he was wrong. The fact that he had so much faith in my abilities reminded me that he didn’t really know me. I couldn’t tell him that I almost left the Foundry and went home, or that my grades alone weren’t good enough to buoy my stock. He’d spent years orbiting the tech world, going to tech fairs and programming camps and taking summer coding classes. He didn’t know what it was like to come to a place like the Foundry and start from scratch.

  It didn’t help that I was starting to wonder if he really was ObjectPermanence. He hadn’t been acting like someone who had gotten an extremely important message and was weighing what to do. I tried to convince myself that maybe he was pretending to be oblivious because he didn’t want to draw too much attention to the fact that he was talking to someone online, but that didn’t make sense. If he had any inkling that I could be ArrayOfLight, wouldn’t he have responded and drawn an O on my wrist, just to see?

  He turned back to his laptop and I turned back to mine only to discover I had a new message in my inbox from ObjectPermanence. I angled my computer away from Mast, then held my breath and opened it.

  NEW MESSAGE FROM U/OBJECTPERMANENCE:

  O.

  It was an invitation. An agreement. A hand reaching through the screen and touching mine. Still, my heart sank. The timestamp read four fifteen, which was five minutes ago. There was no way Mast could have sent it.

  Still, I needed to try. Should I do it now? Should I wait? If Amina were there, she would tell me to do it and get it over with.

  Nervous, I reached over and touched his hand, which was busy typing. He stopped and watched as I drew the letter A on the inside of his palm.

  He stared at me blankly, then smiled.

  “What was that?” he asked.

  The room around us began to crumble.

  “The letter A,” I said, steadying my voice.

  He gave me a confused smile. “Why A?”

  A for Anyone.

  A for Agony.

  A for Always wrong.

  A for Abject failure.

  A for Amina was right.

  “No reason,” I said miserably.

  He squeezed my hand then turned back to his computer, but I could do no such thing. I sat frozen in my seat, feeling all of the molecules in the room rearrange themselves. The room around us looked the same yet felt inexplicably different, like everything I had once perceived as real was now in question. What did I know about anything?

  It wasn’t him.

  But if ObjectPermanence wasn’t Mast, then who was he?

  Eighteen

  I’d expected Amina to gloat and say she’d told me so, but when I showed up at her door holding her list in my hand, she took one look at my face and said, “I’m sorry. I wish I’d been wrong.”

  “What am I supposed to do now?” I said, collapsing into her bed.

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Find out who he is.”

  I’d assumed Amina would pull out her notebook and start going through our list again, but instead she hesitated.

  “I totally get that. But do you really have to? I know it sounds unthinkable, but just hear me out. You like Mast, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You like him a lot.”

  “Well, yeah. I mean, I did think he was ObjectPermanence, so I’m not sure how much is me superimposing another person on top of him, but yeah.”

  “And you aren’t interested in anyone else at school.”

  “No.”

  “So why don’t you just not find out?”

  “And stop talking to ObjectPermanence?” I said, incredulous. It felt impossible, like deciding to stop breathing.

  “Well, yeah. If you like Mast, why fix what isn’t broken?”

  The problem wasn’t with her argument, which, in theory, was correct. The problem was me. “I can’t. I need to know.”

  Amina sighed as if she’d anticipated my answer. “And when you figure out who it is—what will you do then?”

  I leaned against the wall and stared at the ceiling, wondering how I’d gotten myself into such a mess.

  “It depends on who he is. You know how in programming there are conditional If / Then statements? They tell a computer, if A happens, then do B, and if C happens, then do D. I guess that’s how I’m thinking about it.”

  “So you want to keep Mast around so if ObjectPermanence turns out to be someone awful, then you’ll choose Mast, but if he turns out to be the boy of your dreams, then you’ll choose him?”

  “No—not exactly,” I stammered, but if I was honest, that was exactly what I wanted. “When you put it that way, it sounds terrible.”

  Amina shrugged. “You want it both ways.”

  Why did she always have to be right?

  The truth was, I was less worried about what I would do then, and more worried about what I was supposed to do now. I didn’t want to lie to Mast, but I also didn’t want to break up with him. I stared at her ceiling and considered what to do.

  “What if I just try to keep my distance from Mast? Just be really busy. Then it won’t feel like I’m lying to him. And it’s not untrue—I am busy. I’m really behind on my assignments and I have all these plans with Mitzy. It would just be until I figure out who ObjectPermanence is.”

  I could tell Amina wasn’t sold on my plan. “What if it takes you longer than you think to figure out who he is?”

  “There are only four possibilities,” I said. “How long could it take?”

  When I got back to my room, I pulled out the list we’d compiled together.

  I crossed Mast off quickly, like ripping off a Band-Aid, then surveyed who was left.

  Mike Flores

  AJ Pierce

  Arun Krishna

  Arthur Kim

  I stared at the names, as if the answer would appear to me if I looked at them long enough. When it didn’t, I slid it back into my desk drawer.

  The rest of the week passed like an ellipsis, one day folding into the next without distinction or fanfare. When I saw Mast in the dining hall or in class, I tried to act as if everything was normal before ducking away with the excuse that I needed to study.

  Could it be Arun, with his expensive clothes and his confiden
t, baritone voice that seemed to carry over the room, every aspect of him louder and bigger than everyone else, as though he was amplified by his money? It was hard to imagine him having any of the compassion or insight that ObjectPermanence had, but maybe behind his sleek haircut and designer shoes was a vulnerable person invested in the human condition.

  Or was it Arthur, always laughing in the back of the classroom while he shared memes he’d made? He seemed to be the best of my options. Though he was self-deprecating, I could tell he was smart, always finishing his work before everyone else and spending the rest of the class playing games on his phone. I’d always pictured ObjectPermanence as slightly more serious and introspective, but Arthur did seem kind. If I closed my eyes, I could almost imagine him writing the messages ObjectPermanence had sent.

  Or was it Mike, a handsome coward, his arm wrapped around Kate while he listened to his friends boast about their stock and rate girls online? I didn’t know if Mike was as terrible as his friends, but in the end, it didn’t really matter. He had the quiet aloofness of a complicit bystander, watching his friends with mild distaste but rarely disagreeing with them or trying to intervene. He’d been bestowed with beauty, money, and social status, and seemed to be caged by them. Was he witty enough to be ObjectPermanence? I’d rarely seen him laugh, let alone say anything that could be construed as even mildly funny. He seemed too constricted by his good looks and his social position to ever allow himself to talk so candidly with a stranger online.

  Or, heaven forbid, was it AJ? Cruel, unbearable AJ, smirking from his desk while he degraded others in an attempt to make himself feel important. I wasn’t sure which was worse—that he thought his money would protect him from consequence, or the fact that so far, he’d been right. I refused to even consider him a possibility. It was an insult to ObjectPermanence and everything I thought I knew about him.

  “Is everything okay?”

  Mast was staring at me as though he’d asked me a question. We’d run into each other in the dining hall while Amina and I were clearing our trays.

  “What? Yes.”

  “Yes, everything’s okay, or yes to Sunday?”

  Sunday. Right. He’d asked me if I wanted to go to a screening of the 1984 classic Dune, which was playing at the Stanford Theatre. Though I’d planned on keeping some distance between me and Mast while I tried to figure out who ObjectPermanence was, it was harder than I’d expected. It was tricky trying to come up with believable excuses as to why I couldn’t hang out. But the real problem was that I wanted to see him. A movie would probably be okay. How much could I betray while sitting in a dark theater, staring at a screen?

  “Sunday. Yeah, I’d love to.”

  Mast was studying me like he could read my thoughts. “Are you sure everything’s okay?”

  “Everything’s fine,” I said. “I’m just distracted by the Kowalski assignment.”

  “It’s a tough one, isn’t it?”

  I nodded, feeling like a miserable lying liar.

  Before I could change the subject, my phone vibrated with a text from Mitzy.

  >Clear up your Sunday night and put on your best suit

  >What? Why?

  >We have plans.

  >Can we do another night?

  >Definitely not. There’s a VC dinner party that you need to come to. This could be your breakthrough.

  Maybe it was convenient, a good excuse to skip another potential mind-reading session with Mast.

  “Actually, do you mind if I take a raincheck for the movie?” I asked him. “Mitzy wants me to meet with some VCs.”

  A look of surprise flashed over Mast’s face, but he quickly hid it. “VCs? Sounds fancy.”

  I could tell he was hurt. I swallowed, feeling guilty. “It could be my big break.”

  “Well, you can’t turn that down.”

  I wasn’t sure if he was being sincere or sarcastic. “Right.”

  “It’s fine,” he said. “I’ve already seen Dune and I have a lot of work to do. I just thought you’d like it.”

  “Some other time,” I said, wondering what I was doing, turning away from a cute boy who seemed to like me more than anyone ever had.

  I squeezed my laptop to my chest as if it were armor that would prevent him from seeing the workings of my heart.

  When we got to class, Ms. Perez was already there, the back of her pencil skirt trembling as she wrote our names on the board. She had broken us into small groups to workshop our venture capital pitches.

  We had a big mock pitch meeting coming up the following week, where retired venture capitalists came to class and listened to our ideas. I scanned the names until I saw mine, next to Micah and Arthur.

  “The point of this exercise is to give hard critiques,” Ms. Perez said, pacing the front of the room. “Each of you will take turns pitching, while the other two role-play as VCs and ask tough questions.”

  I took a seat next to Micah and watched as Arthur dropped his bag next to me and sat down. I glanced at him and felt suddenly nervous. I could, at that very moment, be sitting next to ObjectPermanence. The thought was paralyzing.

  Arthur volunteered to pitch first. “So, who’s going to be the silver fox and who’s going to be the young juice-cleansed rock climber?” he asked with a grin.

  I tried to imagine him reading ObjectPermanence’s messages out loud, but they didn’t sound right in his voice.

  “Juice cleanse,” Micah said.

  “I guess that makes me the silver fox,” I said.

  “How does it feel having four ex-wives, a collection of luxury sports cars, and a vacation house in Big Sur?” Arthur joked.

  “You know, it honestly doesn’t feel that different from when I was a twentysomething, eating instant ramen and sleeping on a futon,” I said, trying to get into the role. “Wealth is a mindset.”

  Arthur let out a satisfying laugh. It was convenient that I was playing a role, because it allowed me to watch him. He wasn’t bad looking. On the contrary, the longer I looked at him, the more endearing he seemed. He had a sincere face, the kind that was inclined to smile. It was tanned from hours of skateboarding outside, and his loose T-shirt and messenger bag studded with pins made him look goofy, like a proper teenager. I didn’t mind how his eyes glinted when he smiled, or the way his left hand was stained with ink from doodling.

  His pitch itself was surprisingly smart. I’d expected it to be juvenile and sloppy; it only seemed fitting for his Truth or Dare app, Dare Me. But three sentences in, he’d already convinced me to invest in it.

  “In the age of façades and influencers and manufactured content, we at Dare Me are trying to break down social barriers. We want to move relationships from the digital world to the physical world. The idea behind Dare Me is to take randomized interactions and make them fun, unexpected, and unprecedentedly intimate, which allows for more human connection.”

  It was the first time I’d seen Arthur as a founder, and I was surprised by how funny and charming he was. I quickly found myself forgetting that Dare Me was essentially a drinking game, and had started to believe that it was a revolutionary way of reinventing the way people related to each other.

  He then told a story about how he didn’t have a good relationship with his parents and couldn’t connect with them. They were Korean immigrants and had a different emotional vocabulary than Arthur, making it hard for him to talk to them about things that really mattered to him. He’d thought that if he could just find a way to get them to open up and share stories with him, he could bridge the cultural gap, which was how he’d gotten the idea for Dare Me.

  When he was finished, Micah started asking questions about his userbase and how he planned on appealing to new audiences, but I barely paid attention. ObjectPermanence had also talked about how he wasn’t close with his father, and how his family had expectations that he could never meet.

  There was a long pause in conversation and both Arthur and Micah turned to me, waiting for me to say something. I glanced down
at my laptop, where I’d typed up a few questions from Ms. Perez’s lectures that I’d thought would be useful to ask, but now that I was potentially sitting across from ObjectPermanence, they didn’t seem relevant. Discarding them, I turned to Arthur. Though I knew he was acting as though I were a venture capitalist, I couldn’t help but wonder if this was what it would feel like to look ObjectPermanence in the eye and say hello for the first time.

  “What—what kind of music do you like to listen to when you’re programming?” I asked.

  Micah snorted. “What kind of question is that?”

  “I just think that a silver-foxed VC might ask a curveball question like that,” I stammered. “Old men love talking about music and sounding cool.”

  “She’s not wrong,” Arthur said.

  Micah didn’t look convinced. “Whatever.”

  “I like EDM,” Arthur said. “But I also like movie soundtracks. Classical stuff, even. Anything instrumental with a good beat.”

  Classical. Movie soundtracks. My heart almost stopped. “Me too,” I said. “I mean, right. Good.”

  I scrambled to think of another question that I could ask a potential ObjectPermanence. How was I not prepared for this?

  “What kind of work culture do you plan on cultivating when you build your team? Do you believe that you can ever really know someone?”

  Micah let out a resentful laugh. “What kind of woo-woo question is that?”

  “Hey, I thought you were on a juice cleanse,” I shot back. “Don’t you think that’s a little woo-woo?”

  Arthur laughed. He had a nice voice. “You know, that’s a good question,” he said. “I think the premise behind Dare Me is that there’s always more to know about someone.”

  I swallowed. Was it possible? Arthur was looking at me, amused, like we were in on a secret that Micah wasn’t. Maybe we were.

  When it was my turn, I gave the pitch I’d been practicing for Mitzy, then braced myself for questioning.

  Micah was hard on me. “How are you going to convince people to let the app access all of their data?”

  I tried my best to answer, but he kept pressing me. “Don’t you think that’s a huge breach of privacy? Are you going to use it to sell products? How are you going to generate revenue?”