We Are the Perfect Girl

by Ariel Kaplan

  “If you don’t mind my asking,” I said, “how exactly do you have time for this? Don’t you swim year-round?”

  He let out a sigh. “That’s a little complicated right now. But swim practice is in the morning anyway.”

  “Still,” I said. “That’s a lot of practice time, two hours in the morning and then two hours with us after school. You must be pretty tired right now.”

  “I didn’t actually swim this morning.”

  I waited to see if he would follow that up. He did not. So I said, “Oh. Well, I think you’ve got the hang of it. Let’s head back.”

  I glanced over my shoulder to judge the distance to the dock and saw Bethany sitting there with her knees to her chest. The rest of the girls were gone. Behind me, I felt Greg bobble in the boat.

  Right. I was supposed to be talking up Bethany. I said, “You know Bethany, right?”

  “Sure,” he said. “I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever actually talked to her.”

  “She’s…,” I said. “She’s shy. But she’s great, though.” I chewed on my lip. “She’s really good at Spanish.”

  That last part was a total lie; it’s hard to be good at a foreign language if you won’t practice out loud because you’re scared of screwing up. But Greg didn’t have to know that. He said, “Really?”

  “Let’s head to starboard,” I said.

  “How do I do that?”

  “Maybe let me do it this time,” I said. “Just go easy and let me pull us around.”

  We straightened out and started rowing toward Bethany.

  A few days later, I was sitting in my app design class with Bethany, supposedly fine-tuning the Deanna app but really finishing the Dostoyevsky essay I had open in a second tab. Mr. Positano was in the back of the room helping a couple of seniors who had teamed up to write a game that was exactly like Fruit Ninja except with cows—creatively titled Steak Ninja—which managed to crash every time somebody started it up.

  I scowled at my word processor and listened to Mr. Positano saying, “No, not like— No. No. No. Not that, either.” Then: “Have you thought about starting over?”

  I jumped when Bethany popped up next to my chair.

  “Sheesh,” I said. “Give me a heart attack. What’s another word for redundant?”

  She frowned. “Repetitive?”

  “Besides that.”

  “Um, I can’t think of one. Hey. Have you checked on Deanna lately?”

  “Superfluous! I already used redundant twice.” I typed superfuluous into my sentence and then retyped it when the spell-checker told me I had messed up. Too many u’s. Talk about superfluous. Or redundant. “I’m just letting her run, that’s kind of the point. I’ll check her responses at the end of the week.”

  I ran the word count. I was fifty short. I thought about altering the margins. Mr. Edwards would probably notice that. I changed the font to Courier. Way too obvious.

  Bethany said, “I think you should check her.”

  “Maybe I need a longer title,” I said. “Wait, why should I check Deanna?”

  “Well, I was sitting back there finishing my calculus and I was bored, so I decided to ask her what I should have for dinner, and she got kind of vulgar.”

  “Vulgar? I didn’t program her to be vulgar.”

  “Yeah, but if she’s picking up stuff from the people who downloaded the app…”

  “No,” I said. “I accounted for that.” I had been, in fact, very careful, having anticipated that some of my classmates might try something like this. I specifically blocked every four-letter word I could think of. The point of Deanna’s algorithm was that she was supposed to learn to anticipate follow-up issues. She wasn’t supposed to be a dirty-word lexicon.

  “There’s no way,” I said. “I made sure she was bulletproof.” But I minimized my essay and pulled up the tab with Deanna’s program. I typed, Should I eat a burger or a peanut butter sandwich?

  Deanna said, Check this out! And then there was a link to one of those tiny URLs.

  I’d programmed her with some links to various mental health sites. Maybe she was being oversensitive and sending me to the National Eating Disorders Association site? But asking about sandwiches shouldn’t have triggered that. I clicked on the link.

  I let out an involuntary shriek and closed the browser before anyone else could see the images of people doing unspeakable things with peanut butter. From the back of the room, Mr. Positano called, “Aphra?”

  “Nothing!” I said. “I, uh, thought I deleted something, but it’s fine.”

  “Control-Z for the win!” he called back.

  “Woo!” I said, clearing my browser history and making a mental note that the campus porn blocker was even weaker than I’d thought. “Holy shit. Where did she pick that up?”

  Ugh. If people were sending in porn links, she might have decided those were greetings, or conversational filler when talking about food. Or maybe she was just pulling them off Google somehow? I wasn’t even sure. And that was an even bigger problem, because if I didn’t know how this was going wrong, there was no way for me to fix it.

  Bethany said, “You programmed her to give out links, right?”

  “Links to mental health sites! Not naked people!”

  “I guess people were inputting those, and she kept them?”

  “I guess so. Well, at least it’s food-specific. It could be worse.”

  She sighed.

  “What?” I asked.

  “It’s worse,” she said. “Type anything.”

  I typed, Hi, Deanna.

  Deanna said, Tell me what you’re wearing.

  “Oh,” I said. “No.” But just to make sure, I typed, I am in my favorite shirt, which I also wore yesterday.

  She replied, That sounds hot, big boy.

  “Like, not to freak you out or anything,” Bethany said, “but you realize that if she’s sending porn links to the kids at Middleridge who downloaded your app, they’re probably all minors?”

  That actually hadn’t occurred to me. Was that a misdemeanor or a felony? I wasn’t even sure.

  I lowered my forehead to my keyboard as I contemplated turning in ten pages of Deanna the Phone Sex Operator to Mr. Positano. Not only would I fail, I would probably get suspended.

  “Oh, God,” I said. “I can’t turn this in.”

  “You really can’t.”

  “Shit,” I said. “Shit, shit. I’m going to flunk.”

  “Can’t you just put her back the way she was? Take out the learning algorithm?”

  “I can’t,” I said. “The learning algorithm was my whole project. Without that, she’s just an open-source chatbot written by someone else. I can’t get credit for that.”

  “Look, I’m still doing that weather program,” she said. “Mr. Positano said people could pair up.”

  “But you already finished!”

  “Well, you can’t turn this in. All she does now is show you naked people and give you fifteen euphemisms for penis.”

  “There aren’t fifteen euphemisms for penis!” I said. “Wait, are there fifteen euphemisms for penis?”

  “I think some of them might be made up,” she said.

  At that, the bell rang. “Crap,” I muttered, logging out of the computer.

  “Remember!” Mr. Positano called. “These are due next Friday!”

  The seniors in the back groaned.

  “What are you going to do?” Bethany asked as we walked out the door.

  “Not sure yet,” I said.

  * * *

  —

  As soon as I got home that afternoon, I opened the program I’d used to create Deanna and reset it to the original vanilla chatbot. I’d spent weeks writing that algorithm. I thought I’d made it vandal-proof, too, but I guess I underestimated how much peop
le would want to mess with it and how gross they’d be.

  So where did that leave me? The project was worth a third of my grade. I couldn’t turn in what I’d done. I couldn’t turn in the original program the kids at GMU had made. I didn’t have enough time to come up with another project. I could piggyback on Bethany, but that seemed wrong, too, since I hadn’t done any of the actual work and it amounted to cheating off my best friend.

  An alert beeped on my phone….It was Bethany’s app. Essentially, what it did was link up with the AccuWeather website, and based on the next day’s temperature and precipitation, it told you what you should wear.

  Tomorrow will be drizzly with a daytime high of 62. You will be comfortable in layers—wear a sweater or jacket. Wear closed-toe shoes with a good tread so you won’t slip. Remember your umbrella!

  I smiled. It was a pretty clever app, actually. She’d written it with Kit in mind, since he always refuses to wear a jacket when it’s cold out and then freezes at recess.

  I started a text to tell Bethany that her app, at least, was working. Our text logs are long, stretching back since I bought the phone last year. My mom is always on us for texting too much (“You just saw each other an hour ago! You don’t need to text her at dinner!”). But there’s a certain kind of comfort to knowing someone is always there, waiting to hear from you, like you’re never a hundred percent alone.

  Then it occurred to me that basically, Deanna was also kind of a chat app. The person on the other end was talking to my AI, but only because I’d routed it that way. There was no reason I couldn’t be the person on the other end; the person using the app would never know it wasn’t really Deanna. I just had to sound like a computer, that was all.

  It would be like a reverse Turing test—instead of trying to convince someone that a computer was a person, I’d be trying to convince people that I was a computer.

  I deactivated Deanna and updated the app so the interface would look the same from the user’s end, but instead of talking to the chatbot, the app initiated a chat session with my phone. I would just write in her place. I could turn in the algorithm I’d written—which would have worked, if everyone who downloaded it wasn’t such an asshole—and for sample replies, I’d write them myself. Was that completely honest? Well, no. But otherwise I was going to fail, and that wasn’t fair. I’d worked way too hard on this project to turn in Deanna the Sexbot.

  I’d already set the app to automatically update, so as long as everyone using it was hooked up to Wi-Fi or mobile data, I’d be good to go. It would be a lot slower than it should be with me typing, but hopefully people would assume it was glitchy or something. I would just have to hope that fifty people didn’t log in at once.

  I printed out my Dostoyevsky essay and got up to get some cookies, when my phone pinged. Someone was using the Deanna app.

  Grabbing the phone off my bed, I went into the kitchen and got some of the chocolate chip cookies my mom and Kit had made after school. I sat down at the counter. The Deanna user had typed: Pancakes or French toast?

  I wondered why everyone kept asking my advice app about food. I guess those are easy choices. Low-risk. I took a bite of my cookie. The chocolate was still a little soft. From down the hall, I could hear my mom reading Kit his nightly chapter of Harry Potter.

  Because I was a little cranky, I typed back, The overconsumption of carbohydrates can lead to insulin resistance.

  You sound like my mom.

  Always listen to your mother.

  But I want French toast.

  I rolled my eyes. So eat the French toast.

  I knew I liked you.

  I smiled at my phone. I typed, I like you too.

  Careful, Deanna. Getting unprofessional.

  Empathy is always professional.

  I realized I was sounding a little too slick for a chatbot, so I decided to throw in something random. I typed: Where does the blue sky go at night?

  Oh. Getting philosophical on me now.

  Philosophy is the study of wisdom.

  Yeah, I knew that.

  Did you eat your French toast?

  Yeah, I’m eating it now. You’ll be happy to know I used minimal syrup.

  I typed, Canada produces 73 million liters of maple syrup every year, much of it for the export market.

  I waited a few minutes, but there was no response. There’s really no reason to formally end a conversation with a piece of technology, so I wasn’t exactly offended. I put my plate away and went back to my room, where I found Kit curled up in my bed with Walnut under his arm.

  “Didn’t Mom already tuck you in?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but I’m not tired.” I looked at Kit a little more carefully. He’s had this sandpapery rash on the left side of his face for a month or so; sometimes it’s just like really dry skin and sometimes it’s worse than that. Mom is always putting lotion on him and telling him to stop scratching. The pediatrician thought it might be a milk allergy, but Kit had been off dairy for two weeks and it didn’t seem to make any difference. I could see that his skin was shiny from whatever ointment Mom was putting on it, but it looked a little redder than usual.

  “I’m tired,” I said, climbing in next to him so that Walnut was sandwiched between us. I scratched behind Walnut’s ears. He purred. “Maybe you could sleep for both of us.”

  “If you’re tired, why aren’t you going to bed?”

  “Not done with my homework,” I said. It had occurred to me that people might be trying to use Deanna in the middle of the night. I needed to program it with a backup so if I wasn’t around it would go back to the original open-source programming. I just wouldn’t turn that part in.

  “I hate homework,” he said, even though I know he barely has any.

  “Yeah. It’s no fun,” I said. “Something on your mind? Afraid something bad’s going to happen to Harry?”

  He shrugged.

  “What, then?”

  “I called Delia today.”

  I said. “Did you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Nothing. She’s coming home soon.”

  “Yeah, I knew that.”

  “Are you still mad at her?”

  I swallowed. “No.”

  “Liar.”

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  “Can’t you just not be mad at her?”

  “It’s complicated, buddy,” I said, ruffling his hair. He batted my hand away.

  “No it’s not,” he said. “You just decide not to be mad, and then you’re not mad.”

  I didn’t say anything. He said, “Do you like being mad?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “You do. I think you do.”

  “Why would I like being mad?”

  “I don’t know. I just think if you didn’t, you’d stop.”

  Mom stopped in my doorway. “I thought you were in bed,” she said to Kit.

  “I am in bed,” he said.

  “Your own bed,” she said. “In your room. With the lights out.”

  “Aphra’s bed’s more comfortable,” he said.

  “Go,” Mom said. “Sleep.”

  “Fine,” he grumbled, stumbling from the room with Walnut following him.

  “Hey,” Mom said once he was gone.

  “Hey.”

  “So,” she said, sitting down in Kit’s place. “Delia.”

  I wished I’d gone to sleep when I’d had the chance. “I have a sister named Delia,” I said, sounding a little too much like a chatbot. At least chatbots don’t get talking-tos for being pissed off.

  “Isn’t this something you’ve been working through with Dr. Pascal?”

  I angled my face toward the ceiling. “You aren’t supposed to ask about what I discuss with Dr. Pascal.”

&nbs
p; “Right. Right. Sorry. It’s just…,” she said. “Well.”

  It was just that I’d been in therapy for the last ten months, and had not, as yet, made any headway in dealing with my feelings about my sister. In terms of investments, Dr. Pascal was turning out to be a bad one, as far as my parents were concerned.

  “You know, your father and I will be dead someday,” she said. “And you might wish you hadn’t torched your relationship with your sister.”

  “Nice emotional manipulation, Mom,” I said. “And I didn’t torch it. Delia did.”

  “You know she didn’t hurt you on purpose.”

  “That has nothing to do with it! Look, I know everybody wants me to just forget about it, but I can’t. It’s not like she shrank my favorite sweater.”

  “No. She shrank her nose.”

  I made a face.

  Mom doesn’t exactly understand, because she doesn’t have the Nose. The Nose is an inheritance from our father, and everyone considers it to be a perfectly acceptable man nose. It’s only on girls that it seems to be a problem.

  “Hey,” she said. “I wish that if she was bound and determined to do this, she had waited until you weren’t at such a vulnerable age. But that wasn’t the choice she made.”

  “You sound like Dr. Pascal.”

  “She may have recommended some books for me,” she admitted. “Look, the point is, Delia did what she did, and we just have to accept it.”

  “Just because you say I have to accept it doesn’t mean I do.”

  “Aphra,” she said.

  “Look. Do you just want me to promise that when she gets home I’ll pretend everything’s fine? Is that it?”

  “No, that’s not actually what I want.”

  “It’s the best I can do,” I said. I rolled over toward the wall. “I’m going to bed now.”

  “Aphra.”

  “Good night, Mom.”

  “Aphra.”

  I made a few snoring noises. She sighed and patted my shoulder before she left the room, turning off the light on her way out.

  I lay there for about five minutes before I remembered that I hadn’t finished my Latin homework, so I sat up and turned the lights back on. My phone pinged again with the Deanna app. I was debating letting it go to autopilot, but I took a look at it to see if it was a good question first. According to the IP address, it was the same person I’d been talking to earlier about the French toast. The question was: How bad is it to disappoint your parents?