Pushing Perfect(8)

“A likely story,” Alex said. “I keep waiting for you to tell us you’re ditching work to open a restaurant.”

“It’s a great idea. Your mom can quit her job and take care of the books, and you can quit school to waitress.”

Mrs. Nguyen laughed. “You’re welcome to trade software for soft-shell crabs, but you’d have to carry me out of the office bound and gagged. And don’t even joke about Alex dropping out of school.”

There it was—that Marbella-mom edge to her voice. I wasn’t the only one at this table with high-pressure parents, then.

“Speaking of school, we should probably get to work,” Alex said.

I thanked her parents for dinner and then followed Alex to her room. Just as I’d expected, she had the same enormous bedroom setup that Becca had, though she’d done something completely different with the space. Her bed was in the same place, but instead of a lounge area she had a huge desk that ran the length of the entire back wall and then turned and tracked half of the rest of the room. That was where the computer monitors were. Three of them: one in the center and two at forty-five-degree angles on either side. Also huge.

“Are you an air traffic controller or something?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I guess you could say I’m a programmer.” She sat down in a big fancy-looking desk chair and motioned to a smaller chair next to it for me.

I sat down. “What kind of programming do you do?”

She gave me a little smirk, like I’d caught her doing something she wasn’t supposed to. “Well, maybe I exaggerated a little. I told my parents I needed all this stuff for programming. Can you keep a secret?”

If only she knew. “Sure.”

“I need the screens for poker. I play online. Like, a lot.”

“Isn’t it illegal? I mean, not to sound like a goody-goody or anything . . .”

She shrugged. “It’s, like, dubious. The playing part isn’t so much illegal, but the money part isn’t something I want people to find out about, if you know what I’m saying.”

“You make money? You must be good.”

“Yeah, I am,” she said, but she didn’t sound arrogant. Just proud. “But that’s also where the programming comes in. I wrote a bunch of tracking programs to help with my game, to run statistics, that sort of thing. It gives me a real advantage over some of the idiots who play online.”

I was impressed. I’d thought she was just this random girl in some classes with me; it turned out she had this totally other secret life. My secrets weren’t nearly as interesting as hers. “Why do you need so many screens?”

“Because I usually play about five or six games at a time. That’s the nice thing about being online—you don’t have to sit at just one table. Your avatar can be in lots of places at once.” She clicked and her screen lit up with the image of a poker table covered in felt; she clicked again and I saw an image of a boy’s face, with short dark hair.

“That’s your avatar?”

“That’s virtual me. I pretend I’m a boy so they’ll take me more seriously. Sad, but poker’s pretty sexist. It’s weirdly not as racist, though—there are a lot of famous players with the same last name as me, so being Alex Nguyen is actually kind of helpful. Not that I use my real name, but some people I play with a lot know it. And they know my uncle, too—he was a professional poker player, a really famous one. Taught me everything I know.”

“When do you have time to do all this?

“At night. I don’t need much sleep.”

I knew that couldn’t be true; I remembered last year, when she used to fall asleep in class every day. “Don’t you need a lot of math for programming? Do you really need my help? It sounds like you could help me more than I could help you—I’m way behind in AP Statistics, too.” I’d loaded up my schedule with math electives, mostly to avoid having to take more science classes.

“Well . . .” She got that look again, like I’d busted her, and then started talking really fast. “I mean, yeah, calculus isn’t my best subject, but I get by. It’s just . . . most of my friends are guys, and you and I have been in classes together forever but we’ve never hung out, and I only see you with those Brain Trust kids, and in class you seem smart and funny and they’re smart but not even a little bit funny, and they can’t be a whole lot of fun, and you seem like someone who should maybe be having more fun than you are, and I thought maybe we should be friends.”

She took a deep breath. I stared at her.

“Well, are you going to say something? Did I just totally humiliate myself? We can just study. No problem. I’ve got stats down cold. Took it sophomore year.”

“No, wait,” I said. “You just talk way faster than I can think. You’re right.”

“Right about which part?”

“Right about all of it. I do pretty much only hang out with Julia and those guys, and only at school, because they’re not fun.”

“I’m totally fun. We’re going to start getting you out more.”

I’d never met anyone so direct. It was kind of amazing. “That would be great,” I said. I wanted to tell her that I used to have friends, that it wasn’t always like this, but that wouldn’t change anything.