I’m saying.”
A.A. said her own good-byes then, but the smile she gave the girls never quite reached her eyes. She just waited until Mom, Sylvie, and Hannah had cleared out, then closed the door and turned to face me again.
Here it came.
“What the hell, Angela?” she said. “You just shot your own career in the head.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
“And it’s all my fault,” A.A. went on.
“Wrong again,” I said. “Nobody did this but me. And that asshole deserved everything he got. I regret nothing.”
She looked hurt.
“You know what I mean,” I said. “I’m going to miss the hell out of you, but I’ll only be a few minutes away.”
A.A. didn’t answer. I guess I wasn’t the only one who could wield a strategic silence, because I was feeling guiltier by the second.
“Has he texted you?” I asked.
“Only about eighteen times,” she said.
“And?”
“I didn’t answer,” she said.
“Good,” I said. “Knowing him, it’ll only take another thirty-two tries before he gets it.”
“He’s really pissed, you know,” she said. “He had to replace his whole hard drive.”
I could tell A.A. was fighting between tears and laughter at that point, but her face darkened when she met my eyes again. I stared back, waiting for the inquisition, part two.
“What’s wrong with you, Angela?” she said. “Real question.”
“Where should I start?” I asked, but A.A. didn’t even crack a smile. “Nothing’s wrong,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“No. You’re not, and don’t try to tell me you are,” she shot back. “You’re crazy like a rooster in a cage, and I don’t get it.”
A.A. knew me well. Sometimes too well. It’s the cost of a real friendship. The whole thing was like a giant paradox, because everything really was fine, and everything really was a complete mess, all at the same time.
“I’ll be fine,” I insisted. “Just not today. Okay?”
“Angela—” she said before I kissed her. Not on the cheek. On the mouth, just to shut her up. It was either that or we were both going to start crying, and one of the many things A.A. and I shared was a complete distaste for cheap drama. So I kept things moving instead.
“I’ll talk to you soon,” I said. Then I grabbed my bike off the wall and wheeled it out the door.
“Hey!” she called after me. “You left your crew shirt.”
“Keep it,” I said just before the door swung shut behind me.
CHAPTER 5
THAT VERY EVENING, I was summoned to Eve Abajian’s town house for what I could only assume would be a world-class dressing down. Eve was the person I most dreaded talking to about the MIT “situation,” even worse than telling my parents. I didn’t know how she’d already heard about it, but Eve always had a lot of ears to the ground.
“What in the blue hell, Angela?” she said over the intercom at her front door.
“I brought food!” I answered. Eve and I shared a certain obsession with the fried chicken and ginger waffles from Myers and Chang, not far from her place in South Boston. It was like bringing a water pistol to a gunfight, but it was all I had.
When I didn’t get any answer, or even a buzz-in, I beeped myself through with the keypad and headed inside to face the music. I knew this had to happen, sooner or later. Emphasis on the sooner. Eve Abajian was not one to be kept waiting.
Eve was also the one who got me into MIT in the first place. I’d met her when I was sixteen, at the summer robotics program there, where she taught coding and applied theory as a volunteer instructor. Ever since, she’d been a mentor to me, steering me toward Carnegie Mellon and then putting in a strongest-possible word with the graduate admissions committee back at MIT after that.
In other words, everything Eve had spent the last six years helping me accomplish had just gotten rerouted straight down the toilet. I wasn’t looking forward to this conversation.
As I came up and into the town house’s main living space on the second floor, I saw that Eve was parked behind her four-screen array. I could barely see her for all the equipment, which was just as well. Even the sound of her keyboarding was angry.
I paused there, not really sure how to proceed. When the silence stretched on for an uncomfortably long time and I still wasn’t sure what to say, I took the food into the kitchen and started plating it up. Maybe I could still ply Eve