Like a Boss - Annabelle Costa Page 0,31
even considering marriage until at least age forty. Maybe that’s changed, though. He doesn’t seem to be having fun in the dating world. In any case, I understand now why he wanted me to come—I’m his beard.
“You had enough yet?” he asks me.
“I could go a little longer,” I say.
A guy is approaching us who’s about our age, flanked by a stunning woman. The guy’s sculpted good looks remind me of my first impression of Luke when I met him all those years ago. I glance at Luke, and I can tell from his eyes that he doesn’t like this guy much. I wait for him to lean in and tell me some gossip, but he keeps quiet for a change.
“Lucas, m’boy!” The guy flashes a wide but incredibly phony smile. “This is Arielle.”
Arielle is really beautiful to the point where it’s hard not to stare at her. Damn, maybe that Ethel woman was right, maybe I really am a lesbian.
“Hello, Gray.” Luke offers an equally genuine smile. “It’s nice to meet you, Arielle. This is Ellie.”
“Ellie Jensen,” Gray says before I can even extend my hand.
And holy crap, I remember this guy. After all, it’s sort of hard to forget a guy named after a color. He was in a basic computer science class that I was a teaching assistant for. As an upperclassman, I was able to give up scrubbing toilets and instead teach for my scholarship money. This class probably should have been called “Computer Science for People Who Don’t Give A Shit.” Harvard required everyone to take a very small amount of basic science, just so people like Gray could come out well rounded, and presumably also to torture the teaching assistants.
This class was easy to the point of being ridiculous. The first assignment was to write a short program in C that printed out “Hello world!” It was like half a page and that was the entire assignment for the week. Gray handed in a quarter of a page of code with a stain that smelled like vodka and he misspelled the word “world.” The second assignment was to make your own webpage. Gray’s page was a single sentence that said, “This is a webpage,” and then had a pornographic photo below it.
Each week, he handed in nonfunctional code. The hard copy he gave me was always stained with food, alcohol, and once with something I strongly suspected was jizz (especially since he snickered as he handed it to me). He also bombed both the midterm and the final. I gave him a D, which I swear to God was a gift because he rightfully deserved to fail. But when I went to double-check the grades, his D had magically turned into a B. I confronted the professor about it, who mumbled something about “extra credit.”
So no, Gray was not my favorite person in the world.
“Hello, Gray,” I say, somehow summoning up the will to smile pleasantly at him.
“You straightened your hair,” he observes. “Good idea. I’d never seen so much hair before. It was like the crazy wicked witch look. We all used to laugh about it.”
They all used to laugh at my hair? Who’s “they all”? Was everyone in my class just making fun of my hair? I look over at Luke, who has conveniently chosen this moment to get all quiet.
“How have you been, Gray?” I ask politely.
“Oh, fine,” he says. “Arielle and I just got back from two weeks in Paris. There’s so much to do there, it’s a bit exhausting. You know how it is.” He gives me a pointed look. “Well, maybe not you, but Luke knows.”
I wish I could shoot back that I’ve been to Paris, but I haven’t. But at least I’ve been to Europe. I participated in an international math program in Hungary during my junior year of college.
“What did you think of Paris, Arielle?” Luke asks politely.
Arielle just smiles vacantly. For all I know, she may be mute. I’d guess Gray wouldn’t care either way.
Gray shakes his head. “God, Ellie, do you remember what a bitch you were when you were teaching that class?”
I glance at Luke, who seems shocked. My cheeks are burning, but I reply coolly, “I don’t think I was.”
Gray laughs. “Well, everyone else in the class would have disagreed. You thought you were, like, the god of the computers. It was pathetic.”
I don’t even know how to respond to that. I stare at him, wishing I could disappear. How can people