Page 47 of The Statistically Unlikely Reunion

“I’m not afraid of my professors.”

“You got so tongue-tied around Professor Miller⁠—”

“He’s our coach.”

“In name only.” Professor Miller used to be a competitive programmer, back when they still saved the programs on floppy disks and used volunteer runners to deliver potential solutions to judges. Thus, he allowed Christopher and whatever other undergraduate seemed even moderately interested to run the tryouts and competitions. He didn’t attend regionals, and when our team qualified for nationals, he arranged for the funding of our tickets and confirmed our hotel reservations, but declined to come himself. (“If you make it to worlds and it’s somewhere exciting, then we’ll talk.”) We’d only met with him as a formality, to go over registration details.

“Professor Miller is a very well-published, well-respected leader of the CS community, particularly in matrix multiplication.”

My nod says it all.

“Maybe I was a little awkward.” Lucas reaches into his pocket and begins unfolding a little origami flower. “Am I the least cool guy you’ve ever dated?”

“Every guy I’ve dated has put his head between his knees in the middle of the airport security gate.”

Lucas looks at me, genuinely distracted as the plane begins rolling away from the tarmac. “You said you’ve done the dating and sex thing before.”

The buzzing of the airplane is loud enough and Brody’s headphones are definitely those top-of-the-line noise-canceling ones, and yet this isn’t exactly where I would have chosen to have this conversation. “I’ve gone to a few parties, a group date–like thing, and had sex twice. Two different guys.”

What I don’t share is that I was drunk the first time, that I didn’t want alcohol to be my main memory, and that I’d then gone out of my way to find the very next guy who had wanted to hook up. As if the newer memory would overwrite the previous one.

“I told you already. I don’t do the dating thing, the romance stuff. I wanted to try out . . . the other . . . I did. Nothing to see here.”

“So I’m your first boyfriend?”

“In that we haven’t even gone on a date but plan to? One-on-one? Yes.”

Though I’ve successfully kept Lucas’s eyes on me this entire time, the damn plane is now taxiing. The captain announces that there’s a bit of a queue and that we should hold tight.

“Hold tight to what? Did I miss part of the message?”

“It’s an idiom. We’re taxiing because there’s a backlog.”

“Right.” He’s accidentally ripped one corner of the paper he’s folded and unfolded it so many times. “This is safe. We are safe.”

Lucas’s breath is starting to turn shallow. I could kiss him again, but since making out in front of the entire first-class cabin isn’t exactly on my bingo card, I do the next best thing. I squeeze his hand twice, until his eyes meet mine again, albeit briefly. “I was thinking about that random permutation problem from last night.”

“Yeah?”

He’s only half with me, eyes darting around the plane, as if looking for an escape.

“Why didn’t the absolute error bound kill it?”

Though I know the answer, this sharpens Lucas’s focus back to me. He looks puzzled for a mere second before launching into an explanation. Whenever possible, I refute or push back, pressing against points I already understand. I link it to similar problems we’ve written in the past, asking barely-above-basic questions about what it might have looked like if we’d implemented it in Java instead. Lucas is mid-sentence when there’s a faint chime. The flight attendant announces it’s now safe to unbuckle and move around the cabin.

His lovely hazel eyes narrow. “You did that on purpose.”

“Or I completely forgot how to use a doubly linked list in Python.”

Lucas closes his eyes. “You would never.”

“Probably not.” Now that there’s free Wi-Fi, I connect my phone and load the riddles and short-form math/CS problems I know will distract Lucas. “Since I can’t pull that trick more than once, we’ll have to settle for these.” I pull out my ever-present journal and pens.

“You said you barely slept last night.”

Which is true—I stayed up preparing meals and snacks for the girls, making sure everything my mother might need would be stacked and ready. I had meant to rest, to enjoy the first-class goodies bag, use the free headphones, and maybe even catch up on some of the latest movies.

“You can’t really want to work on problems with me the whole plane ride.”