Delete it before hitting enter.
I know the odds. Know most designers eat ramen for years before breaking through. But I’m good at this. Really good. And someday, when kids in our neighborhood are obsessed with something I built, when Dad’s golf buddies ask about his son, the designer?—
Then he’ll see. Then I’ll be somebody again.
Just not the somebody he wanted.
3
PIPER
The smell of frying oil is permanently embedded in my hair.
It doesn’t matter how many times I wash it, or how aggressively I spritz dry shampoo into my roots before class—Dora’s Dinerlingers.
Like the ghost of poor life decisions.
Or men who ask for your number while eating a full rack of ribs.
I wipe down table six and mentally re-compile my to-do list for this evening.
Finish debugging the profile matching function, send off the beta version of OptiMatch to Professor Jenkins for feedback, and maybe, just maybe, find five minutes to eat something that wasn’t fried in the same grease as the onion rings.
“Order up!” Marco calls from the kitchen window, sliding a plate toward the edge like he’s in a rom-com. It wobbles. I catch it with a reflex born from too many near-death scrambled egg incidents.
“Got it,” I mutter, swinging it onto my arm and heading for table ten.
An hour later, my shift is over.
I grab my bag and swing by the counter to clock out, peeling off my apron. That’s when I see it—on the floor by table five.
A single green leaf. I roll my eyes.
It must’ve fallen from that guy's plant. Curled and slightly bruised on the edge, like it wasn’t ready to fall off but did anyway.
I crouch, pick it up, and roll the stem between my fingers.
He didn’t leave the plant behind. Of course, he didn’t. He’d carried it out like it was his child.
Still, something about the leaf makes me pause. Makes me think of that boy with the sad eyes and the too-bright grin, sitting alone with a potted friend like it was totally normal.
I smile, just a little.
Then I catch myself.
Nope.
Nope, nope, nope.
Smiling over diner boys is how people end up crying over voicemails and rewatching text threads like forensic evidence.
I don’t do that anymore.
I don’t trust that part of myself.
I trust logic. And metrics. And the elegant, brutal neutrality of code. Specifically, the code that I am designing.
I drop the leaf in the bin, straighten my glasses, and walk out of Dora’s like I’ve never once thought about a boy with a houseplant as a friend.
