Farah Rishi - I Hope You Get This Message

An embarrassed smile crept across his face. “My bad, Miss T.”

She waved her hand impatiently. “Just toss it, please. How many times do I have to remind you there’s no food allowed during class?”

As he stood and dropped the empty pouch with a thunk into the nearby trash bin, he could feel his classmates’ eyes on him, wondering if Miss Takemoto would finally snap and write him up. It wasn’t the first time Adeem had caused an interruption, after all. Once, he’d made a program on C++ to control her mouse cursor from his phone, forcing her to click on all the wrong programs; it’d taken her ten minutes to realize it was him. Then the other week, he’d made her computer meow whenever she pressed the space bar. But his grades had cushioned him from any kind of penalty, and he was pretty sure Miss Takemoto had been impressed he could pull those pranks in the first place. It’s why she’d been hounding him since freshman year for his college plans, trying to get him to meet with an MIT rep, and throwing sign-up forms for code jams and national robotics competitions in his face—sometimes literally.

Even the applesauce pouches were her idea. Easy to eat when coding, healthy sugars and all that. “I’m not having you become one of those Mountain Dew–chugging zombies, not under my watch,” she’d said before tossing him a pouch after school at Coding Club. Back when he actually showed up.

He took his seat in the back of the classroom. Beside him, Derek Robinson, his best friend since fifth grade, shook his head. Idiot , he mouthed. Adeem flashed him a grin.

Adeem normally spent his weekends at Derek’s house, where they made their own video games. They’d work side by side late into the night before Adeem would call it quits and crawl to the kitchen to eat all of Derek’s Corn Pops in the glow of the refrigerator, while Derek sat cross-legged on the countertop, adding final touches to some artwork on his tablet. Their latest project was a cat simulator game. Before that, it was a dating sim for AIs. A platformer. They’d done it all.

But the games never went anywhere, and Adeem’s parents—and Miss Takemoto—were hounding him now with words like “wasted potential” and “future plans.” They might have had a point. Making games took time, time that probably could have been spent doing homework or fluffing up his résumé or studying for the SATs. Things he never did. In the end, though, Adeem put their game-making on hold, if only to stop dragging Derek down with him, give him his weekends back. Even if his future was a black hole, Derek’s didn’t have to be.

Not that he’d told Derek the real reason, of course. As far as Derek knew, Adeem simply didn’t have time to make games anymore now that his weekends were taken over by his newest weird hobby: amateur radio. Which was partially true.

It’s not Thursday if you don’t get dragged by Miss T at least once , Derek typed on a blank Notepad file on his computer—their way of passing notes, though they sat next to each other—once their teacher began lecturing again.

Adeem opened Notepad on his own computer. She’s just mad because I already finished her joke of a midterm. He’d created a binary translation program using JavaScript. It had taken him two hours, a couple applesauce packets, and one tumbler of black coffee. He’d turned it in last night, and Miss Takemoto had replied with a single thumbs-up emoji; they both knew the midterm project was nothing more than a formality for him.

Derek’s eyes widened. Why do you even bother taking any comp sci classes when you’re just gonna dominate them?

Adeem shrugged and typed: And miss baby’s first steps into programming? No way.

404 Humor Not Found , Derek replied with a scowl. JavaScript Fundamentals was Derek’s first coding class, and he wasn’t shy about expressing his hatred of it to Adeem, much to Adeem’s amusement. But for someone who only cared to do artwork for their games, Derek was actually pretty good at coding. It’d be fun having Derek in on his pranks, not that he’d risk getting Derek into trouble, too.

Miss Takemoto finished writing the array object and was now highlighting the various elements and variables in different-colored markers. But Adeem caught her glancing back at them, as if she knew he wasn’t really paying attention. He batted away at the guilt buzzing in his head like a fruit fly that wouldn’t die.

The thing was, Miss Takemoto had high hopes for Adeem, and he knew it. Adeem wasn’t exactly a genius—and according to his mom, he was an idiot for not taking school seriously—but he’d always been pretty good at fixing things. It had started with him tearing apart his sister’s old toys and putting them back together: a plastic “robot” dog, a canary-yellow drone, a remote-controlled R2D2. Then his dad’s antique Philco radio, chipped at the left-hand corner from when his sister, Leyla, had once dropped it. He’d nearly taken apart the family computer until Leyla introduced him to programming, and he soaked up code like a sponge. He loved everything about it: the fractals of scattered text across his white screen, the delicate architectural coherence of it all, and the looming threat it could all fall apart with a single misplaced symbol. Coding was like a game of chess, but he could make the rules. With his own imagination being the only constraint, coding was the closest he’d ever felt to having some semblance of control over something.

The skill had other benefits, too. Being the only two brown kids in school, Adeem and Derek were practically walking targets for people like Chris Wakely, the kind of kid who proudly hung a certain red baseball cap in his locker and grumbled, loudly, about the growing population of “Mexicans” during every school assembly. When Chris Wakely called him a terrorist in the hallway last year, Adeem hacked into Chris’s email and created a macro that made every one of Chris’s emails autosign as Shit Wakely. Coach Grier wasn’t too thrilled; apparently, it had made Chris’s college football scholarship prospects a little… strained.

But that was the extent Adeem had ever used his talents: making silly little games, pulling stupid pranks. As for anything else—anything more —some invisible weight was holding Adeem back.

How was he supposed to explain to Miss Takemoto and his parents that taking his coding talent seriously would mean that his future would forever be tied down to memories of his sister? Memories that still stung every time he saw the chipped Philco radio or wrote new code he was proud of. Code that she would have been proud of, too.

If she’d cared enough to stick around.

The eighth-period bell chimed.

He turned off the computer and stood, racing to pack his notebook, when Miss Takemoto called his name, her voice only just bobbing above the cacophony of rustling backpacks and chairs scraping across the linoleum floor.

She was waving him over. Dread coiled down from his stomach to his feet, fastening him to the floor.

Derek looked at him sympathetically and shook his head but said nothing. Adeem breathed in, letting the oxygen settle before walking through the crowd of glazed-eyed students making their way out of the classroom.

“You staying after school for Coding Club?” Miss Takemoto asked as he approached, hastily erasing the whiteboard, leaving behind trace marks of code. It smelled sharply of alcohol solvent and ink, and made him dizzy.

Miss Takemoto was also the supervisor for Coding Club, and there was no way Adeem could deal with her any longer than he already had. He scrambled for an excuse. “Not today. I’ve got a… dentist appointment.”

But Miss Takemoto suddenly spun to face him, her eyebrow raised. “ Another one?”