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  Her anger didn’t go away, but she found it had abated somewhat. It wasn’t that she enjoyed her new “friends,” but they did provide a convenient distraction. When Rowan and Indira spent fifteen minutes taking forty selfies to figure out the perfect one to post, Cassie found herself caught up just enough that she didn’t think about her dad or her life.

  The crazy thing was, it was almost fun. For someone who preferred to keep a small group of select friends, Cassie found that being a part of Rowan’s crowd was a new experience. Moving through her days, she developed a sense of something that was almost like power. People left her alone once they figured out who she was friends with, and this new status offered her the protection, the invisibility, she’d been craving. Her anger still flared and flashed of its own volition, but she had her girls to help her direct it. She’d always hated the kind of girl who spent time cutting down others, but she had to admit that it served a purpose: it felt damn good. Pointing out someone else’s flaws and shortcomings helped to masquerade her own.

  Better yet, the girls’ whole Homework Coven notion was genius. Her homework time was cut down considerably, as the five of them ganged up on each class assignment, letting each girl’s expertise lead the way. Why kill yourself on that English essay when Rowan could set it all up for you and show you what quotations to use? Why stress over physics when Indira could walk you through the equations in half the time? Cassie figured that she earned her part, given that she got all of them A’s on the first quiz in Westfield’s mandatory coding class.

  Dad, I’m sort of cheating at school, but not really, she texted one night.

  Sounds more like you’re hacking life, came the reply.

  After that, she didn’t worry about it anymore.

  Her newfound guiltless existence, though, didn’t cover everything. A voice gnawed at the back of her mind, whispering that she should be nicer to Sarah. And she tried — she really did. Sarah so badly wanted someone to bond with. She wanted someone whose grief — newer, more raw — could overshadow her own. But she had nothing else to bring to the table. Other than losing parents, she and Cassie had precisely nothing in common, whereas with the Homework Coven …

  With the Coven, there was snark. And flash. And style. Nothing more than skin-deep. Nothing real. That’s what mattered, for this year in particular.

  Still, out of sheer guilt, Cassie spent time with Sarah between classes and occasionally in homeroom, then usually managed to bounce a few texts back and forth. Eventually, Sarah stopped pushing her trauma group and seemed OK just being friends.

  Meanwhile, Cassie found that pretending to be friends with Rowan, Indira, Madison and Livvy was getting easier and easier. Sometimes she didn’t even have to pretend. Bonus: it was definitely keeping her mom off her back and her rage quiet.

  Of course, then Rachel had to ruin it.

  *

  “We have to talk about college,” Rachel said to Cassie one night during dinner — cheap spaghetti, watery marinara — and Cassie groaned. The only person she hadn’t reached some kind of understanding with appeared to be her mom. Their relationship was as strained as ever. Rachel had been snapping at Cassie more and more, especially about how much time Cassie was spending with her new friends after school. Cassie figured she must be stressed from her new job. It was better for everyone involved if they just left each other alone as much as possible, Cassie had decided.

  “Oh, I’m going,” Cassie assured her, poking around at the lukewarm noodles. “Fast as I can get out of here, I’m going.” She pretended not to see Rachel’s face cloud over.

  “Of course you’re going,” Rachel said quietly. “But you’ll be applying soon, and I’m a little worried about your transcripts.”

  “I’m an A student,” Cassie argued. Why was her mom always discounting her? She was never good enough for Rachel. She remembered bringing home a B minus on an impossibly difficult statistics final sophomore year. She’d been so proud of that grade. But when Rachel saw it, she’d tsk’d and asked Cassie what had happened. Her dad, meanwhile, had as opposite a reaction as one could: he’d taken her out for ice cream.

  “I’m not talking about your grades, which are very strong.” Rachel paused to shake some cheese, probably the kind filled with sawdust, onto her pasta. “I’m worried about your lack of extracurriculars. I don’t want schools to look at your record and wonder why you dropped everything, even all your computer stuff, when you switched schools.”

  “I will happily tell them why I dropped everything,” Cassie snapped. “I’m sure there’s some kind of ‘dead dad’ credit they’ll give me, if you’re so worried about it.”

  Not for the first time, Cassie wondered if she’d gone too far. Rachel turned pale, her fork frozen in midair. She sighed. “Sorry.”

  “No, don’t be sorry,” Rachel said, her voice low. She still wouldn’t meet Cassie’s eyes. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe there is a dead-parent box you can tick off on your applications. Maybe there’s a mom-who’s-tried-everything-to-get-through-to-her-daughter-and-is-out-of-ideas box, too.”

  Abruptly, Rachel stood up, cleared her dishes and disappeared into her bedroom, the hollow door making a small thwack as it closed. Cassie rolled her eyes, ignoring her regret. It was just like her mom to leave her to clean up the kitchen. And why did she have to bring up the fact that she hadn’t touched a keyboard in months? As though it had been an easy decision for her, something she’d done on a whim. You have to have a reason to code, Harlon used to tell her. Your reason can be lofty or silly, grand or stupid, but it needs to exist. Well, without him, she didn’t have a reason. Even though she dreamed in code, she couldn’t play around with it anymore. It felt like … Cassie hesitated, trying to place the emotion. Betrayal was the closest word she could come up with. Playing with code after her father died kind of felt like she was betraying the deepest, truest part of their relationship, their bond.

  Hey, Dad, she texted as soon as she got to her bedroom. Rachel hadn’t come out of hers all night. Why is mom so mean?

  Hey there, kiddo, Harlon wrote back. Your mom loves you. So do I.

  She has a funny way of showing it. Cassie’s thumbs were faster than her brain. She shouldn’t have written that. She suspected Rachel occasionally checked in on Cassie’s texting with Harlon, even though it was the most private thing Cassie had ever done and would ever do.

  I’m sorry you had a bad day, Harlon wrote. But remember …

  Cassie said it out loud before the phone could send the full message: “Any day you can walk away from is a good day.”

  She stared at the screen awhile longer, wondering what her dad would really say if he were here. Would he be proud of Cassie? Their apartment was so quiet that she could hear the television noises from old Hattie Morris’s next door. She wanted to scream, to break the silence with her internal thunder, to wake her mom from whatever cage she’d constructed around herself, from whatever it was that was keeping them from hearing each other.

  Cassie’s thumbs moved over the keys without her even realizing what she was asking. Dad, why is this all so hard?

  She stayed up for hours, her eyes scratchy, her long limbs heavy. But Harlon never wrote back.

  *

  Sometimes he didn’t write back. That was part of the randomization strategy.

  It wasn’t her father. Not really. Cassie knew that even though she let herself think it was her dad on the other end of the chat. Her father, though, was actually buried some ten miles from the new apartment, in a cemetery behind an old run-down church, the same church where baby Harlon had been baptized.

  The Harlon at the other end of the chat logs was a bot. A very special one.

  She and her dad had built it together. Some dads and daughters built homemade musical instruments or birdhouses. Harlon McKinney and his daughter hacked together an incredibly sophisticated bot designed to test Alan Turing’s the
ories.

  Turing had claimed that the true test of artificial intelligence was whether you could put the machine behind a curtain and have it converse with a human being on the other side. If the person on the other side couldn’t tell that he or she was speaking to a machine, not a person, then congratulations — you’ve got bona fide artificial intelligence.

  Their attempt at a Turing AI had been modeled on Harlon himself. There was a lifetime’s worth of Harlon’s blogs, posts, tweets and more all over the internet, to say nothing of thousands of hours of lecture videos and home movies. A hell of a lot of information on one man, capturing vocabulary, mannerisms, verbal tics and so on. Together, they’d built a neural net designed to suck all of that in, along with Harlon’s entire text-message history.

  They’d finished it about eight months before he died and had spent every free moment training it. It lived somewhere on the net on a secret server farm Harlon shared with some other mysterious hacker types, and only Cassie had the IP addresses that allowed her to “speak” to it.

  It was like talking to her dad.

  Almost.

  The bot responded to her using Harlon’s words and Harlon’s written voice, based on what she said and how she said it. But there was a randomization factor built in. Sometimes it didn’t respond because … Well, sometimes people just flaked and didn’t get back to you. It was more realistic that way, though frustrating.

  And she’d begun to notice that some repeats were cropping up. Depending on what she said to the bot, there was a range of responses. At first those responses had seemed infinite, but the bot was starting to tread old ground a bit. This was probably her fault; she had been — subconsciously, perhaps — sending it a lot of the same input lately. Mom sucks. I hate my life. I miss you. Over and over. The bot wasn’t learning anything new.

  She sighed and tried to figure out something new and interesting to send it but couldn’t come up with anything that would throw it for a loop.

  Mom said something smart today.

  Ugh. No. Never.

  Cassie would never admit this, but her mom was occasionally right about things.

  It was infuriating.

  Still, Cassie considered what Rachel had said about extra-curriculars. She’d worked hard all throughout school, and it seemed pretty dumb to throw it away now, when she was so close to the finish line. She’d had her eye on Stanford since Harlon had taken her on a tour of it in middle school, when he’d been a visiting lecturer, and her application was already saved on her laptop, just waiting to be finalized. So the next day, while she was waiting in the lunch line to purchase her sad little banana and yogurt cup — Rachel hadn’t allotted her much in the way of a lunch budget — she checked the Westfield High app to see what clubs were meeting that day. Maybe she’d surprise everyone and join one.

  She had English right before lunch, with Sarah, so she let Sarah escort her to the cafeteria each day. By unspoken agreement, Sarah peeled off before they actually walked into the room.

  At her lunch table, Rowan and Indira were shrieking and laughing at something on their phones. “What’s up?” Cassie asked, setting down her tray.

  “Oh, we’re just making fun of the president’s daughter. She had the baby!” Indira said gleefully.

  Cassie shrugged. “Mazel, I guess.” The president had a bunch of kids, but Cassie couldn’t be bothered to pay much attention to any of the first family. She did, though, remember her dad ranting about how the president was scum, especially for the way he talked about women, including his own wife and daughters. “If you ever hear me talk about Cassie like that,” he seethed to Rachel once, “please shoot me in the head. Twice, to be sure.”

  And, yeah, the first daughter had all the traits of a hottie, along with a social media following most people would kill for. And her dad seemed like a total creeper, but Cassie just couldn’t convince herself to care. Most old guys seemed like total creepers, after all.

  “Cassie,” Rowan said in that tone of voice that made Cassie guess her reaction to the news had been less than ideal. “Don’t say you haven’t seen the photos?”

  “I haven’t been on BLINQ since second period,” Cassie protested. She and Rowan had somehow fallen into this pattern, this routine, where Cassie scoffed at the amount of time and energy Rowan spent on social media, while Rowan pretended Cassie didn’t know anything about anyone as a result.

  “Girl. These will make your life.” Indira flashed Cassie her phone. Cassie grabbed it and began scrolling. It took a minute for her to digest what she was seeing. Then, her expression unreadable, Cassie handed it back.

  Rowan and Indira waited eagerly, their faces bright as they scrutinized Cassie. Livvy and Madison slid onto the bench next to them and Indira nudged them, updating them in a whisper while they all waited for Cassie’s reaction.

  “Well?!” Indira squealed. “I can’t take it anymore! What do you think?”

  “I mean, I know nothing about babies …” Cassie began. She chewed her lip and tried not to laugh. “But …”

  “But …” Rowan prompted.

  “But …” Cassie met four pairs of glistening eyes. “That is one unfortunate-looking child.”

  “Ba-ha-ha!” Indira guffawed while Livvy and Madison burst out laughing. Rowan was prettily chuckling into her hand. Eventually, the table’s laughter was loud and raucous enough that the others began to look at them, even more than they normally did. Cassie basked in it, surprised at how good it felt to hear real laughter. It had been a while.

  “I mean,” Cassie added, eager to continue making them laugh, to continue the cafeteria’s collective admiration, “the poor thing is going to hate its mother for being so pretty!”

  “It looks like her dad,” Indira said. “Like a teeny, tiny, baby version of the president.”

  “With better hair,” Livvy deadpanned.

  Cassie had to admit it was true. Poor baby.

  “My mom is gorgeous and I don’t hate her,” Rowan said. She cocked her head in thought. “But still, I get what you’re saying.”

  “You guys, we should try to get #UnfortunateBaby trending,” Livvy declared.

  “Or what about #UglyMothersAreTheBestMothers?” Madison offered.

  “That’s so mean,” Cassie said with a chuckle.

  “OK, this is my mission now. Let’s see what’s trending already.” Rowan tapped a few times and then cleared her throat. “Here’s our competition: #RoyalBaby.”

  “But they’re not royalty!” Livvy said.

  “They sure act like it,” Cassie grumbled. An unexpected silence fell across the table and Cassie, surprised, tried to clarify. “What? My dad said the president thinks he’s a king.”

  “My family supports the president,” Rowan said, her voice stiff and prim.

  “It was just a joke.” Cassie shrugged.

  Rowan fixed her gaze on Cassie for another uncomfortable moment before clearing her throat again and looking back at her phone. “Check out the other trends, everyone. Let’s reconvene after school to try and get something trending ourselves. We don’t have much time if we want to get in on this one!”

  “Speaking of after school …” Cassie let her voice trail off and hated herself for it. She straightened her spine, set her jaw. So what if they laughed at her? “I’m thinking of joining a club. What do you guys all do?”

  Indira snorted. Madison looked confused. Livvy and Rowan exchanged glances before Rowan broke into a dazzling smile. Indira snapped a quick photo of her — “This light is really beautiful, Roe, I’ll post this ay-sap” — and Cassie braced herself. She’d misstepped somehow, again.

  “Clubs aren’t really our thing,” Rowan said. She shrugged daintily. “You know our thoughts: This is all so temporary. Burn bright and brief and leave some energy for the real world.”

  “I get that.” Cassie nodded, biting into her ban
ana. “I guess I’m just worried about my college applications. I don’t want them to look too sparse.”

  “Mmmm,” Rowan said noncommittally. “My daddy told me I don’t need to worry about college applications.”

  “Me neither!” Madison’s eyes lit up. She liked it anytime she and Rowan had something in common.

  If Harlon were alive, would Cassie need to worry about college? As she slurped the rest of her yogurt she tried to picture, not for the first time, how her life might be different had Harlon lived. They hadn’t been private-jet rich, or even first-class-to-Europe-every-summer rich the way Rowan and her friends seemed to be. But Cassie had never wondered if her parents would turn down her requests for the latest technologies, or the best sneakers, or that weekend away at Max’s beach house. She’d always gotten what she wanted in addition to what she needed. Now, she realized ruefully, her college search had been narrowed down to its high scholarship potential. She would probably end up at MS/BFU. With her mom. Ugh.

  Cassie surveyed the rest of the cafeteria to get ideas. Her eyes landed on a tableful of techies, silently munching at their sandwiches while also tapping at tablets. She lingered long enough for the other girls to notice.

  “Oh-em-gee, is our tech-head hearing the mating call of the teen cybergeek?” Rowan teased.

  Cassie ducked her head, grateful she hadn’t made the time to tie her hair up that morning so it could fall over her face and hide her grimace. With Harlon McKinney for a father, being a tech-head had pretty much been her birthright.

  But that was over now.

  “Nah,” she muttered when she knew her face had reverted to its neutral expression.

  “Well, let’s think about what you’re good at, and go from there,” Livvy suggested.

  “Talking shit?” Rowan joked. Cassie chuckled while the rest of the girls laughed heartily.

  “No, but Rowan’s right,” Madison said.

  “Obviously,” Rowan said with a smirk.