“Almost there,” Alex said.
Once they were done, they stuck big spoons right in the pots and handed out bowls so we could all serve ourselves. Then we sat at the kitchen table and completely pigged out. I liked how casual it all was, but that they all ate together. In my house we mostly fended for ourselves or ate in front of the television; we only ate at the dining room table when my parents were having people over. Which happened almost never.
“This food tastes even better than it smells,” I said, fighting the urge to talk with my mouth full so I could keep eating.
“He’s a better cook than his mother was,” Mrs. Nguyen said. “And he knows it, too.”
“Don’t be silly.” Mr. Nguyen waved her off, but he looked pleased. “Cooking is just a hobby.”
“A likely story,” Alex said. “I keep waiting for you to tell us you’re ditching work to open a restaurant.”
“It’s a great idea. Your mom can quit her job and take care of the books, and you can quit school to waitress.”
Mrs. Nguyen laughed. “You’re welcome to trade software for soft-shell crabs, but you’d have to carry me out of the office bound and gagged. And don’t even joke about Alex dropping out of school.”
There it was—that Marbella-mom edge to her voice. I wasn’t the only one at this table with high-pressure parents, then.
“Speaking of school, we should probably get to work,” Alex said.
I thanked her parents for dinner and then followed Alex to her room. Just as I’d expected, she had the same enormous bedroom setup that Becca had, though she’d done something completely different with the space. Her bed was in the same place, but instead of a lounge area she had a huge desk that ran the length of the entire back wall and then turned and tracked half of the rest of the room. That was where the computer monitors were. Three of them: one in the center and two at forty-five-degree angles on either side. Also huge.
“Are you an air traffic controller or something?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I guess you could say I’m a programmer.” She sat down in a big fancy-looking desk chair and motioned to a smaller chair next to it for me.
I sat down. “What kind of programming do you do?”
She gave me a little smirk, like I’d caught her doing something she wasn’t supposed to. “Well, maybe I exaggerated a little. I told my parents I needed all this stuff for programming. Can you keep a secret?”
If only she knew. “Sure.”
“I need the screens for poker. I play online. Like, a lot.”
“Isn’t it illegal? I mean, not to sound like a goody-goody or anything . . .”
She shrugged. “It’s, like, dubious. The playing part isn’t so much illegal, but the money part isn’t something I want people to find out about, if you know what I’m saying.”
“You make money? You must be good.”
“Yeah, I am,” she said, but she didn’t sound arrogant. Just proud. “But that’s also where the programming comes in. I wrote a bunch of tracking programs to help with my game, to run statistics, that sort of thing. It gives me a real advantage over some of the idiots who play online.”
I was impressed. I’d thought she was just this random girl in some classes with me; it turned out she had this totally other secret life. My secrets weren’t nearly as interesting as hers. “Why do you need so many screens?”
“Because I usually play about five or six games at a time. That’s the nice thing about being online—you don’t have to sit at just one table. Your avatar can be in lots of places at once.” She clicked and her screen lit up with the image of a poker table covered in felt; she clicked again and I saw an image of a boy’s face, with short dark hair.
“That’s your avatar?”
“That’s virtual me. I pretend I’m a boy so they’ll take me more seriously. Sad, but poker’s pretty sexist. It’s weirdly not as racist, though—there are a lot of famous players with the same last name as me, so being Alex Nguyen is actually kind of helpful. Not that I use my real name, but some people I play with a lot know it. And they know my uncle, too—he was a professional poker player, a really famous one. Taught me everything I know.”
“When do you have time to do all this?
“At night. I don’t need much sleep.”