Pushing Perfect

Alex’s mom opened the door and welcomed me in. She wore the local mom uniform of yoga pants and a zipped-up track jacket, her thick black hair pulled into a high ponytail. “You must be Kara,” she said. “Come on in—Alex is inside and my foolish husband is slaving over the hot stove.”

She led me into the kitchen, where a short man in khakis, a denim shirt, and an apron that read TROPHY HUSBAND was frowning over a cookbook as several pans bubbled on the stove. “Hi, I’m Kara,” I said. “It smells amazing in here.” I meant it, too; the air was full of ginger and garlic and other spices I didn’t recognize.

“Oh, it’s a disaster,” he said, cheerfully. “I’ve been taking classes and reading these cookbooks to try to reconstruct all these old recipes my mom used to make, but she took her secrets to the grave.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, though he hadn’t sounded sad about it.

“I’m just sorry she didn’t teach me how to cook. You can be sure I won’t make the same mistake with Alex. Hi, honey! Come over here and give me a hand.”

I turned around to see that Alex had just come into the kitchen. “You don’t really want my help,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to get in the way of the fun you’re having.” She said it with a completely straight face, so it took me a second to realize she was kidding.

But her dad understood right away and stuck his tongue out at her. She stuck hers out right back. “Stop screwing around and help me,” he said. This was obviously not the first time they’d done this bit.

“What do you need?” She gave me a nod to acknowledge she knew I was there and then went to read the cookbook over her dad’s shoulder. “I thought you were just going to do pho. You can make that in your sleep.”

“I got ambitious,” he said, looking a little embarrassed. “Shaking beef with red rice … it’s been a while since you had company.”

Now it was Alex’s turn to look embarrassed. “I told you, this is not a big deal!” She glanced over at me. “No offense.”

“None taken.” It was all pretty amusing. “Can I help?”

“No!” they both yelled at the same time.

Alex’s mom laughed. “Let me get you something to drink, and then we can sit at the table and watch the show. It’s usually entertaining, if messy. Last time they made shaking beef, I had to renovate the kitchen afterward.”

I wondered whether she was joking. It was a really nice kitchen, with shiny sea-green tile that looked like little bricks lining the walls behind enormous stainless steel appliances. Even if she was serious, though, it didn’t sound like she minded. Though she was wearing the Marbella uniform, she didn’t seem as high-strung as some of the other moms. Mine included.

She handed me a glass of iced tea and we sat at the table and watched Alex and her dad prepare the food. They worked well together, only talking occasionally, trading ingredients and utensils back and forth like people who did this all the time, which they clearly did. I couldn’t even imagine having that kind of a routine with my dad; he was so caught up in work that even my earliest memories were of him on his cell phone. The only time we’d really spent alone together was when he helped me study—he was really good at English and all the nonmath stuff that I wasn’t so into—but that hadn’t happened in a long time.

“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.”

I knew that couldn’t be true; I remembered last year, when she used to fall asleep in class every day. “Don’t you need a lot of math for programming? Do you really need my help? It sounds like you could help me more than I could help you—I’m way behind in AP Statistics, too.” I’d loaded up my schedule with math electives, mostly to avoid having to take more science classes.

“Well …” She got that look again, like I’d busted her, and then started talking really fast. “I mean, yeah, calculus isn’t my best subject, but I get by. It’s just … most of my friends are guys, and you and I have been in classes together forever but we’ve never hung out, and I only see you with those Brain Trust kids, and in class you seem smart and funny and they’re smart but not even a little bit funny, and they can’t be a whole lot of fun, and you seem like someone who should maybe be having more fun than you are, and I thought maybe we should be friends.”

She took a deep breath. I stared at her.

“Well, are you going to say something? Did I just totally humiliate myself? We can just study. No problem. I’ve got stats down cold. Took it sophomore year.”

“No, wait,” I said. “You just talk way faster than I can think. You’re right.”

“Right about which part?”

“Right about all of it. I do pretty much only hang out with Julia and those guys, and only at school, because they’re not fun.”

“I’m totally fun. We’re going to start getting you out more.”