So I rode my bike through the gritty, slushy snow to the warehouse with my stoma
So I rode my bike through the gritty, slushy snow to the warehouse with my stomach full of angry butterflies and met the guys from the Group and they all stared at me, holding limp slices of pizza and bottles of beer like statues until one of them said “Oh my god. You’re Shad.” And they were all freaked out, not because I was black or only fifteen and not cool, but because it had apparently never occurred to them that girls could code.
It was warm inside the tent-like place, thanks to an electric space heater that was humming away. I took a slice of pizza. I also pulled a bottle of beer out of a case, and that made them exchange glances, like “should we say something? Isn’t she too young?” But they didn’t, which is good because I was on the edge of getting really angry.
I didn’t realize it until I thought about it later, but I was giving them a test, taking that bottle of beer. If they said they could drink beer but I couldn’t, that would have told me I would always be a kid to them, and worse yet, a girl. Girls don’t code. Girls don’t drink beer, but if they do, they’re probably sluts, even though fifteen-year-old boys who drink beer are cool. Pretty girls might be allowed in the clubhouse, just for special occasions, but they can’t be members, not for real. Also, any black girl who codes and drinks beer is probably a lesbo freak who has no friends and is too weird to hang out with because her weirdness might be contagious.
They introduced themselves, and though I knew who they were in the Group, it took me a while to connect who they were online with who they were in person.
The one with the fancy glasses named Tyler was Kadabra. Jason was Gargle, who I had always imagined would look like a furry blue Muppet, but he actually was over six feet tall, with a shaved head and nice abs but absolutely no blue fur or googly eyes. I had expected Call me Cheese to look like a straight-laced English teacher with a bow tie and suspenders because he was always correcting people’s grammar, but he wore paint-spattered jeans and tennis shoes patched with duct tape. (Okay, so my first impression that they all wore expensive clothes was wrong. It must have been the stress.) His name was Geoff, and he made sure I knew how to spell it, because he hated it when people spelled it with a J, which was just plain wrong.
Ferret, the cryptoarcheologist, was the oldest and had a lot of wrinkles that doubled whenever he smiled. He had wire-rim glasses and wore jeans with a tweedy jacket but no tie. He looked like he was disguised as a college professor, which it turned out he was, teaching computational biology at MIT when he wasn’t excavating software off of old hard drives.
Fa1staff was closer to what I imagined – a wiry little guy named Zeke with shaggy hair that he must have cut himself with those scissors little kids use, the ones that have round ends and aren’t very sharp. The only surprise was that he was a lot younger than the others, the only one remotely close