Page 3 of What If It's You?

With that, everyone rose from their seats around the ovoid frosted glass conference table, gathering their laptops and seltzer cans, falling into subdued conversation with their neighbors as they made their way to the exit.

“You’re gonna have to tell me how you managed that,” a soft voice said at my left shoulder. I didn’t need to turn to know Drew would be standing there, blue eyes crinkling with a shy smile. I let my giddy grin loose—Drew might technically run half of Lightning, our experimental division, but he was my friend first.

Drew and I had started at Pixel within a few weeks of each other, me as a junior marketing and advertising associate, him as a software engineer for core products, “a glorified code monkey” in his words. Usually our paths wouldn’t have crossed, but Pixel’smultiweek orientation deliberately threw the departments together, “so we all understand the breadth and depth of our mission.”

Which was actually the specific thing that bonded us. Drew had sat next to me the entire first week of orientation, his square jaw set, straight dirty-blond hair always slightly mussed (probably from his habit of tugging the hood of his standard-issue-coder-uniform zip-up sweatshirt up and down every few minutes when he was trying hard to focus). He’d kept his wide-eyed gaze fixed on the rotating cast of speakers at the front of the lecture hall—I was still reeling that even the relatively unimportant Boston office had alecture hall—the picture of dutiful attention. Then, that Friday, our Company Culture Czar launched into his presentation of themission,which wasn’t just to dominate various segments of the tech space, or to make astronomical profits (both metrics we consistently met), but tobuild the products that will bring justice to a broken world.

Drew had laughed aloud, loud enough that the speaker stopped midsentence to scan the room. Luckily, the hall was dim enough that Drew’s deep flush was only noticeable to me, sitting directly to his right. I’d waited until the speaker was deep into a spiel about howsharing our happiest moments with strangers can turn them into friendsto turn to Drew and whisper in his ear.

“Don’t like this particular flavor of Kool-Aid?”

“It’s—it’s not that,” Drew stammered, wincing with his entire lanky frame. “I mean, it’s good to have a mission, it just feels a little…”

“Messianic? Egotistical? Completely contradictory to all of the peer-reviewed studies about the negative impacts of social media on mental health?”

A warm grin spread across Drew’s face, turning his strong, handsome features sweetly boyish.

“I’m not saying I’m not psyched to work here—it’sPixel,it’s like…the Olympics for computer scientists—but if we really wanted to save the world we should at least try, I don’t know…moderating content?”

“Or turning a single one of our trillion server farms into anactual farm.”

“Or using the infinite data we have on our users to get them to, like…go to the doctor, or find therapy, or pretty much do anything but buy more random shit.”

“Really, the possibilities are as endless as the deep, meaningful connections we can all make through the avatar of world peace that is Pix.”

Drew snorted softly, his grin pulling out a dimple.

“You’re in marketing, right? Aren’t you guys supposed to really buy into all this stuff?”

“We’re supposed to find ways to sell this stuff. Not the same.”

“Then why are you here? At Pixel, I mean.” I searched his face for judgment, but I found only genuine curiosity.

“I mean…you said it yourself, it’s kind of the Olympics for all sorts of different jobs.” I shrugged. “Honestly, I think I wanted to show my dad that the ridiculous cost of my college education wasn’t a total waste. He triedreallyhard to be supportive, but he’s all about stability. I could see that ulcer forming when I told him I was majoring in English.”

“Well, I’m glad I’m not the only cynic,” Drew said, flashing that same soft smile he’d given me after today’s department head meeting, one that had grown wonderfully familiar over the intervening years. “And it was Flavor Aid, by the way.”

“Sorry?”

“People say ‘drink the Kool-Aid,’ but Jim Jones’s followers drank Flavor Aid. At Jonestown. I assume that was what you were referencing?”

“Oh, yeah…right.” I blinked, a little taken aback. I’d probably heard at some point that the phrase originated with the events at Jonestown, but it had never really sunk in. It made me want to stop using the phrase at all, correctly or otherwise. “Learn something new every day, huh?”

“If you’re lucky.” And from the glimmer in his eyes, I knew he really meant it.

After that we sat together at lunch through the rest of orientation, then started coordinating our lunch breaks in the months that followed, messaging each other on the company’s chat platform multiple times a day. We almost never discussed our jobs directly, unless it was to complain or gossip—Drew’s favorite hobbyhorse was the closed-mindedness of the experimental team, where he’d quickly managed to snag a spot; mine was officemances both suspected and confirmed, which he gamely pretended to care about. Even all these years later, despite the fact that we’d been steadily working our way up our respective ladders, he was definitively my work husband.

After a stressful morning, Drew’s familiar, solid presence was especially welcome.

“How I managed what?” I raised an eyebrow at him as I gathered my things. “Sorry to break it to you, but even after half a decade here, I still have to enlist a whole pack of code monkeys to build out our A/B tests.”

“Good. If you ever really set your mind to learning how to code, I might have to worry about my job.” That goofy grin was so hard not to reciprocate.

“You really must want something out of me to spew such obvious bullshit,” I retorted. Drew was a brilliant coder, just one of the many reasons he was already running an entire experimental team. But whenever I used “thegword,” as Drew called my occasional (earned) references to his obvious genius, conversation grew stilted, and he flushed even redder than he had the day we met. Apparently no amount of objective proof could fully overcome the years of medium-town Iowa “no one likes a bragger” programming he’d been subjected to.

“You know me too well, Laurel.” He bit his lip, glancing at the door and leaning in, voice lowering. “I meant how’d you shut down Jim Donovan without even breaking a sweat? Every time he starts digging into my presentations I feel like I’m in one of those naked-in-high-school dreams.” Drew gave a self-deprecating eye roll.

“It helps that he so clearly thinks my job could be outsourced totrained chimps. Not hard to beat expectations set that low. I’m guessing the questions he has for your team are a lot more intense.”

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