Page 62 of Deep End

“I’ve been working on the pooling layers for the neural network,” I tell Lukas.

“You said max pooling, right?”

“Zach did.”

“Ah. What doyouthink?”

I pause. Chew my lower lip. “Zach is a grad student. I’m just an undergrad.”

“Uh-huh. And you can still disagree with him.”

“The average value would be better.” I glance up at him, sideways. “What doyouthink?”

“I think you’re better than me, or Zach, at this.”

I don’t strictlyneedLukas to tell me that I’m good at something, especially when I already know that, but it’s still nice. A quiet warmth. My knees no longer shake, but I’m empty. Electrified. “Love the trust.”

“It’s a hell of a drug.” We exchange a knowing look. “I’m going to write a script to prepare the training dataset for the model.”

“Can you?”

His eyebrow quirks. “Are you doubting my coding ability?”

“No, no. I’d rather do it, though.”

“Why?”

“Well, I don’t know what coding languages you know, for one.”

“And?”

“I’m concerned that you’ll say, I don’t know, MATLAB.”

He scoffs. “MATLAB.”

“Your indignationisa relief.” I catch the twitch of his lips as he nudges me into a left turn. We’re slowly heading toward the outskirts of campus—maybe another library I don’t know about? “You may write the script.”

“How generous of you. How’s German going, troll?”

I glare at his smug, self-satisfied face. “Okay, first:troll? And, that waslow.”

“But warranted.MATLAB.”

“Uh-huh. Next thing you’re gonna ask me about my inward dives.”

“Hmm. Which ones are those?”

I halt in the middle of the sidewalk.

“What?” he asks.

“Did you just . . . do you not know what an inward dive is?”

He shrugs. “I get them mixed up.”

“But . . . Pen.” He stares at me like I should elaborate. “Your ex is a diving prodigy.” More blank stares. “You can tell different dive groups apart, right?”

“Well, I did notice the difference between the short, bouncy board and the tall, stiff board—”

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