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  “The data is pretty damn useless,” Elle admitted, meeting her friend’s eyes again.

  Marni and Tina had finished even their French fries at that point, so they just sat there, looking at Elle. Finally Marni burst out, “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  Elle blinked as Tina shot Marni a warning glance.

  “Since when did you even contemplate putting up with this shit?” Marni demanded. “Adam cheated on you. Betrayed you with a skank. How can you ever trust him again? Why would you want to?”

  Elle felt her cheeks heat up. She knew if the roles were reversed and this had happened to Marni, she’d be spouting exactly what Marni was spouting. But now that it had actually happened, it wasn’t that simple.

  “You don’t have kids,” Marni went on. “You two aren’t even married. There’s nothing tying you to him.”

  “We’ve been friends since freshman year,” Elle said. It sounded lame even to her ears, but the words kept coming. “We’ve been dating for two and a half years. We planned to- to get married.” She swallowed against the thickening in her throat. She would not make this worse by crying, but her voice grew hoarse regardless. “We had plans.”

  “Screw the damn plan!” Marni leaned forward, as if she wanted to lunge across the coffee table all the way to where Elle was sitting and shake her. “Plans sometimes change. Even you modify those algorithms, or models, or whatever it is you do.”

  Tina intervened. “It’s not that simple.”

  “Why the hell not?” Marni demanded.

  “Oh, come on,” Tina rolled her eyes. “Logic isn’t the only thing at play here.”

  Elle was practically gulping water at this point. She would not cry, dammit. She would not. So instead she choked.

  “Are you all right?” Tina asked Elle, standing up and moving towards her.

  Elle nodded, waving her off as she finished swallowing the water. “I’m fine,” she managed.

  Marni sighed. After a moment of silence, she finally asked Elle, “Do you love Adam?”

  Elle wasn’t sure how to answer that question. What, exactly, was love? What was real love, not the movie love or romance novel love that had women swooning and their breath catching? “Along with you guys, Adam was one of my best friends freshman year,” she said.

  She drank some more water as she thought, remembering how happy she had been at the start of their sophomore year when he told her, “I want to take you out this Friday, not to hang out, but on a date.”

  “When he asked me out… I couldn’t believe it,” Elle continued. “We have so much in common. We can talk about anything, even informatics, data analysis… anything.”

  Tina and Marni simply looked at her.

  “I don’t care that he’s not a GQ model. I’m not a model, either. We… we fit,” Elle finished. Her words sounded lackluster to her own ears.

  Tina raised an eyebrow but kept silent. That wasn’t Marni’s MO. “There are other guys out there, you know.”

  Elle rolled her eyes. “I know.”

  “Adam was your first serious boyfriend,” Tina said. “It makes sense he’d hold a special place for you. It doesn’t mean he’s the one.”

  “That’s easy for you guys to say,” Elle said. Both of them were better looking than Elle. Marni could walk the catwalk with her long legs and slender waist. Tina was shorter but with lethal curves. Elle was the geek girl guys looked right past to get a better look at them when the three of them went out together. And Elle was okay with that. She knew she was smarter than both of her friends, although neither one of them was a dumb ass. It all evened out.

  Tina looked confused. Elle sighed, realizing she was going to have to make it clear. “I’m not a supermodel.”

  “Who is?” Tina asked.

  “You’re pretty yourself,” Marni said, “without even trying. And if you put a little bit of effort into your appearance, you’d be stunning.”

  Now Elle was raising an eyebrow. Marni was not a bullshitter. She was a give-it-to’em straight kinda girl.

  “She’s right,” Tina agreed. “Guys check you out. You just don’t notice.”

  “When we would go out freshman year,” Elle said, “I noticed where the guys looked and where they didn’t. I’m okay with that,” she added, talking over them as they both started to protest. “But I’d always hoped I’d meet my husband in college.”

  Tina and Marni looked at each other. “We haven’t met our husbands here,” Marni said. “It’s the 21st century: plenty of people don’t meet the person they’ll marry until after college.”

  “Adam is not your last chance,” Tina added. “If that’s why you’re staying with him-”

  “You guys don’t get it!” Elle surprised even herself with the forcefulness of her outburst. “I- I have no one. If I don’t have my own family, I’ll be sailing solo for every holiday.”

  There was a long silence that made Elle more uncomfortable than she had ever been with Tina and Marni. She stood up. This conversation had gone on long enough.

  “There’s no divorce between friends,” Tina said with a fierceness that contrasted with her typical zen persona. Before Elle knew it, Tina was up and across the room, right in front of her.

  Marni joined her with virtually preternatural speed. “Guys come and go,” she said, “but friends are for life.”

  They began to get blurry in front of Elle. Before she knew it, both of them were hugging her at the same time. Her throat was too thick for her to respond, so she just hugged them back. Family was something people took for granted. Parents were around, whether they were wanted or not, for everyone else she knew. Despite her friends’ sincerity, Elle knew it was impossible for them to really know what it was like when that wasn’t the case.

  Chapter 8

  The screech of rusty hinges seared through Elle’s head as she pulled open the door to the School of Information Science building the next morning. Those hinges always squeaked, so normally she didn’t even notice, but after a night of Marni pouring her shots and trying to get her to hook up with guys in the bar (not Bubba’s), any sound assaulted her ears. Elle was almost finished with her double espresso which was helping unfog her brain. This was the first time she and Preston were meeting one-on-one. She wanted to be professional.

  “Well, good morning.” Preston was already in the lab, settled in with his laptop. While the espresso seemed to melt the cobwebs cluttering her brain, his smile was like an electric jolt. Now she needed to make sure she was still breathing, while behaving normally, of course.

  She returned his smile. “Good morning.” Elle opened up the CIA-issued laptop Jack/Henry had given her for her work on the project. She had memorized the login sequence to unlock the laptop. Elle didn’t want Preston to see her struggling with it on their first day working together. First she had to swipe her left index finger, then type in a password, then let the laptop’s web camera perform a retinal scan. Finally she had to say “Eleanor Paquet” into the laptop’s microphone. At that point her home screen came up. She felt a moment of relief. If she had done the finger swipe and password in reverse, it would have actually wiped the hard drive clean. Talk about embarrassing.

  “No cheat sheet- impressive,” Preston told her with a grin.

  Elle found herself grinning back. “They’re forbidden, right?”

  “Yeah,” Preston nodded and winked. “Some of us just might write it down and make sure we keep it secure.”

  Elle laughed. So the CIA people were human. Preston leaned back in his chair. It looked like he’d been there for a little while. “So I’ve heard you develop algorithms and models to identify players. Can you explain what that means? In English?”

  Elle laughed again. At least she wasn’t giggling like a school girl. She hoped. “An algorithm is a set of instructions, so a search algorithm does just that-”

  “Search the data?”

  Elle nodded. “I use search algorithms to go through the data sets that Anderson- that I get.”r />
  Preston smiled at her slip, and again, she found herself smiling back, but she pressed on. “A model-”

  “Isn’t a lady who struts down a catwalk for a living?”

  Elle laughed. “Not this type. This model includes the statistically significant variables that influence a desired outcome.” She had the textbook definition memorized, but the nice thing about being at this point in her training was that she actually understood it.

  Preston blinked. “Statistically significant variables that influence a desired outcome.”

  She nodded.

  “I know what each of those words means individually,” he said, “but not a clue what they all mean together.”

  Elle thought about it for a minute. “Okay, think about it this way. The goal is to identify specific groups of users, right? There are specific things that make each group unique. That’s what makes them a group.”

  Preston blinked again. “If you say so.”

  Elle continued. “Each of the key characteristics that makes a group unique- or the combination of characteristics- is considered significant.”

  “I know what the individual words mean-”

  “Let’s consider location, time of play, and strategy as three significant variables. Players may be grouped together because their IP addresses are from the same general area, they tend to play at the same time, and they use similar tactics. Maybe their games intersect, so they’re either playing cooperatively or in direct opposition to each other, which is another significant variable.”

  “So they’re playing together,” Preston clarified.

  “Yes. Each of these characteristics is a variable: a significant one. When I put them into a model, I can identify who’s playing together, or in a similar way, out of the thousands of players in the game.”

  Preston even looked hot when he was thinking hard. “I like my definition of models better.”

  Elle laughed again and realized she hadn’t laughed this much in a long time. This was where she shone, so the conversation was fun for her. She couldn’t really talk about this stuff with anyone else except, well, Adam. “Basically what I’m doing is sorting all of the data. Think of it this way: Sub Rosa is a complex game, right? Thousands of people play around the world. Players generate data from playing the game itself, not to mention the chat rooms, message boards and informational threads. What I do is try to organize all of this data and connect it by similar players. I try to figure out if different players are more likely to use the message boards vs a chat room, for example, and what makes them similar. Does that make sense?”

  Preston’s brow remained furrowed, which just made him look even hotter. “So you try to connect a player’s information from the game with their messages on message boards and conversations in chat rooms?”

  Elle nodded. “I try to link players’ data and also group the players based on shared characteristics. How do teenage males play vs college-age males vs post-college males, for example.” That was, ostensibly, what the advertising company had been interested in.

  “That’s the data itself,” Preston said. “So what is metadata?”

  Elle smiled. Lots of people had that question. “Metadata is the information about the information. For example, players have user names. The easiest way to link a player’s information from the game with the message boards and chat is to gather information that is all from the same user name. But sometimes people use different names. So I also tag information by such markers as time of day of play and posting, IP address, similar game strategies: information about the data. That’s the metadata.”

  Preston nodded, brow still furrowed as he thought it through. “So by analyzing the metadata, you can group the players.”

  He was hot and smart. Elle was impressed; Marni and Tina still got confused about what, exactly, metadata was, despite her repeated explanations over the years. “How do you like my model now?”

  Preston’s eyes seemed to pin her in place with a gaze so penetrating it was as if it stripped away the layers and crystallized her thoughts so he could see them. “Very much,” he said with a sly smile. “She’s been good to me. And it’s the hot, one-of-a-kind model that not even our analysts at Langley can duplicate.”

  Elle felt herself blush. So annoying. “Well, I understand gamers.” It was as if invisible lasers were beaming out of his eyes, heating her up. “You know, being in college and everything.” Adam was a gamer, but she didn’t want to bring him up right now.

  Preston looked amused at her blushing. “I like how you strut your stuff.”

  Of course that had her blushing so much she probably looked like she was suffering a coronary. Elle again laughed while trying to think of something to say. All she could come up with was, “So I take it you’re not an analyst?”

  She began typing commands into her computer, and he started reviewing whatever he’d been doing as well. “Clandestine Service,” Preston replied. “I use the data you find in the field.”

  Clandestine Service. So he was a spy. A super sexy secret spy. Elle managed to block a giggle from escaping but felt her cheeks get warm. She was working with a real live spy. She could see Preston in a tuxedo, doing the tango with some long-limbed woman before stealing state secrets and zooming off in a sleek sports car.

  After a while, Preston said, “So if you can put together the right combination of variables, you can predict what will happen.”

  “Within a certain degree of accuracy, yes.”

  “So what variables would I need to guarantee dinner with you?”

  Now Elle was blinking. Was he- the super sexy secret spy- asking her- the geek girl- out? She had to be misunderstanding something. He wouldn’t give her a second look if they passed on the street. Before she could try to think of anything to say there was a knock on the door.

  Patty, one of the administrative assistants, came in, holding flowers and a box of chocolates. Elle always had appreciated Patty’s assistance, in this case from saving her as her brain sputtered. Patty gave Preston an appreciative look before focusing on Elle.

  “These came for you,” she said, setting them both down on the table, “along with this.” She handed Elle a small envelope and then focused on Preston. “I’m Patty,” she said, offering her hand.

  Elle’s appreciation for Patty crashed. The administrative assistant was not much older than Elle, probably in her late twenties. Likely right around Preston’s age, Elle realized. Her stomach felt as if it was turning over.

  Preston flashed his Hollywood smile at Patty as he shook her hand. “I’m Preston from Anderson Advertising. I’m working with Elle on this account.” He gestured to Elle, but Patty didn’t spare her another glance.

  “I’m the administrative assistant assigned to Clark’s lab,” she said. “If there’s anything I can do to… assist, feel free to ask. I’m right down the hall.”

  The word “Bitch” popped into Elle’s mind, but luckily it didn’t escape her lips. That alcohol had done a number on her brain today. What was wrong with her? Patty had saved her ass more times than she could count.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Preston assured her.

  As Patty left, hips swaying with each step, she gave him another smile over her shoulder, which he returned. Oh, yeah, she was a bitch.

  “I take it that variable is a… complication to my model?” Preston asked after a moment.

  “Huh?” Elle realized he was gesturing towards the flowers and the envelope she held in her hand. The flowers were lovely: roses of assorted colors, including red, white, peach and pink. She opened the envelope to read the card.

  Please forgive me. I truly am sorry. I don’t know any flowery words, so I’ll just say it directly: I love you.

  Adam was on full scholarship. He got work-study, so she knew the flowers and candy were significant expenses for him. “This variable… pretty much nullifies the model,” Elle heard herself saying. Now why the hell had she said that, given Adam may very well be her soon-to-be-e
x-boyfriend? She was trying to figure out what to say next to smooth things over when Preston, who didn’t exactly look deterred, spoke.

  “What variables would I need for lunch?”

  Smoothed over, just like that. Elle grinned. “The significant one would be my appetite. I’m hungry.” She hadn’t eaten much last night after the nachos from Bubba’s, and her stomach all but dry heaved at the thought of food earlier that morning.

  When Preston’s eyes darkened, however, Elle wanted to cut her tongue out. How could she have said something so… so… provocative?

  Preston’s slow smile told her he had interpreted her words just as she had not intended. “Well, I’m very good at satisfying appetites.”

  Ooookaaaay. She was in so far over her head, she was damn near drowning. “The Purple Pig,” she blurted out.

  That threw him for a loop. He looked downright confused. “A purple pig?”

  Now Elle could breathe, even laugh. “The Purple Pig. Come on, I’ll show you.” She pulled down the screen on her laptop before reaching for her coat.

  Preston followed suit. “Never let it be said I’m not able to please.”

  Her breath caught.

  Chapter 9

  By the end of the day, Elle was actually feeling upbeat. She and Preston had enjoyed a relaxed lunch, and then Elle had class. Afterwards she returned to the lab where Preston was still working. On one hand, he seemed to radiate an intensity, just with his presence, that forced someone to take notice without being overwhelming. Elle guessed it was part of what made him a good spy: he commanded attention without making it awkward to talk to him. She almost didn’t want the day to end when Preston checked his watch, although she needed to get some reading done for other classes.

  They were getting ready to go when there was a knock at the door before a voice called, “Elle?”

  Adam.

  Elle felt as if Preston again had x-ray vision with his laser-like gaze when he focused on her again. Was that something the agency taught? After a pause, she called out, “Come in.”