Chapter Text
The tiered lecture hall of De Anza College’s Advanced Tech Center smelled of industrial carpet cleaner, cold brew, and the faint, high-frequency hum of two hundred laptops waking from sleep mode.
Jennifer Chan sat at the far end of the third row, leaning lightly against the vinyl backrest. With her delicate features, porcelain skin, and immaculate pastel styling, she looked less like a community college STEM student and more like a K-pop idol who had taken a wrong turn on the way to a dance studio. Her outfit leaned entirely into her love for bright, pastel aesthetics: a tight baby pink crop top that highlighted her figure, a crisp white pleated skater skirt, rolled white socks, and pristine sneakers. Her dark hair was pulled into a high half-up style held by an oversized pastel pink bow that sat like rabbit ears behind her crown. On the linoleum floor by her ankles rested a matching pink backpack with a plush Cinnamoroll keychain dangling from the brass zipper.
She had no notebook on her desk. No iPad. Her hands rested loosely in her lap, completely relaxed while the students around her furiously arranged highlighters and mechanical keyboards.
The heavy auditorium doors swung open, and four girls filed down the stairs in a tight formation. Annie Wong led the group with purposeful strides, looking like a junior associate at a venture capital firm in her tailored slacks, structured cream blouse, and low block heels. Beside her was Vu Nguyen, matching Annie’s corporate polish with a sharp silk button-down and a leather portfolio, followed by Carolyn Takamoto in a clean collared polo. Bringing up the rear was Jessica Huang, who looked as though she had coded straight through the weekend. Jess wore an oversized white hoodie with frayed cuffs, faded blue jeans, and blue round-rimmed plastic glasses framing dark, hyper-observant eyes, her dark hair pulled into a messy ponytail.
Annie scoped out the third row, spotted the empty block of seats next to Jen, and signaled the others. "Down here. Third row is optimal line-of-sight for the slides."
The four of them slid past the chairs. Annie settled into the seat directly beside Jen, placing her tote bag neatly on the floor before offering a bright, practiced smile.
"Hey," Annie said, extending a hand. "I'm Annie. This is Vu, Carolyn, and Jess. You in CS too?"
Jen took her hand with a gentle, firm grip. Her voice was light, musical, and completely unbothered. "Yes. I’m Jennifer. Call me Jen."
"Nice to meet you, Jen," Vu said, glancing down at Jen's empty desk before pulling out a slim MacBook. "Where’s your laptop? Or your notebook?"
"In my bag," Jen replied plainly. "I don’t need it yet. If the professor covers something I don't already understand, I'll take it out."
Jess adjusted her glasses, her sharp eyes narrowing behind the blue plastic frames. "Have you taken data structures or AP CS before?"
"No," Jen said. "I moved here two months ago from a village outside Guangzhou. My school didn't have computer classes."
"Self-taught?" Jess asked, the flat, skeptical edge in her voice unmistakable.
"Yes."
Jess gave a single, tight nod and looked away, pulling the cuffs of her hoodie over her knuckles. Her posture said everything: Another influencer-aesthetic freshman who thinks computer science is cute Notion templates. She’ll drop before the second lab.
A heartbeat later, five guys took the row of seats on Jen’s opposite side. They wore designer streetwear, designer sneakers, and carried top-of-the-line MacBooks—the unmistakable look of Silicon Valley wealth.
"Told you Beck's section was the one to get," Brent said, sliding into a seat. "His curves are predictable if you know the TA."
Jason, the tallest of the group, sat closest to Jen. He casually spun a heavy silver key fob around his index finger, letting the polished Maserati trident catch the overhead fluorescents. Having overheard the girls' conversation, he leaned across the empty space toward Jen with a smooth, practiced grin.
"Hey, don't sweat it, Jen," Jason said, his eyes lingering on her pink crop top. "CS 1A can be pretty brutal if you’ve never touched object-oriented code before. If you get stuck on pointers or recursion, let me know. I scored a five on AP CS in high school. I can tutor you."
Jen turned her head, met his gaze, and answered without the slightest trace of hostility or interest: "No, thank you. I understand how memory works."
Landon and Grayson chuckled behind Jason.
Jason’s smile twitched, but he didn't back down. He gave the car keys another lazy spin, letting them clatter against the laminate desk. "Suit yourself. But hey, after this syllabus run-through, I’m heading out. Want to take a ride in the Maserati? We can grab lunch in Santana Row."
"No, thank you," Jen said, turning her attention back to the front board. "I don't like fast cars."
Landon leaned over and muttered, "Shot down on syllabus day, bro."
Jason’s jaw clenched, his charming facade slipping for a brief second before he forced a tight smirk.
Before he could push further, the front double doors slammed shut. Professor Beck strode down the center aisle—a tall, gaunt man with sharp features, salt-and-pepper hair, and the humorless aura of an engineer who had spent twenty years writing defense contract code.
"Find your seats and quiet down," Beck barked, plugging an HDMI cable into his battered ThinkPad. The syllabus snapped onto the massive dual projector screens behind him. "This is CS 1A. If you are here looking for an easy general education credit, drop the course now. We cover algorithms, memory allocation, and object-oriented paradigms. You will have weekly assignments, four exams, and two major team projects."
Beck tapped the podium to advance the slide: Team Projects: Groups of 3 to 5. High-Throughput Simulation Engine or Real-Time Network Router.
Jason immediately leaned sideways toward Jen, tapping his desk with his pen and mouthing across the aisle: Group up?
Jen looked straight at him and gave a single, firm shake of her head.
Jason’s expression darkened. Keeping his hands low beneath the edge of the desk where Beck couldn't see from the podium, he blew her a mocking, condescending kiss, shaped his fingers into an 'L' against his chest, and mouthed: Good luck failing out, sweetie.
Jen’s expression didn't shift by a single millimeter. With the serene, unbothered grace of someone checking the weather, she propped her elbow on the armrest, turned her wrist, and extended a crisp, perfectly vertical middle finger directly into his line of sight.
"You! In the pink bow!"
Beck’s voice cracked through the lecture hall like a gunshot. The entire room went dead silent. Two hundred heads turned toward the third row.
Beck was glaring directly at Jen, his face flushed red with fury. "Since you find obscene hand gestures more productive than listening to my syllabus, let's see if you actually belong in this room, or if you're just here to waste my time."
He furiously clicked his mouse. The course canvas portal flashed onto the projector, displaying a live testing sandbox. A complex graph-optimization problem populated the screen—a multi-layered dynamic programming challenge with tight time and space constraints, easily on par with a LeetCode Hard.
"Log into the testing sandbox," Beck demanded, his voice ringing with absolute authority. "You have five minutes to produce a passing solution live on the board. If you fail, pack your bags and submit your drop request before five o'clock today."
A wave of nervous murmurs swept through the auditorium.
"Is he serious?" Carolyn whispered, her eyes wide. "That's dynamic programming. We haven't even gone over syntax!"
Vu glanced at Annie, her brow furrowed. "That’s an upper-division interview question. He’s deliberately trying to humiliate her into dropping."
Jason leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms with a smug, vindictive grin.
Jen let out a long, quiet sigh.
She reached down, unzipped her bag, and lifted out a high-spec AMD Ryzen notebook wrapped entirely in a pastel pink Cinnamoroll vinyl skin. She flipped the lid open with one hand, bypassed the login prompt with a swift keystroke sequence, and mirrored her terminal to the lecture hall's public sandbox.
The digital timer on the overhead projector began ticking down. 05:00.
Jen placed both hands on the mechanical keys.
What followed was not normal typing; it was a rhythmic, blistering assault. Her fingers moved across the keyboard in a blur of motion that echoed sharply through the quiet hall. She didn't draw a diagram on paper. She didn't write pseudo-code. She bypassed standard library containers entirely, manually allocating a custom contiguous memory buffer directly through raw pointers. Lines of dense, mathematically pristine C++ filled the screen at a rate that seemed physically impossible.
02:14.
Suddenly, her hands stopped.
Jen stared at the middle block of the algorithm for five quiet seconds, her face totally calm. Then, with three rapid keystrokes, she highlighted the entire nested conditional loop, struck backspace, and began typing raw __asm__ volatile blocks.
Jess shoved her glasses up her nose, her jaw dropping as she read the code on the projector. "Wait... is she writing inline x86 assembly?"
Jen was hand-optimizing the CPU register allocation, writing raw machine instructions to ensure zero pipeline stalls and total cache-line alignment.
With forty seconds left on the clock, Jen tapped Enter. She gave her hair a casual flip, sending the oversized pink bow bouncing lightly against her shoulders, and folded her hands neatly over the keyboard.
She clicked Submit.
The automated test runner initialized. Fifty hidden test suites, designed to break memory limits and trigger timeouts, began running in real time.
Test 1: Passed (0.01ms)
Test 10: Passed (0.01ms)
Test 30: Passed (0.01ms)
Test 50: Passed (0.02ms)Status: ACCEPTED.
Runtime: 100th percentile (Faster than 100.00% of all recorded submissions).
Memory: 100th percentile.
A stunned, suffocating silence fell over the two hundred students in the room.
Someone in the back row let out a low, disbelieving whistle. Jason’s smug smirk vanished entirely, his face draining of color as he stared at the green acceptance banner.
Jess whipped around in her seat, leaning across Annie and Vu to look directly at Jen, her eyes wide with total awe. "You're in our group. No debate. You're with us."
"Okay," Jen said smoothly.
Jess pulled out her phone, opened a QR code for their group chat, and thrust it toward her. "Scan this right now."
Jen scanned it without hesitation, slipping her phone back into her skirt pocket.
At the podium, Professor Beck stood frozen. His neck was mottled with deep crimson, but he cleared his throat violently, adjusting his glasses in a desperate attempt to regain control of the room.
"...Right," Beck managed, his voice dropping two octaves and losing every shred of its previous aggression. "As I was saying... the first group project will focus on high-throughput simulation engines. You are free to choose your own architecture and domain, provided it meets the concurrency requirements."
For the rest of the lecture, Beck did not look in the direction of the third row a single time.
When the bell chimed, the auditorium erupted into the sound of packing bags and chatter.
Annie turned in her seat, tapping her chin thoughtfully. "We need to coordinate our design doc before Friday. The library study rooms are usually impossible to book during the first week, though."
"We can just go to my place," Jen said, sliding her pink Cinnamoroll laptop back into her bag. "I have a townhouse on Stevens Creek, three blocks from campus. Come over at six. I’ll make dinner."
Carolyn blinked, surprised. "Wait, you cook too?"
"Of course," Jen said, slinging her backpack over one shoulder. "My mom trained me to be a housewife since age seven."
Jess zipped her hoodie, a faint, genuine smirk tugging at the corner of her lips as she glanced over at Jason's completely demoralized crew. "Townhouse it is. Come on, let's go get boba before the rush hits."
Jen gave a happy nod, adjusting her oversized pink bow as the five girls walked out together into the California sunshine.