“What do you mean? He’s my advisor, isn’t he supposed to, like, help?” Katie wasn’t sure exactly whether or not Dr. Hou had killed a man before. She wouldn’t put it past him. That didn’t phase her so much as the fact that his colleague clearly didn’t trust him. Katie wanted to know why.
“He might help, but in a very passive aggressive way and definitely not if you interrupt him during his - I don’t even know what he does in his office. Meditation? Virgin sacrifices? My point is, if you catch him during a wrong moment, it’s already over. Experienced it firsthand.”
Katie grimaced and shrunk into herself. “Professor Ward gave me that impression?” she replied. Grateful for the change in conversation she replied, “I was just going to do a basic array search, with an increased parameters option, so you can search for multiple keywords and it sorts it into, I guess, buckets? One for each keyword, and then one for combinations of keywords, and then one for all the keywords? And I finally got it to compile last night, but I tried using test data of about four thousand articles, and it should have worked, but it ended up crashing my workspace.” Katie shrugged. She was planning on working out the bugs after she’d finished her other homework that evening.
“Might be a recursion thing. Might be an infinite loop thing. Either way, it’s nothing you can’t fix and professor Hou is always there for y- Nope. I can’t force myself to say that, because, a) it rhymes, and b) it’s a disgusting lie. If you have any questions, come to me or anyone that isn’t him. A lesser chance of getting murdered.”
Katie smiled. “Thanks, but I’m more of a workout-by-myself kind of girl. Not keen on other people seeing me train, you know?” Professor Skye was one of her favorite teachers, but part of her doubted she’d understand the desire to stay hidden. As shy as Katie was, Skye was open and bubbly.
“Don’t I know it. My lovely teammate and the happiest person I know, Grant Douglas Ward, makes a habit of reminding me how terrible of a runner I am. Running is not supposed to look pretty. You just have to get places with your legs.”
“Anyway, don’t exhaust yourself too much. I need your fingers to work later,” she said, immediately remembering why she preferred to keep her mouth shut before 10 am every morning - the lack of filter on her brain was really beginning to show. “Not in that way. In the typing way. For class. You know what? Forget this ever happened.”
Hi, I’ve never actually been to this gym before, where do I get a pass? Or do you just need my Student ID?
Stopping in her tracks when a petite redhead approached her, Skye realised she didn’t have an answer to the girl’s enquiry as soon as she’d mentioned the word “gym”. “Your guess is as good as mine. Wait, no. Hold that thought,” she said, fishing out her phone. Having Ward’s number was finally paying off and, as it turned out, he was a fast texter. “Student ID will do, though you might wanna train with a professor.”
