He smiles and tilts his phone toward me. Oh God, he has dimples. Just slay me in the drip room. “It’s this woman who makes robots, and then she posts videos of them not working correctly. Like this one’s supposed to be tying her shoe, and instead it rips the shoe open. This is what I want to do with my life.”

“Build robots that don’t work?”

“Yeah.”

I show him my notebook. “I have an advice column in my school newspaper. Or…I edit the advice column. Every week I come up with a few questions, and then I gather people’s answers and pick the good ones and write up a summary of it, sort of. I think of a way to bring everything they say together and make some kind of point about it. So…there you have it.”

“Oh, neat, that’s what I want to do with my life now. Forget the robots.”

“You can’t, I’m doing it.”

“You’re gonna do this forever? You’re gonna want to retire at some point.”

“So you want to take over for me when I get old? I don’t know, what do you have? How long are you living, here?” Well, now I have the worst thing I’ve ever said to go along with the worst thing I’ve ever thought. It sounded cute and edgy in my head, but now that it’s out I just can’t believe I said it in the room where the cancer people come. They might not be here right now, but if he could hear my thoughts earlier, then they probably can, too, wherever they are. Cancer people know.

Plus, he could, y’know. Actually be dying.

“That was beautifully distasteful,” he says.

“I can’t believe I said that.”

“No, it’s good. Now we’ve established we have the same sense of humor.”

I don’t know if I do have that sense of humor or if I was just trying to be the cool girl because of his eyelashes, but I’m willing to try.

“And,” he says, “lucky for both of us, I have some hipster disease you’ve never heard of, and it’s not fatal, so nice try. Though I wish it were, just for how awkward you’d feel in this moment now.”

“I’d know if you were dying,” I say.

“Oh yeah, how?”

“Wouldn’t be wasting your time talking to me.”

“You talked to me first. Maybe I’m just being polite.”

“And I bet I have heard of it,” I say. “My dad’s a doctor. I know a lot of shit.”

“Gow-Shay disease,” he says, or something to that effect.

“Yeah, I don’t even know how to spell that one. What is it?”

“Google it, you have a phone.”

“I can’t. I don’t know how to spell it.”

He grins. “Your dad’s a doctor?”