Sara shrugs. “I was sick of how inefficient my school’s online grading system was, so I helped fix it.”

“You got some game,” I say, shoving the card in my pocket.

“I uh...” She blinks at me for a second. “Thanks.”

She blushes and averts her gaze to the small pink notebook in her hand. She flips it open. “I think we should get brainstorming as soon as possible. I could schedule an ideation session for later in the week? I think we need like three packages of sticky notes?” She pauses, her pen resting above the page. A drop of ink falls, staining the otherwise immaculate paper. “Yeah.” She scribbles something. “Three hundred or so is enough for the ideation stage. We—Shit, we also need to decide on a scheme for color coding...” She continues to scribble away.

“Ideation?” Robbie turns to me.

I shrug, I have no goddamn idea.

Sara’s head snaps up. “Ideation,” she says. “You know? Like, the creation of ideas. In the design thinking process.”

“Sorry, babe, I don’t speak tech buzzword.” I shrug.

She wrinkles her nose. “Whatever you call it, we need a plan of attack.” She pauses. “A structure for development.”

“Don’t we need an idea first?” Robbie asks. “Like, how can we have a strategy for growing something when we don’t know what it is yet?”

She looks from him to me, but I just grunt in agreement. He’s making more sense than she is. She’s making up words, for God’s sake.

“We can’t just wait around,” she says. “There has to be a strategy we can use, some sort of technique. To optimize the creative process.”

I brush my hand across my face so she can’t see me laughing. “Isn’t that the point? That you can’t optimize it—isn’t that what makes it creative?”

Her mouth freezes in a little O and her pen hovers.

I decide I’m done with this for today. I shove past her as I start up the aisle, my footsteps echoing in the now-empty auditorium.

“Wait, where are you going?” I hear the clacking sound of her shoes behind me.

“To take a nap!” I yell over my shoulder. “I’m hungover as fuck.”

“What! You can’t just—”

“You’re cute, Blondie, but you’ve got to learn to calm down.” I don’t look back as I push through the door.

She releases a noise that barely sounds human. But before she can continue, there is the sound of the latch clicking.

I walk from Main Quad back to the more residential part of campus. I enter my dorm with headphones on, avoiding small talk with the nerds playing some sort of dragon and princess game in the lobby.