“The dog’s tongue lolled out, and each of its paws had a little white sock. Best of all, Chad’s dog wore a black bandana decorated with pumpkins. The two girls looked at each other and smiled. They had completed their quest of finding the cutest dog in Cambridge.”

“That’s a good ending.” I smiled. “Commit message?”

“ ‘Complete the quest against all odds.’ ”

I pulled up the git log again.

• Add opening of a story
• Introduce character based off of Monica
• Introduce second character and establish relationship
• Introduce character goals
• Things get dire
• Complete the quest against all odds

I asked her what she thought.

“It’s decent, but you can’t just deus-ex-machina Chad in.”

I agreed. “Let’s give him a proper introduction. So, who is Chad?” I scrolled back in the text editor to after the girls’ introduction.

“The second girl had a neighbor named Chad,” she said. “He was awkward and didn’t really talk to anyone. He was quite shy, and reminded the second girl quite a bit of the first girl. The second girl happened to see a flyer for a dog adoption event hanging out of Chad’s mailbox, and so an idea for a quest formed. Commit message: ‘Inciting incident.’ ”

“Excellent,” I said, though I wasn’t sure how I felt about my character being compared to awkward Chad. “But now our git log isn’t in order.”

“That’s okay. It preserves how the story was written.”

“But what if my goal is a polished piece of software that anyone can pick up and take over? They wouldn’t care that Chad was backfilled in. They’d rather have a clean history.”

“Oh.” Her eyes widened. My heart beat faster.

“So let’s rebase. Rebasing can do a lot of things, but we’ll focus on reordering these commits.” I swapped the order using some well-practiced keyboard shortcuts. “Now the inciting incident is where it belongs, right after character introductions. A nice clean history.”

“But not true to what actually happened.”

“Right.” I closed my laptop and unplugged it from the projector. “Did you enjoy the lesson?”

She was staring at me with an unreadable expression. Then she slowly stood up from her seat, slinging her daypack over her shoulders.

“You really were paying attention to all my digital archival talk,” she said softly.

“I’m a good student.” I grinned. “You’ll have to try harder than that—”

She tossed her helmet at me, laughing. I caught it easily. Then she closed the distance between us so suddenly. I instinctively backed up against the wall, pinned by her body, the helmet the only thing separating us. Her fingers gripped the helmet on the other side, and for a moment we stood there, my breath becoming short as her face inched closer to mine, lowering to my level. I raised my hand, my fingers brushing the ends of her hair, right behind her neck.