mary jane | stuart twombly ✓

chapter 3

The team was gathered in the room they usually met in, waiting for their first team challenge. Finally, Chetty's face appeared on the screen.

"Good morning, interns, today marks the first of several challenges through which your teams will show their merits. While internally dog folding a new product, a number of Googlers reported a bug that disabled their audio. All two million lines of that code are in the source files. Your job? Find the bug." With that, Chetty's face disappeared and they all immediately moved away from the computer monitor, grabbing markers.

"Okay, so we should start by looking over the user reports really quickly", Mary Jane said she headed over to the glass wall.

"Scan the logs for any red flags!", Yo-Yo added, grabbing a marker as well.

"See what exceptions were thrown", Stuart said as he joined the others.

The five of them got to work, writing down codes that probably looked like gibberish to the untrained eye. "I always start by drawing strategies to skip through the code", Lyle informed, trying his best to help the interns out. He wanted his team to do well and would help them out in any way that he can.

Behind them, Billy and Nick were uttering some bullshit that was no help to anyone. It was starting to aggravate Mary Jane slightly, but the men thought that they were helping, so she tried her best to ignore them.

"A fly? Like a fly!", Billy was saying.

Mary Jane had stopped watching where she was going as she wrote, bumping into Stuart. "We've gotta stop meeting like this", she mumbled, turning around. They tried to move away from each other, but they only ended up tangled in each other's arms. "Oh, uh—"

"I'll go—"

"Let me just—"

Neha turned to face the two of them with furrowed brows. "Lovebirds, so not the time! Break it up and get back to work!"

Mary Jane realized that her hands were rested on Stuart's chest, her cheeks turning red as she quickly stepped away. "Sorry about that", she mumbled, awkwardly clearing her throat.

"Boggles my mind that no one has a notebook out right now. You guys are so focused on writing down this gibberish, maybe it's helpful, maybe it's not, but I guarantee you that what we're saying is helpful", Nick said loudly, causing everyone to give him odd looks. Why couldn't he just be helpful or be quiet?

"Guys, we're looking for a bug, not a password. They're two totally different things", Lyle sighed.

"Keep going with that human interaction you had! Go, go!", Nick said encouragingly to Billy, completely ignoring what Lyle had just said. They continued talking about nonsense — bugs and flies and something about Jennifer Lopez? It was beginning to really confuse the rest of the team.

"Would you two please stop?!", Yo-Yo yelled, finally snapping. It seemed the boy just couldn't take it anymore.

"No, we're working!", Nick shot back.