Secrets of Attraction

Four: JOOHYUK

"What was wrong with that dude?" Subin asked as soon as the fourth interviewee was out of earshot.

I sar with my feet propped up on a poof, arms crossed, doing my best impression of taking this selection seriously. Subin had talked Mr. Han, the company's manager, into letting us use the nicest meeting room for our interviews. It was too large of a space for he measly six prospects  we had, but it was convenient and came with a compute set. The possible spurned-psycho factor was what made me bail on holding them in my studio. Sandbox Center was the safe option. Safe and coding didn't quite fit together, but who knows. Maybe that was my problem.

"Dude? That guy had a killer Pokémon collection."

"So what if he's a newbie, he could code."

"We need someone with coolness, Bin. Can you picture that guy in a big name company?"

He shook his head as he crossed the kid's name off the list.

Four down, two to go.

It had never been this hard.

Samsan Tech pretty much fell together when Subin, Dowan, Hyoseop, and I were in high school. At first it had been more of a school club. After the obligatory websites we created for school, we'd get together and work out some hardware functions. Both Hyoseop and I could code in our sleep. Dowan was great coder but had to move the country. Subin was clumsy at first, but he had grown into a coder who could hold his own. By sophomore year of college we were tight - an AI robot here,  AI app, we even came in second place to 2STO last spring, mostly because Cha Eunwoo's neighbor has been on the judging panel. We had planned on winning this time around.

Until AnhLee completely stole that future.

"Why aren't we playing along with them? Wouldn't it be easier to tell?"

"We're weeding. Besides, I can just feel it," I said, pounding my chest for effort.

"The first guy was fine."

"Sloppy coding, had to backspace so many times. I didn't like this teeth."

Subin sprang up from his chair and threw up his hands. "His teeth? Why are you acting like such a dork? Maybe if you took off the fucking Ray-Bans and pretended to care."

I slid the sunglasses up into my hair. "It was also obvious he had no developing experience."

"We just need a body."

The more upset Bin got, the more calm it made me. He was getting pissed enough for the both of us.

"Why? We missed the deadline for the demo day. What does it matter if we find someone today or two weeks from today?" I asked.

"Don't you miss it?"

My mouth opened but the words got stuck in my brain. Did I miss it? Aren't musicians supposed to work through their pain in music? My breakup had the opposite effect. As if playing my guitar opened a wound. I didn't want to feel it. I just wanted to forget it. And that, more than anything, scared me.

But the other night when Hyoseop asked for the song, I had felt something. Rage, maybe, but it was better than the facedown-in-a-mud-puddle feeling I'd been living in post-breakup. I had to keep reminding myself - I wanted this. A new developer. A fresh start. No matter how long it took.

And I had to stop comparing everyone to Hyoseop. As much as I wanted to hammer the guy into the ground, he was still . . . We'd been tight. Friends and co-workers. Finding another person felt like auditioning a new family member, but that was making this damn near impossible. Maybe approaching it like Subin had said - that all we needed was a body - was the right way to go.