The Algorithm of You

Chapter 2- First Collision (June's POV)

Adam didn’t break stride. “Then it’s ready for politics.”

The kids groaned and threw a plastic gear at him. He caught it one-handed, tossed it back, and kept walking.

I shook my head. “So this is your dynamic?”

“They break things; I pretend to fix them,” he said, glancing sideways at me. “You’ll fit right in.”

“Meaning?”

“You’ve got that ‘about to correct me’ look.”

“I don’t.”

“You do,” he said smugly. “It’s in the eyebrows.”

We kept walking, and the Hub unfurled like a map. Adam pointed out the supply closet with the reverence of someone showing a shrine—labeled boxes, Velcro straps, a tidy roll of zip ties. “Rule one,” he said, “is never let the tape roll get lonely.” He said it like an axiom, and for a second, I believed him.

“Do you have a motto for everything?” I asked, amused.

“Mostly proverbs and passive-aggressive labels,” he replied. “The labels are for parents who organize; the proverbs are for staff who forget.” He glanced at me. “When Mrs. Kane told me someone was coming, I expected a refresher on sign-in routines, not someone storming the café and debating salad ethics.”

I blinked. “You heard about that? Who told you?”

“Mrs. Kane mentions everything,” he said, smiling slightly. “She runs the hub and the rumor mill.” His brow creased faintly, like he was taking mental notes. It made him feel less like a stranger with a smirk and more like someone moving pieces into place without seeing the whole picture.

We stopped by the 3D printing station, where a spool of orange filament fed slowly into a nozzle. A girl named Nia—ink smudged on her fingers—looked up and offered a shy wave. “That’s my print,” she said proudly. Adam crouched to peer at the in-progress model as if it were a tiny, folding artifact.

“You like tinkering?” I asked. She nodded so fast I worried her head might fall off.

“Yeah! I’m building a little holder for my sketch pen,” she explained. “It keeps rolling off my desk.”

“Practical innovation,” Adam approved. “Not everything has to be flashy to be useful.” He handed her a tiny cloth to wipe filament bits from her fingers. There was a softness to the way he treated the kids that didn’t match the barbed humor he’d used with me. I watched him with the wary interest of someone beginning to notice new angles on an old shape.

The media corner held its own small chaos: two older teens were editing a short film and argued over whether the outro should include bloopers. Adam leaned in briefly, suggested a tweak to the audio levels, and walked away. It was like watching someone thread a needle—subtle, precise, necessary.

At the center table, a crisis had already erupted. Theo—the one with the pencil behind his ear—had accidentally deleted a storyboard he’d been working on for days. His bottom lip quivered with the near-cry surrender every child knows. Adam and I crouched beside him; he offered gentle, practical words while his fingers moved over the keyboard. In seconds, the file was restored, and Theo’s shoulders dropped from disaster to relief so fast it almost seemed theatrical, if it weren’t so sincerely grateful.

“How’d you do that?” I asked.

“Backups,” Adam said simply. “And knowing where kids hide things. You learn the patterns.” He handed me a printed sheet of their standard troubleshooting steps; it read like a map through predictable chaos. “If you work here, you’ll learn where lost things tend to hide. Socks. Flash drives. Little heartbreaks.” He added the last one with a half-smile, practiced care that seemed to extend beyond tools and projects.

We continued through the hub, discovering more small ecosystems: a table for circuitry, a shelf with half-wired robots, a row of headphones that must have seen a thousand tutorials. Parents drifted in and out; Mrs. Kane’s voice carried, sharp but kind, negotiating pickup times and soothing questions about “enough math.” It was daily choreography, except this one ran on code as much as glue.

Adam paused at one point and studied me. “You seem… different today. Not worse. Just different.”

“Is that a good different or a ‘get used to it’ different?” I asked.

He hesitated. “Good different,” he said finally. It was blunt, practical, yet oddly warm.

We stopped at the supply table, where a volunteer—Mrs. Wheeler—sorted donated Raspberry Pis. She offered me a pair of safety glasses with the easy authority of someone who’d been here long enough to know every hazard. “Good to have extra hands,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said, grateful for how the hub seemed to fill in with people who mattered in ways both visible and invisible. “It’s a lot to learn.”

“It is,” Adam said, leaning against the table. “But you won’t be alone. Mrs. Kane keeps things tidy on paper; I keep the chaos manageable in practice.” He gave a small laugh. “And when all else fails, we blame the printers.”

I laughed too, feeling that familiar edge of worry—not about the job exactly, but about how someone else’s presence could make a day feel smaller in ways hard to explain. He made the place seem like a well-oiled machine and me like a cog that might or might not fit. Absurd. Petty. Entirely human.

Mrs. Kane called us to a smaller office and handed me a binder cataloging programs, schedules, and emergency contacts. “You’ll shadow Adam for a few days,” she said. “Then you’ll take the lead on design rotation next week. Step by step.”

Adam watched me flip through it, eyes on the notes in the margins. “You look like someone who reads instructions,” he observed.

“I do,” I said, only partly true. I liked to think I did—it felt necessary, in the moment, to seem capable.

As morning thinned into afternoon, the hub settled into a quieter rhythm. Loud kids had been collected; teens drifted toward independent projects; staff orchestrated clean-up like an understated duet. I slipped into a groove: checking sign-in sheets, organizing supplies, answering questions about soldering irons’ heat settings. Each task folded into the next with a simple usefulness that felt rewarding even when exhausting.

Lunch rolled around. A handful of older kids shared a pizza at the central table. Adam pulled out a chair and waved me over. “Sit,” he said. “You won’t survive the afternoon if you don’t eat.”

I accepted a slice, the grease leaving a sheen on my fingers. We talked about ordinary things: where to buy replacement filament, which supplier was cheapest for resistors, closing bus times. His answers were practical and exact—knowledge earned over time. At one point, almost casually, he said, “I knew someone was coming. I didn’t think it would be you.”

It was a confession tucked like a stone into a pocket. Simple. Direct. Charged. My first reaction was to ask why he hadn’t said so earlier, but instead, I let the words settle.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Didn’t match the file,” he shrugged—half-joke, half something that landed in my chest like an unexpected chord. “You were a different shape in the idea of a new hire.” He gave me a quick, appraising look. “This is better.”

I chewed the pizza in silence. The afternoon stretched, quiet and cooperative. Work shared without pretense. The hub, with its hum and vital small tasks, felt like a place I could learn to live in.

When we packed up at the day’s end, Mrs. Kane gave a small, satisfied nod. “Good first day. Welcome aboard.”

Adam and I moved chairs into place, logged the last of the equipment returns. He handed me a spare key to the cupboard with extra gloves and tools. Ordinary, yet oddly intimate. I slid the key into my bag, feeling it click like a promise.

We stepped into the soft summer dusk. I said, “See you tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” he replied, looking back once before the street swallowed his profile. I smiled, genuinely surprised at how quickly a place—and a person—could shift the rhythm of a day.