I first met Bethany back in second grade; she was the shyest kid in the class and I was the loudest, so Ms. White stuck us next to each other in hopes that we’d rub off on each other.

I didn’t really have any other friends then. The other girls in our class called me obnoxious. I talked too loud, I told too many jokes, I was too sarcastic, and the Future Pearl Clutchers of America were not having it.

I remember the day Ms. White moved our seats. I’d gotten in trouble three times in the last hour for talking without raising my hand (she called me Aphra the Gabber because I would not shut up). So she moved me up to the front of the room to sit next to the girl the other kids called Bethany Boring because she never talked at all. “Maybe you two can find a happy medium,” she’d said.

I’d leaned over to Bethany and stage-whispered, “Ms. White has marker on her butt, pass it on.”

Bethany hadn’t answered. But she’d smiled. She’d told me later that I’d been the first kid to talk to her in weeks.

So we’d sat together at lunch that day and just clicked, because she didn’t mind if I talked too much, and I didn’t mind if she was too nervous to talk back. I’d maintained both sides of a conversation about My Little Pony until, at the very end, she’d whispered, “I’m a Fluttershy and you’re a Rainbow Dash.”

I’d liked that, even though I’d always thought of myself more as a Twilight Sparkle. So we sat together again the next day, and the next. My mom once said I had to grow into my personality, and I guess she was right; no one appreciates a smart mouth on a seven-year-old, but at seventeen it’s kind of an asset. But Bethany liked me just the way I was, right from the beginning, which is probably why I never had the loud beaten out of me. She gave me permission to be myself. And since I was never jealous of how pretty she was or put off by how quiet she was (the other girls used to call her a snob, which was just plain stupid), I hoped I did the same thing for her.

After we got back from the pool, we made Kit wash the Fudgsicle off his face and the three of us lay down on the couch to watch some cartoons. We were two episodes into Steven Universe when my phone pinged with an alert that meant someone had used the app I was designing for my computer science class.

Kit had fallen asleep and Bethany was dozing, too—I guess being ogled by Greg D’Agostino is pretty tiring—so I extracted myself from their tangle of legs and went to my room to use my laptop.

The class is called Basic App Design, and I’ve been working on the final project for the last month or so. It’s due in two weeks, and it’s worth 35 percent of my grade, and it is totally not working.

The premise of my project is this: last year, some kids in the computer science department at GMU created an open-source chatbot program and gave it a Twitter account. It was called Lola, and it was supposed to learn language the more you talked to it. It’s a simple enough algorithm, and I had an idea to use their base code and turn it into an app. Essentially, it’s an advice app.

Basically, it scans for keywords, and then it replies with customized advice. So, like, if you tell it something with the words cheating and boyfriend in it, it tells you to break up with him (which is generally the best course no matter who’s the one cheating). If you tell it something with the word grade, it tells you to study harder. The trick is that it’s supposed to remember what you asked, so that the next time you log in it asks you a follow-up question, and over time it’s supposed to learn patterns and anticipate issues that tend to go together, like poor self-esteem and anxiety. It’s not like it’s a substitute for a real therapist, but I know firsthand how hard it can be to find one of those.

My chatbot is called Deanna, after the counselor from Star Trek. She was supposed to talk, but I ran out of time, and the text-to-speech software was making the app take too long to download, so now she just types at you. What you see, if you download it, is a cartoon picture of Deanna Troi, in her blue officer’s uniform, and then her advice appears in a dialogue bubble.

In a few weeks, I’m supposed to turn in a copy of the app, along with copies of the advice Deanna has given to at least ten people. The app is anonymous, because no one will ask for advice if they know the person at the other end, and last Friday I’d put flyers up at school, advertising the program.

I sat down and pulled up Deanna’s stats on my computer.

I jumped a little. Forty-six people had downloaded the app, and five of them had actually used it. I went to check the logs, to see if she’d actually learned anything yet.

The first person had written, I hate my mom.

Deanna had written back, Relationships with parental figures can be very important, especially to the burgeoning adolescent. Have you tried telling your mom how you feel?

No, stupid. She’s a total skank who left my dad for her personal trainer.

For example, Deanna continued blithely, you might say, “I am having difficult feelings right now. Is this a good time for us to talk?”

No response.

The next person had written, Your a stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid ho.

Deanna had written, Intelligence comes in many forms. Einstein once said, “If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

Stupid beyotch.

This was a problem. And not just because it should have been “You’re.”

The way the original programming—a two-way AI—works is that it learns by talking to people. She learns how to map questions onto different responses. So, for example, over time she learns that Hi, Hello, Hola, and Good afternoon are all greetings, and answers appropriately. Basically, she is supposed to determine a user’s intent and then find a way to respond.

But if her users are teaching her that “Your a stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid ho” is a greeting…that’s not good. I’d already blacklisted every four-letter word I could think of to keep her from developing a potty mouth, but I couldn’t blacklist stupid, because that was something Deanna might need to talk about at some point, like if someone was feeling bad because they flunked a test or whatever. I made a note to blacklist beyotch, ho, and skank, since those words, at least, she wouldn’t need.

The next message said: I think I have herpes.

Deanna said, An STD is a communicable illness like any other. It’s important, though, to get immediate treatment and notify your current and former sex partners. And then she gave the number for the closest Planned Parenthood.

The response was, K thanks.

Well, at least she helped someone.

I got the ping of an email and saw that it was from Delia, who is my older sister. She’s a freshman at the University of Virginia. The subject line said, Hi.

Here is the story of Delia Brown, the abridged version:

Delia is barely two years older than me. We looked so much alike as babies that in our old photos, no one can tell which of us is which. And we looked alike until high school, when Delia did some weird business with her eyebrows and started going in for Brazilian blowouts every three weeks. She still looked like me, mostly, but with overly groomed eyebrows and shinier hair.

“Why are you doing that?” I’d asked her.

“I like it better,” she’d said. “You’ll understand when you’re older.”

And then, the summer after she graduated from high school, she informed my parents that she’d been saving all her birthday and babysitting and summer job money for the last four years, and she was getting a nose job.

“What?” they’d said.

“What?” I’d said.

But she was eighteen and it was her money, so one Tuesday in June my sister went into one of those outpatient surgery centers looking just like me, and a few hours later she came out looking like we were unrelated.

I have not spoken to her since.

I mean, it’s not like it’s been that hard to avoid her. Two months later she went off to college with three boxes of clothes, a new laptop, and a nose that looked like a stupid ski slope.

The worst thing is, before this happened, I never really hated my nose. It has a bump on the bridge, and it’s definitely bigger than average, but so what? It’s a nose. I use it to breathe in and out, and it generally works pretty well for that unless I have a cold. It’s also useful for holding up my sunglasses. When I was little, my father always said it looked aristocratic, and in my small-child brain, it must have been true because Dad wouldn’t lie about something like that.

I mean, I didn’t think it was perfect or anything. But among my litany of less-than-attractive features, it didn’t stand out as anything awful.

But now, every time I look at my nose in the mirror, I think, Delia thinks you are so ugly she paid $4,000 to some guy to break you with a hammer and cut you up. That’s what they do, you know. They pump you full of anesthesia, they break your nose with a hammer, and then they go at you with sharp objects. I looked it up before Delia had it done, when I was trying to talk her out of it.

“Do you know what they’re going to do to you?” I’d asked.

“Of course I know. But it’s worth it.”

“How is it worth it?”

But Delia couldn’t answer, because the truth was she thought it was worth it to get bashed in the face and cut up so that she wouldn’t have to look like me anymore.

And now she had the unmitigated gall to say hi to me on email.

I deleted the message without reading it and went back to Deanna’s source code. When someone typed the keyword sister, I programmed her to respond: Genetic relationships aren’t everything.