"My turn first, eh?"

He answers, correctly, without looking at her screen. And then keeps talking, relating it to another topic. Showing off, him? Never.

If he wants a more freeform review session that's fine with her. She asks more about the new topic, pointing out in a few places where it seems like he missed something or he's saying something she hadn't thought of, after a little bit she'll relate it to another topic.

He nods along and pulls up the problem set files on another computer and starts coding after a few minutes. He's already mostly done, but he starts improving them based on the discussion.

She jots down some notes in her notebook and occasionally looks something up in the book as the discussion continues. Once it becomes clear he's almost finished, she'll open up a VM and start coding as well.

...Now that he can guess what she's thinking - it kind of stings that she was thinking it in the first place.

"What, you thought I was going to copy or mooch? I'm far too proud to do that."

"People have done that to me before. I didn't think you would, but I err on the side of caution since the time I failed something in high school because someone copied off me."

"Yeah, people kind of suck sometimes. But I don't cheat. It's one of my cardinal rules. I guess I can't blame you for caution." He'll have to live up to his claim now. Not that he would really cheat on tests or whatever anyway, but since he's gone and said it...

Emily smiles broadly, "That's good, I don't cheat either. Except sometimes after my first run through a computer game."

"Oh, that's not cheating, that's playing creatively."

Emily laughs, "I like that. I'll have remember it."

He... Chuckles. (He definitely didn't giggle, no, didn't happen.)

"We should do this every week. Maybe invite-" He doesn't like the idea of inviting other people. "Never mind. Anyone else I might invite may or may not be a cheater and they can always go to the official review sessions."

(What is wrong with him lately? He can tell he's feeling out of character...)

She looks at him a little oddly when he backtracks then shrugs. "Sure, this is fun."

"Yep. And reasonably productive if we don't get too... Distracted..."

Couldn't be. He's not attracted to Emily. He's impressed by her intelligence at most.

(She's beautiful and smart-)

Lying to himself isn't working. New strategy.

This is not in the plan. His life is very carefully scheduled, very busy, he is accomplishing things. He is too busy. And it's a terrible idea anyway, probably Emily isn't interested back. No. Nope. (Maybe.) No! He can't afford the emotional risk of risking rejection or betrayal. He calls to mind all the stories of terrible girlfriends he can remember. He doesn't want that kind of drama in his life, it's not worth it.

...He continues to stare thoughtfully at his computer screen.

"Getting distracted can be fun too, but yeah it's more productive when we stay on topic."

"Riiiight. Like the extra credit question." He can do this. Keep it to programming. Class stuff. Learning. "I think we can sort of just do the quad-tree thing, but make it eight and divide up space into cubes, see...?"

"An oct-tree then, with the important information in the leaf nodes. That would work well for dense and sparse spaces, though it means for some cases there'd be a lot of unnecessary processing on the input. Still, if it was actually being used in a game you'd expect the space to be relatively stable for a lot of ray-traces."

...He pulls up a notepad app and starts writing pseudocode, muttering about the problem.

She reads over his shoulder and offers suggestions.

And soon he's turning the pseudocode into actual code in the IDE. "Want a copy of what I write, since you're helping?"

"I would, thank you." She continues offering pointers and feedback where it seems relevant.

Someone seems to have given this IDE a custom cursor. What is that, some kind of pixelated flower design?

He notices about two thirds of the way through coding up the solution. "Hey, look at the - uh, text cursor, that's funny. Custom cursors aren't unheard of, but I didn't put it there."

"I didn't even know you could do that with IDEs."

It blinks unassumingly. 

Off, 

then on again.