You Had Me at Hello World

by Rona Wang

Genres: YA Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

Jenny Han meets Silicon Valley in this drama-packed debut young adult novel about a Chinese American teen who navigates a high-stakes coding competition, sabotage, and first love when she’s invited to a summer hackathon at MIT.

Sixteen-year-old Charise “Char” Tang is desperate to ditch her dead-end small town. So when she’s invited to a highly selective hackathon at MIT, she seizes the opportunity to jet across the country, spend the summer building an app, and maybe even snag the top prize—a golden ticket to a new life.

When she arrives, she teams up with Khoi Astor, coding wunderkind and creator of last year’s biggest mobile game. Khoi, who has soft eyes and a gentle smile. Khoi, who can make anyone laugh. Khoi, who is easy to fall for…and already dating her camp roommate. If only Char could reprogram her heart to forget about him.

As the competition heats up, so do things between Char and her teammate. But sabotage lurks around every corner, and she soon discovers that the glitzy tech world has a dark, dangerous underbelly.

Release date: November 11, 2025

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 352

Sample

Chapter One

Chapter One
Lola swears this is legit and not like her TikTok “side hustle” that turned out to be a pyramid scheme. She just needs me to float her a hundred bucks.

Even though I’m still sussed out by any scholarship contest with an entry fee, I say yes because, well, she’s Lola. And I have enough cash. That’s not the problem.

The problem is getting past my stepdad.

Cue the Mission: Impossible soundtrack. As soon as the final bell goes off, I rush home. I figure that’s my best shot, since both Mom and Michael will be at work.

All my money is squirreled away in the shared bedroom. I kneel down and lift my mattress up with one hand. The manila envelope sits on the bedframe, all innocuous.

I grab the envelope and let the mattress fall back down. I try to shake out only a few bills, but my entire net worth comes clattering onto the floor. Coins spill everywhere. “Jesus fu—”

I cut myself off when I hear footsteps.

My heart drops.

I shove everything back into the envelope, but there’s no time to stash the envelope itself before my stepdad, Michael, barges in.

So I’m an idiot, and now I’m trapped with an even bigger idiot. Maybe I could jump out the window. I bet he’d love that.

Michael’s still in his pajamas, and his eyes are all bloodshot. He skipped the gel today, so his comb-over is basically a cry for help. I have no idea how Mom finds him attractive. Maybe she makes out with his bald spot.

Nope. Nope. Not devoting any more brain cells to that topic.

Anyway, maybe he’s too out of it to notice anything weird.

Okay, here’s the new plan: Act normal until he goes away.

“Hi, Michael,” I say, but my voice comes out all neon-bright. I want to smack myself. Acting nice is decidedly not acting normal.

He narrows his eyes. “Char, you’re home early.”

Most afternoons I do homework at the Lucky Panda, the restaurant where my mom works. I get free pot stickers and we haven’t had to call the cops on a customer in months, so it’s kind of awesome. I shrug. “Shouldn’t you be at work?”

Michael has some office job selling overpriced beachfront timeshares. Our town, Chinook Shore, is one of those places that is pleasant to visit for a single week every year and not a day longer.

“Called in sick.”

“You don’t look that sick.”

He scowls. “Phantom pain.”

From what I know, phantom pain is like your limb finding new ways to torment you from beyond the grave. Michael lost his left leg in Iraq. There are days when he can’t get out of bed. Once, I found him scrunched on the floor, hands groping for flesh and bone that was no longer there.

I’m all caught up in guilt about Michael’s bleak existence. Major mistake. Never drop your guard around the enemy.

He snatches the envelope out of my lap before I can even react. “What’s this?”

“Nothing.” I make a grab for the envelope, but he holds it high. Freaking tall person privilege. We really don’t acknowledge it enough.

He peers inside. “Where did you get this? You been stealing from me?”

Nah, the casino’s already got that on lock, I want to say, but don’t. Instead: “I have a job.”

“What job?”

“Just some clerical stuff at school.” Okay, this isn’t really true—I run the school website—but I don’t want to get into it.

Anyway, Michael is way more interested in the money than the job, which is the same energy he’s got for his own career. He squints. “How much is in here? A grand?”

It’s $2,192, from five hours a week for thirty-two weeks at thirteen-seventy an hour. Not that I’m about to tell him.

Greed flickers over his face as he eyes the cash. “If you’ve been working, maybe you should be contributing to this household.”

There’s a sudden glitch in the part of my brain that usually keeps me from, like, walking into traffic. “More like contributing to your gambling fund.”

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing,” I say quickly, but his face is all red and pinchy.

He shoves the envelope into his waistband. “You think you’re so much better than me?”

I mumble, “I don’t think that,” even though I definitely think that.

“Your mama gives me her paychecks and it all goes into one bank account. We share money. We don’t keep it to ourselves. If you live under my roof and eat the food I put on the table, you follow the same rules.”

And that’s when I know he’s not giving the money back.

I could totally run for it. Snatch the envelope and shove past him. Bolt out the front door, sprint down the street, and then…

And then what? This isn’t a Disney show. I can’t go, like, live among the squirrels. I’m only sixteen. I’d have to drag myself back here sooner or later.

I have no real choice but to let him win. Like he always does.

After my parents divorced, Mom had a few boyfriends. They didn’t stick around for long. Zhao was all sketchy crime-boss vibes and eventually had to leave the country. Noah fell way deep into Buddhism and ran off to some monastery in Vermont.

One night, when my mom was on the evening shift at the Jade Garden, a man came by as I was helping wipe down tables.

“Sorry, we’re closed, sir,” I said.

He smiled. “You must be Charise.” That was when I realized who he was. Mom’s new guy.

“Here, let me do that.” He grabbed the washcloth and started wiping off the table.

Michael looked like Kristoff from Frozen. Hair the color of wheat. Broad shoulders; large, doughy hands. He seemed sturdy and unmovable, like a mountain. Reliable.

After we finished with the tables, Michael said he’d brought me a present. A bag of White Rabbit milk candy.

“Baobei, say xiexie,” Mom chided.

My thank you was mostly muffled by the candy in my mouth.

He asked me about how old I was (seven and three-quarters), what happened today at school (our class hamster escaped), and what my favorite subject was (lunch). The same boring questions every boyfriend asked me. My eyes wandered downward. Metal poked out of his pants where his left ankle should’ve been.

“Are you a cyborg?” My favorite show on Cartoon Network was about these part-human, part-robot superheroes.

Mom cringed. “Char, be polite.”

“Quinn, it’s okay,” he said. Quinn? That was the nickname my mom used with customers instead of her real name, Qinxu. I didn’t know she also used it with the guys she dated. Zhao spoke Mandarin, and Noah called her pet names like “pookie” or “honeybun,” which made me want to barf.

Anyway, I was more interested in Michael’s leg. “Does it have any powers?” On the show, someone had a bionic arm that could beam red lasers.

Michael rolled up his khakis to reveal titanium. “I lost my old leg in an explosion, so the government gave me a new one. But it’s boring. It doesn’t give me any superpowers.”

“Are you going to marry my mama?” I asked. It would be awesome to have a cyborg stepfather.

“Char!” My mother’s voice was a warning bell.

He let out a whooping, full laugh. Then he knelt down so we were at the same level, and his clear blue eyes were big and sincere as he said, “I hope so, Charise. I hope so.”

Four months later, Mom and Michael got married in Portland’s city hall. It was a gray, wet morning, the kind where the rain can’t make up its mind. I carried the rings and Michael’s daughter, Olive, scattered rose petals at our feet.

My mom looked so beautiful that day. She had borrowed a shimmering ivory dress. Her ink-black hair cascaded over her shoulders in ringlets. She was radiant and happy. I hadn’t seen her smile like that since my father.

During the vows, I figured that as long as Michael stuck around, he would be better than all the other dudes.

I was so wrong.

Two months after the wedding was the first time Michael blew up. He flipped the table like some Marvel superhero attacking a perfectly innocent dish of three-cup chicken. Mom begged him to calm down. Olive and I hid in our shared bedroom and sat with our backs against the door as he went full Hulk on the plates.

Years later, my mom would explain that Michael was sick with a disease called PTSD, which could bring somebody nightmares even when they were awake. But at age eight, I didn’t know that. All I knew was the plates shattering, a bright, clean sound, almost like the song of a wind chime.

Olive slipped her hand into mine. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to remember the kind man who had wiped restaurant tables and given me White Rabbit candy.