by Kate Brian
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“No. You were plenty explicit, thanks. Star magazine explicit,” I told her. “The problem is that if they are hiding anything, they're hiding it very well. This is Noelle we're dealing with here, remember? You really think she's going to leave incriminating evidence out on her bulletin board?”
Natasha unclenched a bit at this. Not even she could argue with that logic.
“Just ... be patient,” I said, wondering how long, exactly, it would take a person with zero computer experience to crack someone else's password. I picked up my copy of Beowulf, which we were reading for English class--at least, everyone else was, while I had yet to have time to crack it--and leaned back on my denim husband. “I'm doing everything I can.”
I settled in and opened to page one.
“Well, do it faster,” Natasha said.
Then she flicked off the light before I could get past the first word.
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THE PASSWORD IS
After two full mornings of typing in everything I knew about Ariana into her password screen and getting nowhere, I was at a complete loss. I needed help. I needed someplace to start. I needed to pick someone else's brain and get some ideas.
But how was I supposed to do that without anyone knowing why I was doing it?
This was the question bouncing around in my brain as I walked into the library one rainy afternoon. I had a plan, but I had very little confidence that it would work. Unfortunately, it was all I had. I knew that the junior class had a huge history exam coming up and half of Billings and Ketlar would be there studying. I made a beeline for the very back of the stacks, where I knew the girls from my dorm normally set up camp.
Bingo. At one table I had found Kiran, Taylor, Rose, London, Vienna, Josh, and Gage. They were all bent over their books, some taking notes, others whispering to each other in low tones. There was a single empty chair at the end of the table.
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I took a deep breath. Here went nothing.
I walked over and sat down with a frustrated huff, placing my books on the table. Everyone looked up, happy for a distraction.
“What's the matter, Reed?” Taylor asked.
“Nothing. It's just this current events paper for modern civ,” I said. “I have to write eight pages on that whole hacking scandal.”
Kiran and Taylor exchanged a look. They weren't buying it. There was no way they were buying it. And why would they? It was a complete fabrication.
“You mean that thing at that high school in New York?” Josh said.
“I heard about that!” London put in, excited. “Someone hacked into all the students' computers and posted a list of all the illicit Web sites they were looking at. So scandalous.”
“Those poor bastards had all their porn deleted,” Gage said. “That's not scandal. It's a crying shame.”
“Well, there are about a million articles on it and it's ridiculous trying to sift through it all,” I said, lifting out a Xeroxed page. “Plus it's scary. Did you guys know that ninety percent of high school students use something obvious for their password? Like a boyfriend's name or a birthday?”
Everyone just stared at me. Was I the worst actress ever, or what?
“I would never use something that lame,” Gage said.
“Yeah. You just spell curse words backward,” Josh said with a laugh.
“Dude!” Gage complained, whacking him with the back of his hand.
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“I would never use anything that obvious,” Rose said, turning the page in her history book. “I just use random characters.”
So not what I wanted to hear. If Ariana was using random characters, I was screwed.
“How do you remember them?” Vienna asked.
“I just force myself,” Rose said. “I repeat it over and over until it's in there. Four, dash, dollar sign, eight, /, star. Four, dash, dollar sign, eight,/, star.”
“Nice one! Now we all know your password!” Gage said.
Rose turned beet red. “Well, that's not my password now.”
'Yes, it is! Yes, it is!“ London trilled, bouncing up and down in her chair, her long earrings slapping her in the face. ”We know your password! We know your password!"
“Oh, yeah? Repeat it back to me,” Rose said flatly.
London cleared her throat and looked at the ceiling. “Four, dash, dollop of. . . A. .. J ...” Everyone laughed and London lost steam, slumping. “Crap.”
“It's okay,” Vienna said, patting her back. “It's not like Rose has anything good on her computer.”
Rose shot Vienna a bite me look and got back to studying.
“Personally, I always use song titles,” Kiran said, lifting a shoulder. “I think a lot of people do that. Like book titles or movie titles or poems .. . CDs--”
Titles. That sounded like something Ariana might do. I made a surreptitious note in the margin of the Xeroxed article.
"You know, Reed, I read somewhere that some huge percentage of people actually write down their password and keep it
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somewhere close to their computer,“ Taylor said. ”They jot it down on a special day in the calendar or something. You know, just in case they ever forget it."
“Really?” I said, intrigued.
“Yeah. I bet I could find the article if you want me to,” Taylor said. “I save everything.”
Like I didn't know that already. Of course, she had no way of knowing how much time I had already spent under her bed.
“Don't worry about the paper too much,” Kiran said, returning to her own work. “Mr. Kline has a very lax grading system.”
“There's a theory going around that he only reads the first page of everything anyway,” Josh said.
“That's good news,” I said, feigning relief.
Everyone returned to their books and I realized that the conversation was closed. There was no way to open it again without looking completely obvious. But at least they had given me a few places to start. Now all I had to do was put these new theories to the test.
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TRANSPARENCIES
I should have been studying for my French quiz. I should have been taking notes for my history test. I should have been reading Beowulf. I should have been asking Kiran if I could raid her closet for an outfit to wear out to dinner with Whit. I should have been doing any one of these things. Instead I was at Natasha's desk with the Easton Academy website open on her computer, bent over a notebook, brainstorming potential passwords for Ariana's computer.
Taking a cue from Kiran, I had started scouring old issues of the Easton literary magazine, the Quill, online. If Ariana's password was in fact a title, then I figured it might be the title of one of her very own poems. Unfortunately she had published at least three and sometimes as many as seven poems in each and every issue of the Quill, going back to her freshman year. My list of poem titles already filled an entire page.
I sighed and closed the window containing last year's final Quill issue and double clicked on the latest one--published only last month. I knew that Ariana had at least five poems tucked
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inside its pages. I opened the table-of-contents page and jotted down the titles:
“Transparency”
“Endless Fall”
“The Other”
“Scarecrow”
“The Dark Age”
Ariana was a very lighthearted, carefree girl.
Suddenly the door to my room opened, sending my heart into unhealthy spasms. It only got worse when Ariana walked in, followed closely by Noelle and Taylor. I slapped my notebook closed and reached for the laptop's screen, but realized it would look far too suspicious. Besides, they were already behind me. Noelle placed a paper bag on the floor near the wall. I had a feeling I didn't want to know what was in it.
“Using Natasha's computer, huh?” Noelle said, leaning both hands on the back of the chair so that I tipped slightly backward. “Hope you asked or she might turn you in to the Gestapo.”
“Looking at the Quill, are we?” Ariana said, hovering behind me. “Getting ideas?” she asked, her eyes dancing.
My heart completely stopped. For a second my life flashed before my eyes. She knew what I was doing. She was actually psychic.
“Ideas? For what?” I choked out.
Ariana smiled slowly. 'Well, your writing, of course. I know you're a big reader. I always wondered if you might be a writer as well."
“Oh! Right!” I said, all the blood in my body rushing to my face. Of course she didn't know what I was doing. How could she
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possibly? “I am a writer. I'm actually thinking about joining. You know, the Quill.”
If it hadn't been for self-preservation purposes, I might have been alarmed that I was getting so good at lying.
“That's great. We'd love to have you,” Ariana said with a small smile. She looked at Noelle, who was, for some reason, grinning as well. “What do you write?”
Now I reached over and clicked the laptop closed, mostly to stall for time. I hadn't written anything creatively since first grade, when I'd written a short story titled “Animal Crackers” that had been universally panned by all the six-year-olds in my class.
“Uh . . . essays, mostly,” I said. “But lately I haven't really had much time.”
Thanks to you guys, my tone implied. You and your chore list are so the reason my muse has gone missing.
“And you're about to have even less,” Noelle said happily.
Everything inside of me slumped. “Why?”
“It's the windows,” Taylor said, her expression bordering on apologetic. “They're a disgrace.”
The windows? Didn't Easton employ a maintenance staff for this kind of thing? “What windows?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer.
“All of them,” Noelle said, taking my notebook out of my hands. I snatched at it, but she tossed it on my bed. She reached into the paper bag and produced a bottle of Windex and a stack of fresh rags. “And you can start with mine.”
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WEAK STOMACH
“It's going to rain,” Ariana said, turning her blue eyes toward the roiling sky the following evening. “We should hurry.”
I wrapped my scarf around my neck and scurried down the library stairs after her. The last hour had been spent listening to Ariana and her fellow Quill editors discuss the merits and flaws of various submissions for the latest issue. Since, in my moment of panic, I had expressed an interest, Ariana had invited me to come along and see what it was like. Now, having listened to these pretentious people tearing apart one another's work, I could sum it up in three words:
Not for me.
Still, I was touched that she had asked me. It meant that she thought I was worthy of sharing one of her favorite things. If only she knew that whenever I had started scribbling in my notebook during the meeting I hadn't been taking notes on the poems but jotting down new ideas for her password.
That morning, while I was supposed to be scrubbing floors, I
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had searched Ariana's room for a calendar or a date book, hoping to put Taylor's theory to the test, but had found nothing. If Ariana had a planner, she kept it with her at all times. After that failure, I had spent half an hour rapidly typing in every potential keyword I could come up with, flinching at every creak of the floor and every chirp of a bird outside the window. None of them had worked. Now I was on a mission. I had spent too much of my time on this already. I had to crack that password, if only to be able to tell myself that I had succeeded.
So I had spent most of my classes brainstorming more and more potential passwords and writing them down in my trusty notebook. At this rate I was going to flunk out of school, but at least I would know whether or not the Billings Girls had gotten Leanne Shore thrown out. Yeah. It would all be worth it.
Ha.
“So, what did you think? ”Ariana asked me as we speed-walked along the cobbled paths. “Did you enjoy it?”
“It was interesting,” I said in a noncommittal tone. “I don't know if I feel comfortable tearing apart people's poems, though.”
“Why?” Ariana asked.
“Well, those are their most personal thoughts and feelings. It has to take a lot to put that out there,” I said. “And you guys just sat there throwing out words like pathetic and pedestrian and cliche. That one girl was on the staff and you said she had no original thought. Right in front of her.”
“I know. It's not easy,” Ariana said, shaking her head. She
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hugged her notebooks to her chest and curled her slim shoulders in against the wind, her chin tucked down so it was almost hidden behind the books. “But if you're going to put something on a page and ask people to read it, you have to be able to handle the criticism.”
“I guess,” I said as we reached the front door to Billings. “It just seemed mean.”
Ariana stopped and stared at the door. The sky chose that moment to open up. A fat raindrop plopped right in the middle of my forehead.
“Look, Reed, if you can't handle it then maybe you shouldn't come back,” Ariana said rather harshly. She placed her hand on the door handle and gripped hard enough for her knuckles to turn white.
“I never said I couldn't handle it,” I told her. “I just--”
“No. You don't have the stomach for it,” she said, looking me in the eye. “And that's fine, but just don't pretend to be something you're not. It's a waste of your time. And mine.”
Whoa. Okay. Where had that come from?
Ariana whipped open the door to Billings and strode inside. For a long moment I stood there, feeling as if I'd just been slapped. Who the hell did she think she was, talking to me that way? She didn't know me well enough to know what I was or was not capable of.
Anger seared my skin as I walked into Billings after her. I couldn't just let this one go without saying anything. First the implication that I had something to do with Thomas's disappearance and
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now this? What, exactly, was Ariana's problem with me? As I entered the foyer, I expected her to be on her way upstairs, but the place was deserted. Then I noticed that all the lights in the common room off the entryway had been dimmed. I slowly pulled off my scarf and shook it out as I went over to inspect the situation. The half-dozen couches and chairs had been pulled together to face the big-screen TV, and there were all my dorm mates, gathered together with snacks and drinks, watching the latest Orlando Bloom movie.
It was a very cozy scene and, after all the stress of the past few days, looked like the perfect antidote to my two tons of stress.
“Hi, Reed,” Taylor whis�
�pered from her spot on the first couch. Kiran glanced over her shoulder and fluttered a wave. Rose looked up and smiled.
“Hey,” I replied, already scoping out a spot.
Across the room near the fireplace, Ariana was just settling in on an overstuffed pillow at Noelle's feet. Noelle pulled a throw off the back of her chair and passed it to Ariana, never taking her eyes from the screen. She lifted an hors d'oeuvre--some kind of cracker, cheese, and black gunk combination--from a platter on the table next to her and placed the entire thing in her mouth.
“What's all this?” I asked.
“Movie night,” Rose whispered. “We do it once a month.”
“Sweet,” I said.
“Not for you, glass-licker,” Noelle said in full voice. “You need to get back to the windows.”
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I blinked. “But I finished the windows.”
'Yeah. And they have more streaks than my mom's last dye job," Cheyenne said.
“Go to it,” Noelle said. “Maybe you'll be able to catch the last five minutes. But I doubt it.”
Everyone laughed. All fifteen of them. Fifteen times the humiliation. Ariana looked at me with those eerie eyes and smirked.
“Would you bring my bag upstairs for me, Reed?” she asked, holding out her messenger bag. “Thanks,” she added sweetly.
Then I saw Natasha was watching me, too, with a meaningful stare. I gave her a nod, feeling very CSI. There couldn't have been a more perfect opportunity to get back to my project. Back to that computer. And little did Ariana know she had just handed me the one thing I might need to finally break her password wide open. Her bag. Which undoubtedly had her planner inside.
Ariana thought I had no stomach? Just watch me.
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SUCCESS
An hour later my eyes were dry, my neck was tight, and a headache throbbed at the back of my skull. I checked my watch every two-and-a-half minutes, wondering exactly how long it was going to take Orlando to find love. Did I have fifteen minutes or another hour?