by Lisa Bunker
She sniffed her underarm. There was a pong. Definitely. Her face twisted. No! No no no. Please please, not that on top of everything else. Now: so not the time. The worst possible time. This was outrage piled on outrage, insupportable.
And yet, as her breathing gentled, she sensed something still unsnapped inside. She could feel it there, thrumming—a wire-tight thread of refusing to give up just yet.
Why hadn’t it snapped?
It just hadn’t. She didn’t know why. Somehow, though, she still had strength.
Enough to face the face in the mirror?
Only one way to find out.
She turned on both lights, the overhead and the one above the sink. She turned toward the mirror with her eyes closed. She inhaled and exhaled two deep breaths. She opened her eyes.
Boy face. Boy boy boy. Which was what she had been expecting. Still, her heart shriveled. She forced herself to keep looking anyway.
Bones: wrong. Skull: too big. Jaw: too heavy. Her fingers probed her neck. Was her Adam’s apple starting to grow? Today, it seemed yes. And was that the start of heavier hairs on her upper lip? Was some of the peach fuzz thickening, darkening? She wished for more light. She wished for the spotlight glare of certain truth.
Avoiding the worst as long as she could, she ran her fingers through her hair. That at least grew thick and strong, and was getting longer. The longest points bent their tips gently on her shoulders now. She lifted her chin, tilted her head . . . and, just for a second, her face flashed girl. She gasped, but when she moved her mouth, her jaw looked heavy again.
And, despite the endless, massive squirm, she couldn’t not look anymore. Time to face the worst.
She stared at her eyebrows.
Monstrous, hideous. Great bushy blobs of coarse black hair, splatted like a couple of roadkill raccoons above her eyes.
She pinched them with both hands and tugged. Her skin pulled out. She jerked them up and down. The hairs felt like steel cables under her finger pads.
The tweezers had been so bad, before. That little white drop around the bulb of the hair. What had it been? Pus? What was that other word? Lymph? Zen retched. She so did not care to know about body insides. If only you could be a perfect shell on the outside, and a mysterious miracle everywhere underneath.
But there were no longer any other options. The tweezers it had to be.
She fetched them. Leaning close, she studied her eyebrows minutely in the mirror. There were a few dark hairs between them. All right, those would do for a start. She pinched a big one right in the middle. Remembering how, the first time, not pulling hard enough had hurt more, she steeled her muscles, clenched her teeth, and yanked with her whole arm. A “huh!” escaped her lips.
It hardly hurt at all. She examined the tip of the tweezers. One curved black lash. Thicker on one end, tapering to invisibility at the other. No white blob.
Not so bad?
Not so bad.
Shaking the hair off into the wastepaper basket didn’t work. She had to brush it loose from the tweezers, and then it drifted sideways and hung on the plastic liner. She growled at it, thought a moment, then tore off a single square of toilet paper.
She tweezed another hair, then pinched it out of the tweezers with the toilet paper. Repeat. Repeat. The stings of the yanks built to a hard tickle, so every few hairs she paused to rub the tickle away. Soon the skin between her eyes had no hairs darker than fuzz in it.
Which only made the dark furry brows look that much more appalling.
Now that she was looking closely, she could see that part of the bushiness came from stray hairs that straggled above and below the main swath of close-together hairs. She set to work on them, under the brows first. The skin just above her eyes was looser, so the yanks hurt more again, making her eyes water. But she was indifferent to the pain now. Not numb. It still hurt. Just finally accepting that there was no way around it. It simply had to be endured.
The problem was, every hair removed made the remaining ones look bigger, darker. Branches. Tree trunks. She had twin forests of vile ugliness growing on her face. She leaned closer, breathing now through her mouth. She began switching back and forth, left right left right, trying to get them balanced.
She couldn’t get them balanced.
She couldn’t get the shapes right.
But there was momentum now. Her mind switched into a half dream familiar from Cyberlandium-time. Back and forth. Thinning, thinning.
Time went a little wonky. Sense of self, likewise, slipped out of focus. Then she stepped back from the mirror with a sharp in-hiss of breath. She had run out of hairs to pluck. The skin above her eyes was completely hairless, marked now only by twin slashes of angry red skin.
Zen opened her mouth to scream. But, no. Neighbors all around. No one must hear or see, no one must know. She swallowed the scream and, instead, made a fist and swung it down toward the glass. Whack! The bottles and other things inside the medicine cabinet rattled on their shelves. Luckily, the glass did not break.
Zen flung the tweezers rattling into the bathtub, whirled, yanked the door open, lunged across the kitchen into her room, and slammed and locked the door behind her.
FORTY-FOUR
A STRETCH OF black time. What pulled her past it: the call of Cyberlandium, waxing stronger again. She got up off the bed and opened her laptop. She felt herself on a path now. A path to a crucial decision. Wreak vengeance. Or not. Did she feel it strongly enough? The righteousness? The old passionate rage? It would have to possess her completely if she was going to do all that she was capable of.
Blank command field, except for the cursor. The starting point for whatever needed to happen next. Zen sat and gazed at that blinking vertical line. What demanded to be done?
No immediate answer. That was fine. There were a few things she could do while fate was brewing. Before getting started, she fetched a bandana out of a drawer and tied it over her head, covering her denuded brows.
Back to Cyberlandium. A first task had come to her: the IP address she had memorized from Mr. Walker’s sticky note. It had felt so good to accuse Robert, to put all her stormy feels into that one act of blame, but with a little distance she realized how ridiculous that had been. Robert wasn’t a hacker. He was an adequate gamer, and he knew more than the average middle-schooler about operating systems and such, but that was it.
On the other hand, though, why not be thorough? It would be easy to check. She knew the dates and times of her two encounters with Robert in Lukematon. If the IP address was his, it would match the logs of those sessions. Time to go back into the tunnels.
In another minute she moved once again through the old familiar grungy low-res graphic environment, abandoned as always. At the control hub she took down the dusty log-ledger for the first date and began leafing through the pages, scanning for the incriminating numbers. And, boom, just like that, there they were.
Zen jolted back into meatspace with a gasp. What? Robert was the hacker after all? But wait, no. She checked the details of the entry. The person with the address had played a couple of hours later than her first encounter with Robert, and in a different world.
So, the hacker was definitely not clueless Robert. But the hacker played on the Lukematon platform. And if vo had played before, vo was likely to play again.
Zen smiled grimly. Here was a task worthy of her skills.
Over the next several hours, Zenobia crafted a sweet little piece of code to run in the background of all the Lukematon environments, continuously scanning IP addresses. There was a simple alarm function, so she would know as soon as the hacker showed. Just for fun, she tied the scan into the presence of NPC. She test-ran it in a mothballed world, discovered one bug (a simple typo), fixed and tested again, found an infinite loop, recoded to eliminate it, and then got a clean test.
At some point the Aunties came home, first
Phil, then Lucy. She deflected them both easily. Why had she come home early? Kids teasing, like she had already said. Also, feeling sick again. Better now, though, and doing homework. Writing a paper. Later they brought her dinner, granting permission to eat in her room. Aunt Phil complimented the bandana. Even later they went to bed, calling good-nights through the door.
As the hours passed, Zen felt more and more awake. It had been too long since she had enjoyed the pure, clean focus that only deep immersion in Cyberlandium brought. She grinned as she loaded her code into the Lukematon mainline. She hovered her finger over the Enter key. Always fun to have that moment of suspense. The drumroll pause. Her grin widened. As soon as she pressed the button, every bird, animal, insect, talking tree, and sentient lollipop creature (just to name a few) in a hundred worlds would be working as her spy, on eternal vigilant watch for one certain IP address entering the game environment. And, the next time the Monarch Middle School hacker came to play, she would get an alert.
She pressed Enter, wondering if the alarm would chime immediately. It did not. So, the hacker was not active this moment in Lukematon. But whenever vo showed up, she would know. Zen laughed softly, wiggling with joy at the thought of all her virtual spies doing her bidding. It felt so very good to be back in her cyber-element.
FORTY-FIVE
ONCE HER SPIES had been set to work, Zen got out of her chair and did some stretches. Sleep? No, not even close. Vengeance decision time closer now. But first, a snack.
She slipped out of her room and eased the fridge door open, reaching in to pin down the switch so that the light stayed off. In the faint city-light from the windows she browsed over the jars and boxes and bottles within, passing over the various health food options. Ha! Leftover lo mein. That would do just fine. She extracted the cardboard carton. Also a fork from an eased-open drawer, and a square of paper towel popped meticulously, one perforation at a time, from the roll.
Back in her room, munching noodles, Zen opened her mind again toward the question of what her next move might be. Hmmm. You know what? First, tunes. Who was playing what on WYZA right now? She put her headphones on and engaged the stream.
Club music. A hard-driving, snare-drum-thwacking dance groove. As she listened, her body starting to bop, the DJ segued seamlessly into something just a little faster. Yes. This.
The next step toward the decision moment was to gather intel. Which was tied up with deciding who the targets would be.
Well, how about Natalie Davenport? She would do for a start. And that was an unusual enough last name to be useful. Who was she related to? What did they do online? What havoc could be wreaked there? Nothing truly devastating, of course. Something worthy of her reputation. Something . . . creative.
Here was someone local who might be Natalie’s mom. And she ran a company. A company with a website. What the heck was a consulting firm, anyway? Didn’t matter. First things first: confirm ID. School records would do for that.
Tinker tinker. Knock knock. Nope, not that way. How about . . . Yes, she was in. And indeed, Sabrina Davenport was listed as one of Natalie’s parents. Surely there could only be one person with that name working in Portland. An extra moment to harvest the names of Robert’s parents too, since she was in the database anyway, and then back to the Davenport website. Any chinks in the armor?
This proved a harder answer to find. Dancing a little in her chair to the overnight DJ’s seemingly endless mix, she worked on it for the good part of an hour.
Then, just as she had found a way in, an annoyance, prickling at the edge of perception. Something was off about the music. What was that sound? Like a lonely sparrow trapped in the dance club, chirping in the rafters.
Wait. Bird chirping. It was her alarm. Her secret agents had spotted the hacker.
Zen bent closer over her keyboard, a mirthless grin on her face. “Got you now,” she whispered. “Got you now.”
No whimsical dallying this time. She used preprogrammed jumps to rocket down the tunnels. In seconds she was back in the control room. She scanned the ledger of players currently in game for the hacker’s IP address. There it was. Another one of the D&D-type worlds. The hacker’s character was currently located outside the entrance to the mines. There was a little country fair setup there, Zen recalled. That made this even easier. She worked a lever, turned a dial (these steampunk controls—whoever made them had a bizarre sense of humor), and then she was looking out at her suspect through the eyes of . . . checking . . . the hobbit lass behind the counter of the balloon toss. One of the throwaway games. Nothing to win. Just a way to waste some minutes, if you were that bored.
And there, presumably, was the person she was looking for. A tall, thin warrior figure, helmet down. Elf. What character name was the person playing? She hovered her cursor. Chimakedu. Hm. That was odd. And familiar. Where had she seen something like it before?
Suddenly Zen’s eyes went wide. Chimakedu. Chima Kedu. Chima Kedum, that was, with the final m left off. Nine letters, stopping just short of the first repeat. And there was only one person in the whole world she could imagine choosing that name for a character.
Flabbergasted, Zen sat back in her chair and, with deliberate care, took her hand away from the touchpad. Important, right now, to think before acting. This she had not anticipated. Arli? Arli was the hacker? Could it be true?
And, if it was true, how did she feel about it? Because, yeah, hacks were illegal and memes were mean . . . but Zen also knew the pleasure of having the power to go where one was excluded and doing there what one wished. What was it Arli had said, down in the Fieldwork Sanctum? Something about revenge? Yep. And “things I’m not proud of”? Zen got up and moved agitatedly around the room. If it was Arli, what a twisty move to pick transphobic memes! A thread of self-hatred there, finding expression? Or a particularly nose-thumbing flourish, throwing everyone off the scent? Or even both at the same time?
But was it Arli? Well, it was easy to make sure. She sat down again and brought up her NPC’s first line of dialog. A hawker’s call—Heya, heya, step right up, try your luck. She triggered it.
The elf warrior paid no attention.
Zen clicked through her admin options. How did one write fresh lines of dialog? That? Yes. That. She clicked. A box popped up, cursor blinking in an empty field. Whatever she typed, the hobbit lass would say. She held her hands over the keyboard, considering subtleties, then decided on the direct approach. “Arli,” she typed, “is that you?” She held her breath and pressed Enter.
In the wee hours of the morning, an elf warrior and a carny hobbit in a pixelated balloon-toss stared at each other. Bird-spies sang in the branches of the trees. A voice bubble appeared over the elf warrior’s head. The person running the elf was typing. Words appeared. “How do you know my name?”
Zen pulled back again and gaped at her computer. A new idea began to thread through the wrangle in her mind, a thought she couldn’t squelch: Hey, you know, we’re already getting to be good friends. How cool would it be if we started hacking together? Went dark together? An outlaw partnership?
She still didn’t quite believe it, though, and before she made her next move she wanted to make absolutely sure. She opened a chat.
Hey.
Hey. What are you doing up so late?
What are YOU doing up so late?
Couldn’t sleep.
I get insomnia sometimes.
So I stay up and play games.
What kind of games?
Stuff on Lukematon, mostly.
Weird thing just happened, though.
I was playing, and I was at this little carnival place, I mean my character was, of course, and one of the carnival worker NPCs called me by name.
How could that happen?
Hello? Are you there?
Does anyone else ever use your co
mputer?
What does that have to do with anything?
Could you please just answer the question.
No. No one else ever uses this computer.
It’s mine, in my room.
Hello?
OK, I have to say it.
And then whatever happens happens.
I know what you did.
What I did?
Yes.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about?
The hacks.
On the school website.
I know it was you.
Hello?
Seriously? You’re accusing me of that?
After the first hack I set up a tracker for Mr. Walker
and the IP address is your address.
I know because that was me talking to your elf warrior just now.
That was you?
You were spying on me?
I was checking. I needed to make sure.
You really think it was me.
Wow.
Are you saying it wasn’t?
Doesn’t matter, does it?
Because you say it is so.
You are able to think that about me.
Wow. I thought I knew you.
Don’t tell me you’re offended.
Um
That’s not the word I would use
The word I would use