Swipe Right for Murder

by Derek Milman

  “Well, I haven’t been. And nothing you did helped. You shut me out.”

  “No one is perfect! We all tried!”

  I feel like I’m being a little harsh, and this isn’t really the time or place for this. I squeeze my mom’s arm. “It’ll be okay, we’ll… talk things through.”

  My sister, who’s pretty much always the most emotional person in any situation but seems to be holding it together right now, untangles me from my mother and pulls me aside. “Listen, people are going to suggest that you need to talk to someone. A professional. Do it. Okay? Talk to someone.”

  “I’m not keen to go back into therapy, Nicks. We tried that.”

  “Try it again. You’ve seen some terrible things”—she puts her hands in a throbbing circle around her stomach—“and we can internalize that, we can repress that. I did this chakra-cleansing workshop in Westport with a Hindu healer who had been reincarnated from a Natterjack toad. He was on his, like, forty-fifth life—”

  I snap my head up to the sky like a Pez dispenser. “Nicks, you’re killing me. Not now with this shit, please not now—”

  She grips my arm. “No, just listen. I don’t believe that crap, either—although it was an amazing workshop—but just talk to someone. Okay? Trust me.”

  “Okay, I will. Good point.”

  “The FBI spoke to me first. Before they talked to Mom and Dad.”

  I close my eyes and take a breath. “Oh?”

  “I know a bit more than they do about how this whole thing came about. I asked them not to tell Mom and Dad, you know… everything.”

  I nod. “Thank you. I see now why you think I should get help.”

  She digs through her purse, finds a lozenge or something, throws it in her mouth and clicks it around her teeth. “I’m gonna tell you something…” She holds up her hands, and I’m not sure if she’s holding off a sob, a cough, if she’s going to sneeze or what, but then she gulps in some air, and just says, “I knew.”

  “About?”

  She moves her hands and head around like, you know.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I should have said something. I should have done something. I’m a terrible sister. I’m sorry. I just didn’t know what to do or if I should.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I just sensed it… I don’t know, something you said, something I caught. I’m incredibly intuitive, you know.”

  “Right. I’m glad you didn’t intervene. That would have made things a hell of a lot worse. I handled it. And I’m okay now.”

  She takes a big dramatic breath. “I knew about it, that it was going to hurt you in the end, that it was not good, and I did nothing.”

  I put my hand on her arm and grip it tight. “I am okay. I love you. You are making this about you in a weird way, like you always do. But all you need to know is, what happened with Tom was kind of a complicated thing and hard to quantify; I am a strong person, and I am okay now… about that, about him, about everything. And I forgive you. Okay?”

  She nods, lips pursed. “You are strong, stronger than me. We should talk more about this.”

  “All right. If you want to, we will.”

  “I know basically nothing. Nothing about you, nothing about what happened. I want you to know my babies.”

  I notice my parents looking over. “We’ll talk. Not here, though. Not now. Okay?”

  She nods, digging through her purse for something else, probably a Xanax. “To think we could have lost you today…”

  “But you didn’t.”

  I see a hand rising up, over the crowd, waving, beckoning. “Hold on a sec,” I tell Nicks, squeezing her shoulder. I walk through the mass of emergency workers rushing around, gently pushing people aside, until I find Shiloh. He’s leaning against an FBI van, right next to an ambulance, with two paramedics bandaging up his shoulder. He doesn’t look great.

  “They got the arrow out?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I’m going to be okay. But they gotta get me to the hospital soon. They don’t want it to get infected or anything.”

  “Of course.”

  “We did good,” says Shiloh.

  “Yeah, we did.”

  “Can you give us a quick minute?” says Shiloh to the paramedics. They nod, take their kits, and disappear into the swarm. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah. I think.”

  “I’m sorry you had to go through all that.”

  I laugh. “I’ve had better trips to amusement parks. And I’ve never admitted this to anyone, but I’m not a huge fan of heights.”

  Shiloh grins. “You’re a great kid, Aidan. I really liked getting to know you.”

  I fold my arms. “Kid? You’re like four years older than me…”

  I want to tell him how much I liked getting to know him, too. But I don’t know if I really did get to know him. Although I like everything I think I know about him.

  So instead I say, “Will I see you again or what?”

  “I’ll see you around,” he says, but it’s not a cold, rejecting kind of thing; he’s grinning. And he takes my hand in his, and rubs his thumb over my thumb.

  We stay like that for a moment.

  “I want to wait,” I tell him, surprising even me.

  But Shiloh only nods.

  “I want to go to college, maybe see where I am after a little while before we move forward with anything.”

  Who is saying these things? Is it me? We’ve had a really interesting start to something, and I’m feeling a lot of emotions, but I hear myself saying these things, and although I want to stop myself from saying them, I know they are the right things to say. I feel it in my bones.

  Shiloh gestures around. “Whatever happens, it shouldn’t be about this… this nightmare we’ve been through.”

  “I think there are certain things worth waiting for,” I say, taking my hand back, and breathing in deeply.

  Shiloh moves in, kisses me on the top of my ear, and whispers, “If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.”

  “I hope it is,” I say, keeping a little spark lit. “I’d like to get to know the real you.”

  “You’ve already done that,” he says. “More than you realize. And more than anyone else has.”

  We both need to let the insanity of this experience dissipate and see where we are when the dust settles.

  “Cool,” I say, rocking back and forth on my heels.

  He gestures behind me with his head. “Is that your family over there?”

  I look behind me and see my parents wildly gesticulating at each other. “Yup.”

  “They look completely crazy,” he says, laughing.

  I smile at him. “You have no idea.”

  He points at my chest. “Get your rib checked. Let them do an X-ray.”

  “Okay.”

  The paramedics return, along with some guys in FBI jackets. “I have to go now,” he says.

  “I’ll see you around,” I say, a lump rising in my throat.

  He gives me a little wave.

  I watch him get into the ambulance, and I watch the paramedics close the doors behind him. Several police vehicles, sirens letting out single piercing retorts, escort the ambulance out of the parking lot, then onto the road. I watch the ambulance disappear over a hill, flashing lights melting into the sun streaks in the sky.

  I didn’t realize that would be the last time I ever saw Shiloh.

  No, he didn’t die—nothing like that. In fact I heard he fully recovered, was doing well, going through detox. We just never spoke again. Or haven’t yet.

  But six months later, I’m not sure we ever will. Shiloh seems to have been absorbed back into whatever mysterious system created him. His phone doesn’t work. I haven’t been able to contact him, and no one’s been much help in that regard. I’m guessing that’s on purpose.

  It makes me wonder, all over again, who he really was, and how much of him was real. The jigsaw puzzle of things about him that I liked so much may not be the par
ts of him, all put together the right way, that make up who he actually is. It’s all so knotty and cryptic. He was undercover, after all. He was trained to play a specific role. He was, however briefly, this chimerical presence in my life.

  I never forgot what he said to me, though, after I told him I’d like to get to know the real him.

  You’ve already done that. More than you realize. And more than anyone else has.

  That made me feel special, still does, and I think about those words often.

  Sometimes I think I see him in crowds. But it’s never him.

  I worry Shiloh thought I was too damaged. Or maybe he thought he was too damaged, and wanted to spare me all the broken stuff about him I still don’t know about.

  I would have accepted all his darkness. I would have helped him get through it. I hope, wherever he is, he knows that. What an intense romance I could have had with someone who saved me on a train and then, only a few days later, shot me twice at close range.

  Long sigh.

  So I suppose you’re wondering what happened after.

  Well, right after, I went to the hospital. I had a cracked rib, but no internal injuries from getting shot. There’s nothing they can do about a cracked rib, really. I got painkillers. I told the FBI everything that happened. We went over it a million times, and then I went home. A few days later, just like they said in the Lake George hospital, our family cardiologist confirmed my little ol’ heart is perfectly fine. It’s not enlarged.

  Briefly I became a media sensation, because the opposite of what I thought was going to happen happened. Instead of the feds retracting their initial statement that I was a person of interest in the terror attacks and removing my photo from circulating in the media, the whole thing came out about me and Digital Dust and the Swans.

  I never gave a single interview. I never spoke to a single reporter. My family shielded me from all that. I watched these fools on ratings-grabbing cable-news networks sitting in their comfortable chairs with their six-figure salaries debating the ethics and morality of Digital Dust and the concept of collateral damage. Because that’s what everyone determined I was: collateral damage. Is it right, they all mused, to endanger and “inconvenience” an innocent kid if scores more lives could be saved as a result of infiltrating a terror group and stopping future attacks?

  They called in experts, all the usual pundits. Many said no, some said sure. They gave the whole we’re-living-in-a-new-world-so-the-game-has-changed argument. I’m so sick of hearing that.

  Also, there was an undercurrent of homophobia to the debate as well, as Scotty would have happily pointed out:

  Look where the pendulum’s still swinging, hun.

  Since the Swans were a gay homegrown terror organization and all that.

  Ultimately there was a huge shitstorm about it, and blowback from the public, everyone worried about their own kids who spend half their waking consciousness on Snapchat and Kik and Instagram. If I could be fed to terrorists like mutton to a lion, so could their own kids.

  Meanwhile, I was the one having nightmares about trying to hold on to Scotty on that roller coaster right before he fell to his death. There have been no more dreams about tornadoes or burning houses. But there were definitely messed-up dreams about that final roller coaster ride. And every time, Scotty said something different to me right before he fell.

  Once he said, I always wanted to be a poet, but I can’t rhyme, and I don’t understand meter. Will you write a poem for me about a garden at night?

  Another time: I always wanted to visit Tangier.

  The worst thing he said was, You’ll never find love, Aidan. You’re going to be known for this forever. You’ll never be anonymous… until the day you die, all alone, in a crumbling lighthouse on a forgotten seashore.

  Typical Scotty: theatrical, over-the-top.

  I never saved him in any of those dreams. He fell every time.

  There were many investigations into the Digital Dust program: how it came about, and how it went so wrong. Congressional hearings. Litigation. And settlements. We lawyered up, and my dad was right—my college (and beyond) is paid for now.

  I’ll never know what the FBI’s endgame really was on those tennis courts. I know they were hoping to get that spyware to the Swans, believing it really did have to be me who delivered it. But I think they secretly hoped the Swans would kidnap me again so they’d get ears on the inside, since they’d lost contact with Shiloh. I’ll always be proud of the fact that I stopped caring what they did or didn’t want from me, and made my own call. I did what I thought was right. And it worked. My finest hour.

  Agents Schwartz and Hernandez and many other people involved in the formation of the Digital Dust program—most of whom I never heard of and never knew existed—resigned. I never saw or spoke to Schwartz or Hernandez again.

  My dad said not to worry about them (I don’t), that they’ll all land high-paying consulting jobs in the private sector. Part of me wishes them luck.

  Part of me wants them all to go to hell.

  And yet…

  What Shiloh and I did mattered in the end. With the higher-ups in the Swans now dead, the FBI was able to dismantle the rest of the terror network of hackers and lost boys the Swans comprised, effectively wiping them out for good. I guess that’s why some counterterror experts had a good argument that Digital Dust saved lives.

  On the other side of that coin, though, gay rights continue to be endangered. Scotty would have been real smug about that.

  Told ya, hun.

  I called my college and asked about LGBTQ groups on campus, and how I can be involved when I get there in the fall.

  Like a sheltered, privileged tool, I’d never even thought to ask before.

  There are plenty of political and support groups. There’s even a queer resource center on campus with books and research materials. I’m turning eighteen soon, and I’ll be able to vote. I plan to become way more politically active now, or at least aware. Gotta start somewhere.

  I’ve also done some research on suicide prevention. I think that might be something I dedicate my life to, I don’t know. It would be kind of a weird tribute to Tom, and to Scotty’s partner Ken, who I never even knew. And Neil would have been proud of me. I can always volunteer for hotlines and stuff.

  I listened to my sister. I went into therapy.

  So did my parents, but they saw a different therapist, which worked out better for everyone.

  With my sister at my side, and on the advice of my therapist, I told my parents about Tom, and what happened. It felt good to get all that out. My mom cried. My dad just listened and looked somber.

  They’ve come to terms with the fact that their grief over Neil led them to start treating me in a way I felt was unfeeling and kind of removed. We’re all still working through this, but things have gotten better. And our relationship has improved. They never fail to tell me they love me now, every day, sometimes several times a day.

  Now I’m like, Okay, fine—I get it.

  With prompting from my therapist, I wrote a series of letters.

  The first letter I wrote was to Neil, telling him how much I love and miss him, and how sorry I am about our silly fight the night before he died. He deserved better from me.

  The second letter I wrote was to Tom, apologizing for my behavior after our breakup, even though everyone unanimously agrees there were other factors in his life that drove him to do what he did and it was in no way my fault AND I NEED TO ACCEPT THAT.

  I also scolded him a bit. I was just a kid, after all. He should have known better, that he had all the power. He should have known that he was my first, real, true love. He should have respected that. And protected me. I deserved better from him.

  I wrote to Scotty. I told him I’m sorry I wasn’t able to save him. I admitted we had a connection, although a complicated one, but in the end he disappointed me by fully crossing over to the dark side. I told him I will try to make change in the world my own way, par
tly as a tribute to what the Swans could have been, but mostly to further my forever quest to prove that Digital Dust was wrong about me.

  I wrote a letter to my Aunt Meredith, the only person I wrote to who is still alive. I said I’d like to get to know her better, and maybe we could have lunch once she’s feeling better and talk about those Ethan Hawke novels. I haven’t heard from her yet. I hope she takes me up on my offer. I hope she knows I was serious.

  Lastly I wrote to Drew, the kid who died in that avalanche, who I never knew. I told him I was sorry for making fun of his (admittedly extremely preppy) death. Wherever he was now, I told him, I hope he didn’t hold my occasionally snarky sense of humor against me. I said we have a lot more in common than he probably realized. I said he sounded like a great kid, and I wished we could have been friends. I said I’m a lesser person for not having known him—but that might have been overdoing it just a tad.

  I returned to school to finish the year. It was all about regaining normalcy. That’s what I asked for, and that’s what I got. So I enjoyed that last chunk of senior year. That prolonged twilight, dotted with fireflies of random memories and the last wisps of minor friendships, where you watch the waning days of your childhood burn out until you’re ejected into the next phase.

  “So how was your spring break?” I asked everyone when I got back, when I was still all over the news every moment of every day. That joke never got old.

  I spent most of my free time with Jackson and Leo, as well as with my other dorm mates. Jacks and Leo both got the summer internships they were hoping for, and Jacks got back together with Tats (for now; we’ll see).

  Jacks and Leo were really good friends to me. They helped me through that whole nightmare, and they were protective and sensitive during the never-ending aftermath, with news vans parked outside the school grounds, reporters hoping to nab me, cajole me into a sound bite, any kind of comment. The media never got one. They never will.

  “Man, the shit that happens to you,” Jackson said when he first saw me again, laughing himself into a whirlwind, slapping at himself, like he does. Then he gave me a big bro hug. “I’m so glad you’re okay,” he said, squeezing me hard, which still hurt because of my rib. I realized how much I love Jacks and how sad I’m going to be when I no longer see him on a daily basis. But knowing Jacks, he won’t let our friendship fade away.