Immoral Code

by Lillian Clark

  Keagan looked up from his food. “Like a contrail!” His own eighth inch of hair, so blond it turned nearly white during the summer, caught the glow of the room’s fluorescent light like a halo of peach fuzz. “You could do mine! Neon pink. Or green. But it has to be neon.”

  “Had,” Reese said.

  “Right.” Keagan pouted theatrically, turning down the corners of his mouth and widening his eyes. “No more practices. No more meets.” He shook his head, feigning despondency. “No more Speedos. No more blocks. No more coaches’ dirty looks.”

  Reese groaned.

  Keagan turned and sang at her at full volume. “Swimming’s out for summer!” He pumped his fist to the beat in his head. “Swimming’s done for-EV-ER!”

  “Stop it. It’s horri—”

  “Pooooool’s been blown to pieces.” Facing her, he did a few air-guitar power chords, then abruptly turned back to his food. “Okay, I’m done.”

  “Praise the Lord,” Reese said, and took another bite of pizza. “That was obnoxious.”

  Keag grinned at her. “You’re welcome.”

  “Alice Cooper?” I said. “Your dad would be proud.”

  He shrugged. “He’d be prouder if I performed a forty-five-minute air-guitar rendition of some rambling Gov’t Mule jam.”

  “Government mule?” Bellamy asked. She and Nari walked up behind Keagan with their trays.

  He looked back, beaming, and said, “¡Hola, chicas! ¿Cómo están? ¿Qué pasa?” He turned to me, eyebrows raised and eager for validation that his Spanish was reasonably correct.

  “Bueno,” I said. Keagan was coming off a phase of having me speak to him almost exclusively in Spanish when we were alone, because that’s the kind of thing Keagan does. He loves learning new things, usually with an all-in sort of gusto that burns out after a week or two, but during those two weeks his interest is genuine and infectious. With this one he’d even tried to keep it up during dinner at my house, leaving my little sisters in tears from laughing at his declaring he was “un poco embarazado” after knocking his water glass over at the table.

  “Really, Keagan?” my dad had asked in English. “Only a little?”

  “Lo siento, Mr. Ramírez,” Keag said, mopping up the water with a napkin, and I’d finally clarified that embarazada means pregnant. Which made Keagan laugh, which started my youngest sister, Teresa, up again, giggling so hard she’d snorted milk out her nose.

  “Just great and not much, Keagy,” Nari answered, sitting beside him. “What’s up with you lovelies?”

  “Nothing,” Reese said, “except for a bit of Keagan’s theatrical flair.”

  Nari nodded and opened the salad she’d bought to doctor it, picking out onions, adding dressing, but didn’t ask what Reese had meant, maybe because Keagan was often theatrical so outbursts weren’t rare, or maybe because things between them, between all of us, had been a little shifted, a little off center, since Sunday.

  For five days, no one had said a word, not when we were all together, not when it was just Keag and me, and if any of the others were discussing or planning elsewhere, they hadn’t felt the need to tag me in. Instead, everything we’d left unacknowledged since Sunday had grown all week, with each lunch and class and hangout when we’d pointedly turned away from the increasingly bloated elephant in the room, as though if we let the sleeping dog lie, we could ignore the cat we’d let out of the bag, nos habíamos ido de la lengua, like it’d all escaped our tongues, and pretend like it’d never happened. But haciéndonos de la vista gorda, making our eyesight thick, or turning a blind eye, didn’t mean there was nothing to see.

  I get why there are so many idioms about secrets and avoidance, because the greater the insistence on something staying ignored, the more obvious it feels, just as our avoidance made us twitchy and uncomfortable, turning the quiet a little crisp, brittle with everything we left unsaid.

  “I love the new hair,” Nari told Reese, her tone and smile together seeming almost conspiratorial.

  Sitting beside me, Bellamy opened her can of Dr Pepper with a hiss and a crack. “Reminds me of a nebula,” she said.

  Reese beamed. “Reese the Space Ace!”

  We laughed.

  “You could put that on a shirt,” Keag said. He held his hands up, miming like he was reading from a theater marquee. “Reese the Piece of Molten Titanium, an Ace from Space.”

  She smiled; then the silence went embarazada again while we all chewed and swallowed and collectively ignored any and all suggestions of grand larceny. Nari ate her salad, Reese finished her pizza and pulled out her phone, Bellamy ate bites of her turkey sandwich, and Keagan started fidgeting, jiggling first one then both knees beneath the table, while I finished my own ham sandwich and wished the weirdness was something I could fix.

  Part of me wondered if Nari was doing it on purpose, ignoring what she’d started only to keep working on it quietly behind our backs, or not exactly behind our backs, but privately, without argument or oversight. I might’ve wondered, if that was the case, why she’d bothered telling us at all, but Nari exercised a strange mix of almost anarchistic self-determination and respect for permission, which—paired with her concoction of selflessness and love of attention—made her kind of predictable. She’d hate knowing I thought that, but she is. Maybe we all are; Reese’s enthusiasm on Sunday, Keagan’s disapproval, Bellamy’s silence, even my calm agreement, readily supporting the plan because of my feelings for Bells. It was all true to character.

  Except that my feelings weren’t the only reason, and I doubted the reasons I assumed were behind the others’ knee-jerk reactions were their only ones either.

  I swallowed the last bite of my sandwich and drank from my water bottle. Beside me, Bellamy had pushed her half-eaten sandwich away and sat slowly sipping her soda. Reese still stared at her phone, and Nari had pulled out hers as well, staring at it in one hand while eating her salad with the other. Keagan’s legs still bounced arrhythmically under the table. “So,” I said. “How long are we going to act like Sunday didn’t happen?”

  Nari finished chewing and set her phone down. “Yeah, about that.” She shared a look with Reese. “Operation Justice for Bellamy has hit a wall.”

  “What wall?” Keagan asked, frowning. Nari opened her mouth but Keag interrupted, “No, wait. Rewind to ‘What are you doing to have hit a wall?’ ”

  Nari narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean?” It wasn’t rhetorical, but she also already knew what he meant. Sometimes I understood Bellamy’s impatience with artifice…

  “You know what he means,” Bellamy said, and we all looked at her. “Why don’t you ask the question you really want the answer to?”

  This is what I meant about predictability and how we all both are and aren’t. Nari taking liberties after Bellamy said okay was as predictable as Bells’s annoyance with Nari’s question. Bellamy voicing that annoyance was not.

  “O-kay,” Nari said, over-enunciating. “I mean, weren’t we all in agreement? Why’s anyone shocked that I’ve been doing what I said I’d do?” She and Keagan shared a look. Then he shifted focus to his lunch, packing his fork inside his empty container and shoving it into his backpack.

  Reese spread a wide game-show smile on her face. “Let’s try this again,” she said. “What wall, Nari?”

  Nari clicked the plastic lid shut over what was left of her salad. “I can’t get all the way into the system. Which means I can’t do the thing remotely.”

  Bellamy sighed and frowned at the table, already getting it. For the rest of us—or Keag and me since Reese seemed to already know—I asked, “Which means…?”

  Nari shrugged and answered, “Time for plan B,” as Reese cheered, “Road trip!”

  REESE

  Friday, March 1

  28 Days

  “You want us to what?”

  “Keep your v
oice down, Keag,” said Santiago, always calm, always collected, always smooth and deep like pewter. Keagan shot him a glare.

  “I can’t get in from here,” Nari said. “I’ve tried everything I can think of and a few things other people thought of for me. But”—she shrugged—“Foster’s security is too good. Well, his and his banks’.”

  “Explain,” San said. “Please.”

  Nari huffed a breath and, in a low voice, obliged. “Okay. So I’ve been doing some midgrade spying to see what, exactly, it’s going to take to get the code I’m working on to do its thing. And what I really need is access to FI’s bank accounts, right? Which, best-case scenario, I’d get Foster to unwittingly give me himself. Passwords, et cetera. So I tacked some keystroke spyware onto a link in an email, and ta-da! Except his antivirus software caught and flushed that. Like, in a day. Before I could get all his bank-account log-in info. And while he didn’t seem to notice and so didn’t change any of his passwords this time, if I try to get him to reinstall the spyware so I can get the rest of it, his virus protection will punt the program and probably alert him.”

  “Meaning he would notice,” Santiago said. “And change his passwords.”

  “Locking you out,” I said, “and leaving us shit out of luck.”

  “Exactly. And not getting all his bank log-in info nixes the easy install-the-fund-diverting-malware-by-logging-on-and-pretending-to-be-Foster option. And no way the Trojan horse approach’ll work after my spyware got trashed so quick, because the malware file will be way bigger and way more noticeable.

  “Which leaves two options. One, break into each and every financial institution FI utilizes either digitally, or, more likely, physically, thanks to the aforementioned issues, to install the malware. Or I code it to multiply and latch onto each bank account as Bells’s dad uses them, and we download it directly onto Foster’s computer. In person. As in, plug a flash drive into a port,” she said, miming it. “And click download.” She shrugged again. “Once it’s installed, I’ll be able to watch it or kill it from anywhere. But I can’t install it from here.”

  Keagan was shaking his head, had been the entire time Nari talked. “Neat,” he said. “That’s all just super cool.” He kept his voice low this time, but he was pissed. “And, really, a fabulous list of reasons to, you know, not do it. Really, Bells? I’m sorry. Your dad’s a first-class piece of shit, but this is—”

  “Not your decision.” The muscles in Nari’s jaw flexed. She stared Keagan down with one eyebrow arched.

  He narrowed his eyes at her. “So it’s yours?”

  “It’s Bellamy’s,” I said.

  Bells shook her head. “No. Not just mine.”

  “Right. It’s each of ours,” Santiago said, eyes on Bellamy, who was staring at her can of soda, trying to balance it on one side of its bottom edge. It tipped toward its side, top-heavy. She took a sip and tried again.

  Bells is…I don’t get Bells. I love her. She’s kind and loyal and honest and brilliant. But I don’t always understand the way she thinks. I appreciate it, but, like, how I appreciate fractals. I am often in awe of fractals. But I don’t get fractals. They’re amazing, but I have no clue how they work.

  I don’t get Santiago’s thing for Bellamy either. Or hers for him, if she has one. It’s all very opaque. Not that I’ve tried to un-opaque, de-opaque?, clarify it. Because I don’t care. Well, ugh, okay. I don’t not care. But we’ve been over this. Sort of. Say you don’t care about enough stuff and people get all, Check out the misanthrope! But I am not a misanthrope. I don’t hate people. I hate assholes.

  Basically, what I mean is that I care about Bells’s and San’s happiness, not what makes them happy.

  I think it’s how different they seem. Keagan and Nari? Fine. They’re both bright and glowing and in the yellow-orange spectrum. Just, Nari’s glittery to Keag’s matte. But Bells is so cut-and-dried and exact, like a checkerboard of black and white, while San is dye dropped in water. A twisting cloud of pigment, all graceful curves with no straight lines.

  But maybe that’s me and my aesthetics. Maybe it’s me being acearo. To make a flippant analogy, it’s like not liking chocolate. Almost everybody likes chocolate, right? All kinds, some kinds, one kind. Or they at least like chocolate on occasion. Or if they spend a careful amount of time getting to know a certain preparation of chocolate, a soufflé or something, they like that specific one. But when you don’t like chocolate at all, people are like, How can you not like chocolate? And I’m like, (Shrug) I just don’t. And they’re like, But have you even tried it? And I’m like, Have or haven’t, what does that matter? And they’re like, What about x, y, z kinds of chocolate? What about brownies and cake and mousse and and and— And I’m like, Hold up, why do you care that I don’t like chocolate? And they’re like, But not liking chocolate is weird! Chocolate’s the best! I wouldn’t want to live without chocolate!

  For real, the world is chocolate obsessed. It’s everywhere, all the time. Which can make people look at chocolate-indifferent me and decide I’m

  (A) Lying

  (B) Broken

  (C) A partial person

  (D) Better off ignored

  (E) All of the above

  I have to not care. Example: Reese the Piece.

  Freshman year I dated a guy. Barret Tundle. He asked me out. I said, “Sure, okay.” We went to a few movies. Sat on the beach watching his older brother and a few of his friends surf in the frigid October water. Then one night he kissed me. I kissed him back. His hand went up my shirt. I pushed it down. He tried my pants. I shoved him off. He got pissed and said a bunch of shitty things, which should’ve been the end, right? Except the next day at school some guy asked if he could try me out now. Someone else stopped while I stood at my locker and asked if I’d give him head in the bathroom. Another cornered me at lunch to say he didn’t care I was so flat-chested, he’d take a turn anyway, which is how I met Nari.

  I was new. We’d moved closer to the coast that summer for my dad’s job, and because my mom, the once-upon-a-time aspiring actress turned real estate agent, was unhappy or something, so I didn’t really have friends yet. Maybe that’s why I said yes to dating Barret? Though I think I just said yes because I wasn’t sure yet how to say no. Anyway, Nari heard the “take a turn” comment and snapped. Even then, Nari was a force. She verbally laid the guy out. Shrank him to about two feet tall, then folded me into her and Bells’s friendship like I was the arm they’d been missing. Then came Keagan and Santiago, and here we are.

  Despite that, “Reese the Piece” stuck. People decided I was a slut, and I didn’t argue. Because screw them and their sexist heteronormative bullshit. Because to Barret it was the “no” that mattered and not whatever color of “because” I could’ve given. Because I don’t owe anyone answers or explanations about who I am. And having to convince someone who I’m not is the same as having to convince them who I am, which isn’t my burden. It’s theirs. I’ve never wasted my time begging people to have an opinion about me, so I’m sure as hell not going to waste my time trying to change whatever opinion they’ve decided to have.

  So, yeah. Long story short-ish, I dated a tool, and kissing that tool confirmed what I already thought I knew: I don’t like or care about chocolate, however you want to define “chocolate”: sexual attraction, romantic attraction, sex the act itself, which I haven’t tried and am not sure if I want to though I’m not touch averse or incapable of desire. Do I reserve the right to want some kind of chocolate in the future? Yup. Or to never want any kind of chocolate at all? Yup. But do I want it now? Even if not wanting it makes some people think I’m a lying/broken/ignorable/partial person? Nope.

  So when Santiago said that this decision, to do or not do the thing, was “each of ours,” I was like, Yes! Because while I didn’t get his feelings for Bells or vice versa, or if that was why he was willing to risk his v
ersion of everything for her, I didn’t need to. He had his reasons. And I had mine. And that was enough. No explanations needed.

  “Right,” I said. “It’s each of ours. So the same grand theft main course, now with a road trip appetizer and a side of trespassing. Everybody still in? Speak now or forever hold your peace.”

  Silence. Brittle, ice-blue silence. Even from Keagan.

  It was on.

  Smash cut to Saturday at Bellamy’s apartment with the Fab Five—

  “Fab Five?” San asked. “Can we vote on that?”

  “Okay…Quintexcellence?” I said.

  “Pentawesomeness,” Keagan suggested.

  Then Bellamy, “Pentaderanged.”

  Nari clapped her hands. “People! Focus! We can brainstorm names for our amazingness later. Now”—she pulled a fat folder out of her bag and slapped it onto the coffee table—“we have work to do.”

  And work we did. It felt surreal. Magenta. We were doing it. Really doing it. An adventure. A heist. Nari was the brains. Santiago the acrobat. I was the diversion. Bellamy the reason. And Keagan?

  “Getaway driver.”

  Nari pursed her lips, watching him cautiously. “You’re okay with that?”

  He fidgeted with the corner of a piece of paper on the table, rolling it up, then flattening it again under one finger, and shrugged.

  Fade out to the following Thursday, twenty-two days to go, with me standing inside the door of school’s main office, watching the hall through the narrow window. I’d say don’t ask how Nari and I ended up in the office, alone, with access to the admin’s computer and ID printer, but Nari had everyone convinced she was allowed to do whatever she wanted and could break into almost any computer system by breathing on it. As for me, Mr. Roberts had given me permission to use the art rooms in perpetuity sophomore year, so Reese-spottings in the empty after-school halls were a common occurrence.