“No Nari?” Bellamy asks.
He shakes his head. “I got the same group text.”
Park, 10:30, it read.
None of us asks a follow-up, I think because Keagan’s face says he both does and doesn’t know what this is about, which is a sense we all share. Instead, we ignore it, like we’ve been ignoring it, or not ignoring it but looking away, letting it happen, calling our parts done even though it’s really only started, because we’d each rather bask in our positive change.
But, the thing is, Nari’s changed, too.
NARI
$249,654.09
I walk to the park. It’s…miles. And yeah, I know. I don’t seem like the kind of girl who takes a lot of long, contemplative walks. Because I’m not. I like shoes where “comfort” is, like, the fifth descriptor and clothes you shouldn’t sweat in. Clothes that would look at what I’m wearing (sweatpants, honest-to-goodness sweatpants) and laugh. Or gag.
My phone dings inside the pocket of my (Keagan’s) hoodie, and I flinch.
Coming? Keag’s text asks. I don’t answer.
Things have gotten a little, uh, out of hand. To be totally glib about it. To put it glibly. It has been six days. Six, because after San uploaded my malware on the twenty-ninth, Foster began logging in to bank accounts on Sunday, the thirty-first, at 9:32 a.m., thereby activating it, and today is Saturday, April sixth. But my malware only ran for five. Well, five and a half. Five and a half, because I killed it last night. Five and a half, because when I logged in to Bells’s bank account at a little after eight p.m. yesterday, I saw this number staring back at me:
$249,654.09
Yes. $249,654.09.
In five and a half days.
Or, better, in round about 131 hours.
We are so fucked.
How fucked? Well, here’s how it went:
Sunday, Foster logs in to a few accounts, activating my pretty little bit of code. No big deal, right? Since, well, that was specifically The Plan. Except that within a few hours it’d already siphoned enough money to start the Bitcoin laundering business, ending the day with $9,965.98 in Bells’s legit account. Which, okay. That was…a lot. More than I’d anticipated. By far. But not so much that I panicked. I’d just made some semi-minor (“minor” har har har) error somewhere. Forgotten to account for the nearly twenty-four-hour business day involved with international markets. Underestimated (okay, yeah, by a lot) how many accounts FI used and how much money they actually dealt in. But I still had it under control. Less than ten grand? Totally under control.
Then came Monday, and by the end of the day, the money had doubled-ish to $19,937.15 and…Again, it was way too much. The money was accumulating in the faux ID account, building to the Bitcoin cost threshold, and going through the auto-buy/sell system I’d set up at a drastically faster rate than I’d originally planned. But again, I didn’t panic. We weren’t there yet! This wasn’t even a third of the way! And, dammit, I knew what I was doing! Ha ha. Ha. Aaah.
Tuesday: $28,012.51. I was starting to worry. But what was I supposed to do? Turn it off? We’d gone to all that trouble. All that mess. All that everything. For this. Couldn’t I just, you know, wait it out? Nothing’d been flagged. Business was rolling (stampeding) along like usual, right? What was the harm in letting it go all the way?
Wednesday: $37,890.65. So, I reasoned, I’d let it hit the seventy-thousand mark. I’d go ahead and collect it all. Finish the job. And then I’d kill it. And, I guess…lie? To the others, I mean. About how fast the money was coming in. About how much was sitting in Bells’s real account. The very thought gave me an ulcer. I mean, this was their thing, too. I knew that. I know that. They were along for the ride (as in, guilty, implicated, culpable) whether they knew how fast the car was going or not. But (and here’s the kicker) I knew they’d tell me to stop. Keagan and Bellamy, definitely. San, probably. Reese, maybe. And what was I supposed to do? Quit now?
Thursday: $68,527.77. But then, nobody asked. Which isn’t an excuse. I know that. And every day, every minute, every breath I breathed and every beat I heartbeated around them, I was sure one of them would ask. (Keag! Or, fuck, Bellamy at least!) BUT THEY DIDN’T. Four days passed, five, and still, no one uttered a word. Out of sight, out of mind, right? So I told myself, one more day. One. More. Day. Let it run for a final twenty-four hours, skid past that seventy-thousand threshold, then that’d be it. Done.
Well.
I don’t know what happened. A few capital-M Major transactions? Foster logging in to a pile of accounts I’d never known about? But the number jumped. Almost two hundred grand in one day. And I…
I tried to fix it.
All last night. When I opened Bells’s account and saw that number, I killed the program. Right away. Closed the fake bank account, scrubbed what I could, going back through as much of Foster’s computer and files as I still had access to, triple- and quadruple-checking that I’d covered every single one of my tracks, looking for warnings that someone, anyone, had noticed the missing money. Then I tried to put it back.
I tried.
But I couldn’t.
I didn’t even know where it’d all come from. I never thought I’d need to keep track. And I didn’t have that kind of access anyway. Not to make hundreds of deposits across dozens of accounts without getting noticed. But I tried. Everything I could think of. Until, finally, this morning, I gave up.
Hence the hoodie. And stale sweatpants. And sneakers I haven’t worn since my final gym class last year. Add in the hair I haven’t washed and the makeup I’m not wearing, then subtract all the sleep I haven’t gotten, and what do you get?
Another ding. Another text. My steps falter. But I don’t take out my phone. I don’t have any answers. I am so beyond excuses. We are so far past fucked.
I cross my arms and stare at the sidewalk in front of my feet, watching my toes poke into the scene: left, right, left, right. Cars drive by. A guy running with his dog jogs toward me, swerves into the grass of someone’s front yard to pass, then steps back onto the sidewalk behind me.
Normal people. Doing normal-people things.
I’ve never been interested in being a normal person. Huge surprise, I’m sure. I’m different. I’m more. I’m d0l0s. Right?
Except what even is normal when everyone is different? With different wants and different goals and different things that make them happy or sad or bloated or satisfied or tired. Prom? Graduation? One last summer with your best friends before you all go your separate ways? College, dorm, roommate, classes?
Normal. Other people’s normal, my normal, Reese’s, San’s, Bells’s.
Keagan’s.
Whatever it is, I want it. I want every average, cliché bit of it. The prom dress, the mortarboard, the going-away parties and buying extra-long twin sheet sets, FaceTiming with Bellamy as she shows me around her new dorm, Snapchats from Reese making inappropriate gestures with statues in Rome, a video of San’s Olympic qualifying dives. Keagan’s everything. Wherever he goes, whatever he wants, I want him. I want the picture, the one of the five of us posing around the statue at the Sea Lion Caves from the disposable cameras that I sent off to be developed when we got back. I want that smiling, simple reality. The one where five friends did a silly thing, and not as cover or an alibi, but just because. I want all of that so damn bad.
And I risked it all.
Like it was nothing.
Like I was different.
Like I was untouchable.
Because Keag was right. I was arrogant. I was self-righteous.
And now, because of it, we’re all going to jail.
BELLAMY
$249,654.09
“Abrir la caja de los truenos,” San says, answering Reese’s question about which idiom in Spanish does it better than the American equivalent.
“Open a box of…,” Keaga
n guesses. “What?”
Santiago smiles. Leaning back, propped up on his hands with his feet stretched out in front of him, he jiggles his right leg, bouncing it purposefully against my knee. “Thunder. ‘To open a box of thunder.’ ” I pluck at the damp mix of old and new grass beyond the edge of our blanket and push down on his leg with my knee. “I don’t know if that’s the best,” he says, “but it’s one of my favorites. And thunder is inarguably cooler than a can of worms. I mean, what even is that? A can of worms?”
Reese takes her pen out of her mouth. “Right? Like how hard is it to put worms back in a can?” She mimes scooping up a pile of imaginary worms, then pauses, looking at something behind San and me with her cupped hands in the air. “Nari?”
We turn.
She’s pale, and there are dark rings around her eyes. Her hair’s a mess and she’s wearing sweatpants.
Keag stands. “Nari, what’s—”
She opens her mouth and closes it again, pulls out her phone, unlocks the screen, and hands it to Keagan. He frowns, reading whatever’s pulled up on Nari’s phone.
And recoils.
“What?” Reese asks, impatient. “You watching a snuff film or something?”
But she knows. She has to know. She gets up and takes the phone from Keagan. Her eyes widen. “This is Bellamy’s account. The post-laundering one.”
Nari nods.
“Holy shit,” Reese breathes, and drops the phone like it’s on fire. It lands with a soft bounce on the grass. “Holy shit. We are so fucked.”
San stands, picks up the phone, blanches.
“Nari!” Reese screams. “What the fuck?!”
“Hey,” Keag snaps. He looks like he’s going to be sick.
Nari’s sobbing. “I—”
“Why didn’t you kill the program?”
“I did.” Her breath hitches. “I did kill it. Last night. Right away when I found out it’d taken so much.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Reese shouts.
“I—I fucked up.”
“Fucking obviously, Nari!”
I haven’t moved. Santiago stands beside me, Nari’s prepaid phone in his hand, eyes unfocused and the fingers of his free hand digging into his opposite bicep. Keagan has paced away a few yards and crouches with his head in his hands.
“Put it back,” Reese says. “The money. Just put it back!”
I stand and take the phone from San.
The bank account Nari made in my name is open on the screen. The balance, displayed in bold print near the top of the page, reads, $249,654.09.
Through her sobs, Nari says, “I can’t. I can’t put it back. All those accounts. I have no way—I don’t know which money came from where. It’s too late.” Then Reese shouts that she doesn’t care, do it anyway, and Keagan shouts at Reese for shouting at Nari, and Santiago says something almost calm but I’m not listening because his eyes meet mine and they’re bright with devastation.
I’ve ruined his life. This has ruined all our lives.
I waited until I was eight years old to finally ask my mom about my father. I wasn’t a very fantastical child. I never believed in Santa or the Easter Bunny, so it wasn’t that I didn’t think I had a biological father or that I’d made up some convenient fiction to explain him away. But I’d never asked. And my mom had never offered. Even at eight, I figured it was better, easier, to look away. I figured if she’d wanted to tell me about him, she would have. I figured if he or my mom had wanted him to be a part of my life, he would have been. But in the third grade, the year after Nari claimed me as her best friend, I asked, and my mom answered by telling me some basics, and that together we were enough. That we were better off. That we didn’t need him because I had her and she had me.
And we didn’t. Need him. I say that with full self-awareness, with a complex understanding of need and want. I don’t need him. Even as I stare at an account with my name on it full of his money, I know I don’t need him. And I know that all of this could’ve been avoided if only I hadn’t looked away.
It’s what I do. What I did. I look away. When Nari suggested this plan, I figuratively put my head down, held my hand out, and said, “You lead, I’ll follow.” I looked away and waited for my friends to fix my problem for me. The unfairness of my mom’s and my life is real, and undeserved, especially my mom’s guilt about it. My anger and resentment are real, too. But I’d used them as excuses. And calling had been a stopgap, a way to absolve myself. I’d known when I called that if he hadn’t answered, or if he’d answered and hung up like he did, if he’d done anything other than solve my problem with a snap of his fingers, I was prepared to label that experiment a failure, turn away again, and go back to waiting. Because I was always waiting. Waiting for that future moment when I’d finally have the right tools to change my mom’s and my life. The classes, the competitions, all the extras I’d done, the things I’d accomplished, all the work; it was all parts, an assemblage of pieces that someday, once I had enough, once I’d reached some intangible concept of enough, I’d be able to build a new set of circumstances out of. Tools that didn’t include Robert Foster because I didn’t need him, I wasn’t supposed to need him, to want someone who didn’t want me.
And maybe that would’ve worked. Maybe five, ten, fifteen years from now, I’d have accumulated the proper components despite this. But what all of this has taught me, what saying yes and kissing San and getting Reese out of FI has taught me, is that waiting for some future moment when things are “ready,” when they’re “finished,” is a good way to miss all of the amazing things I’m capable of right now.
It’s taught me that the stopgap is never enough. That I’m done looking away.
I blink and take a deep breath, locking the phone and walking over to hand it back to Nari.
“…keep it,” Reese is saying, but I was so deep in my own thoughts I missed the first part.
Nari’s eyes flick to me.
“No,” Keag says at the same time San says, “Wait, let’s—”
“It’s the exact right amount,” Reese interrupts. “It’s what we were going to take from the beginning!”
“No,” I say.
But Keagan and Reese start yelling over each other.
“How can you even suggest keeping it? How is that even an—”
“If seventy was right, why is two hundred and fifty wrong?”
While Nari cries.
“It’s all wrong!”
“So going to jail for the rest of our lives is the answer? They haven’t even noticed!”
And San stares silently at the grass, vision glazed.
“That doesn’t mean they won’t!”
“Stop,” I say.
“Better to take the chance than guarantee being fucked over for the rest of our lives!”
“Perfect. That is just fucking perfect. More fucking chances. Haven’t we taken—”
“SHUT UP!” I shout. Loud enough it makes my throat hurt.
They do.
“Here,” I say, handing Nari back her phone. I look between the four of them. “I’ll fix this.”
And I walk away.
It’s a long walk. No one follows, not even San. And I’m glad. I text my mom, telling her to come home, that it’s an emergency.
Everything okay? she texts back a few minutes later.
No, I say, but no one’s hurt.
Five minutes after that she writes, On my way.
My phone buzzes a few more times before I get home with texts from San, Nari, Nari, Reese, Keag, and San again, but I ignore them. By the time I reach the parking lot of my mom’s and my apartment complex, her car’s in her spot. I take deep breaths as I walk up the stairs and through our door. Standing inside with arms crossed and brow tight, my mom asks, “Bellamy? What’s going on?”
A
nd I tell her everything.
Afterward, my mom is silent. She listened the entire time without saying a word. Now she stares at the floor, expression stern. The light in the apartment changes as the Earth turns, shifting the placement of the sun in the afternoon sky. As the sunlight dims enough that we’ll need to turn on a lamp, there’s a knock at the door.
My mom stands to answer. It’s Nari.
“Narioka,” she says, “now isn’t a—”
“It’s my fault. Whatever Bellamy told you. It’s my fault.” I move from the couch and stand behind my mom. Nari’s face is splotchy, her eyes puffy and red. She sees me and starts crying anew. “Bellamy, I’m so sorry. I thought I knew what I—”
“Nari,” my mom interrupts. “Go home.” I peer past Nari down the stairwell, at the bottom of which I can see the front of Keagan’s car, idling in the handicapped space. “Bellamy and I need some time,” my mom says. “I’ll call your parents later.” And she closes the door.
I go to the window that looks down on the parking lot. San stands outside the car by the rear passenger door. He sees me and lifts a hand, not a wave but an acknowledgment. I raise my hand to him in return. Nari comes into view, wiping her eyes, and climbs into the front passenger seat. I close the blinds.
When I turn back, my mom is on her phone. “Bobby?” she says after a moment. Bobby, because Robert Foster was young once. Bobby, because my mom knew him when he was young, a teenager, when they’d been teenagers together who’d hugged and kissed and laughed together, who’d liked each other and had maybe even been in love. “It’s Lauren.” And she shuts herself in her room.
Ten minutes later she comes out and tells me he’s booked a flight. He’ll be here in the morning.
I pass the rest of the evening lying in my room, staring at the ceiling above my bed. My mom took my phone, so I can’t text the others. I heard her calling their parents but not what she said. Now the TV’s on, playing a marathon of old House Hunters episodes, and she’s banging around in the kitchen.
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