The End of Ordinary

by Edward Ashton

She turned to face him, arms folded over her chest.

  “Who are you again?”

  “I’m Micah,” he said. “I’m the guy who brought you here, remember?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I got that part. What I’m wondering is whether you’re anyone I should be trusting enough to continue this conversation.”

  “He’s my boyfriend,” Jordan said.

  Devon raised one eyebrow.

  “Really? That’s too bad.”

  Devon got a look at my face then, and burst out laughing.

  “Sorry, Hannah. Forgot there was a fetus in the room.”

  I looked over at Micah.

  “Did you tell her what this was all about?”

  He shook his head.

  “No, ma’am. I did not.”

  I turned to Devon.

  “He didn’t explain why he brought you here?”

  She shrugged.

  “Not really. He said a bunch of people were hanging out at your house. Also, that you needed someone who could break your dad’s security. It sounded more interesting than calculus and English lit. And also, like I said, Inchy said it might be fun.”

  “You didn’t wonder why we’d want you to crack my dad’s servers?”

  She grinned.

  “Because cracking servers is fun, I assume. Are we looking for porn or something?”

  Micah snorted. I closed my eyes, and rubbed my temples with both hands.

  “No,” I said. “We are not looking for porn.”

  “Okay,” Devon said. “What, then? Stealing money from your college fund? Checking to see if your dad’s been cyber-cheating on your mom? ’Cause I can tell you from experience that those sorts of investigations do not end well.”

  “This is not about money, and it’s definitely not about cyber-cheating,” I said.

  Devon touched my arm.

  “I’m just messing with you, Hannah. I’ve got a pretty good idea of why I’m here. You haven’t made any progress on our little project at all, and we need to move things along.”

  “Not sure what you’re talking about,” Micah said, “but this is serious business, Devon. We have reason to believe that Hannah’s dad and Marta’s dad are engaged in a massive conspiracy to give Jordan super-herpes.”

  Devon blinked, slowly.

  “Super-herpes?”

  “Yes,” Micah said. “Or possibly chlamydius maximus. We can’t be entirely sure. The only thing we really know is that whatever it is, it will definitely cause jets of literal fire to shoot out of Jordan’s wiener.”

  “Or kill him,” Marta said. “It might just kill him.”

  Micah looked over at Jordan, who was distinctly not amused.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I guess that’s possible too.”

  It was an hour or so later, and I was sitting on the back porch with Jordan, drinking iced tea and watching the breeze push the dead weed stalks around in the field behind my house. Devon, Micah, and Marta were inside, supposedly trying to break the security on my dad’s work system. When I’d asked Devon how she planned to accomplish this, she’d said Inchy was really good at that kind of thing.

  I know exactly what you’re thinking: Hannah, you are an idiot. In my defense, even though I did tell Devon to go for it, I definitely had some serious doubts about what she was planning. My dad was a doofus, but he was also the smartest person I’d ever met, and I didn’t think he’d be sloppy about protecting his stuff. More important, the system they were trying to crack technically belonged to Bioteka, not Dad, and Bioteka’s security budget was bigger than the GDP of Denmark. My guess was that they’d probably have had better luck trying to crack into the NORAD defense grid.

  I guess I mostly thought they’d get bored after a while, and then maybe we’d pile back into Jordan’s ride and find something more interesting to do. In the meantime, though, I had friends. Also, it was turning into a nice afternoon. The sky was a faded light blue, and the sun was low and bright and strong enough that my face and legs were hot, even though the backs of my arms were goose-pimple chilly. Jordan and I were sitting on an ancient wooden glider with banana-yellow cushions that my dad had picked up in an antique shop a few years before. It looked ridiculous on our porch, and my mom absolutely hated it, but Dad said having it sitting out there made him feel like a country squire.

  I asked Mom once what he meant by country squire. She said it was a fancy way of saying moron.

  “So,” Jordan said. “Got any idea why your dad wants to kill me?”

  I shrugged.

  “After that scene in the parking lot the other day? Protecting his daughter’s honor, I guess.”

  He gave me a sour, sideways glance.

  “You didn’t explain to him that your honor was totally safe with me?”

  I looked down at my hands.

  “Yeah, sorry. I never really got the chance.”

  We sat in silence for a while then. A half dozen crows were hopping around out in the field, pecking at the ground, flapping their wings and jawing at one another. I found myself wondering what it would be like to be part of a group like that—just one of the crows, hanging with my friends, making fun of the lame-o pigeons and looking for dead stuff to eat.

  I’d probably be the one who got ostracized for accidentally eating something that was still alive.

  “So real talk now, Hannah.” Jordan said. “Do you seriously think Marta’s dad is some kind of a doomsday villain? I mean, I know Micah’s having fun with the whole super-herpes thing, but do you think shit is actually getting real here?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know Marta, and I definitely don’t know her dad. I can tell you, though—my dad is not conspiring to kill you.”

  He sighed, and stretched his arms out across the back of the glider.

  “You sure? I get that he’s your dad and all, but what makes you think you really know what’s going on inside his head? I mean, my dad . . .”

  “Yeah,” I said. “No offense, but I actually know my dad, Jordan. He’d definitely a social maladept, and he’s kind of a moron about some things, but he’s not a lunatic. Killing off all the UnAltered might sound like a good idea on the surface, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t actually work out.”

  “Thanks,” Jordan said. “Nice of you to say that, at least.”

  I leaned my head back against his arm.

  “You know what I mean, Jordan. I don’t think killing anybody is a good idea.” I looked over at him. His eyes were closed, and his chin was almost resting on his chest. “I definitely don’t think killing you would be a good idea.”

  He smiled.

  “Thanks, Hannah. That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

  I smacked his chest. He laughed.

  “You know,” he said. “I’m sorry the girls are so bitchy with you. You’re actually a pretty okay person.”

  I sighed.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

  We sat in silence for a while then. Out in the field, the crows all leapt up at once and flew a hundred yards or so, then settled down into a new spot and started hopping around again.

  “Huh,” Jordan said. “What do you think that was about?”

  I shrugged.

  “They’re crows, Jordan. I don’t think they do a lot of heavy-duty planning.”

  He lifted his head then, and looked over at me.

  “What makes you think people are any better?”

  The sun was just edging under the porch eaves. I closed my eyes against the glare.

  “What do you mean? You think we’re dumber than crows?”

  “Well,” he said. “Crows mostly just hang around eating bugs and roadkill, right? Crows don’t have doomsday cults. Crows don’t fight Stupid Wars. Crows don’t make corn monsters and retro-whatevers and . . .”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Animals are great. Animals never do anything mean. Have you ever seen one of those nature vids of a lion taking down an antelope? Or how about ants fighting? I had a
fish one time that bit off the fins of the other fish in the tank so that they couldn’t swim away while he ate the rest of them really, really slowly. I don’t know about crows specifically, but I’d be willing to bet that if you actually follow them around for a while, they’ll do something horrible. I mean, don’t get me wrong. People definitely suck. Don’t act like animals are all sweetness and light, though. The reason we suck isn’t because we’re worse than animals. It’s because we’re just like them.”

  “Wow,” Jordan said. “I didn’t know you were such a crow hater.”

  I laughed.

  “Oh, yeah. They’re the worst.”

  I opened my eyes, but the sun was a white-hot glare, so I closed them again. It was comfortable, sitting there with my head resting on Jordan’s arm and the sun beating down on my goose-pimpled legs.

  “Actually,” I said after a while, “you might have a point about the planning stuff.”

  “Huh,” Jordan said. “I’ve got a point? No kidding.”

  I sighed.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No,” Jordan said. “I have no idea what you mean.”

  I squinted up at him. He’d turned his head to look at me.

  “I’m just thinking about what’s happened to me over the last three months,” I said. “How much of that did I plan out?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, his eyes slightly narrowed. “You tell me.”

  I stared at him. He blinked before I did.

  “I was mostly thinking about stuff like letting things get all salty with Tara, but yeah—I didn’t plan on becoming friends with you either.”

  “Just drifted into it, huh?”

  I shrugged.

  “Pretty much. Didn’t you? Honestly, isn’t that how most things happen? When was the last time you set out with a long-term plan, and it actually worked?”

  “So you’re saying all those lemonade bottles just randomly showed up on the hood of my car? Like a quantum tunneling kind of thing?”

  I laughed.

  “Quantum tunneling, huh? Look at you, mister science guy.”

  He smiled.

  “I didn’t take GeneChem, but I did take the whole physics sequence.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll give you partial credit on the lemonade thing. I will tell you, though, that even that didn’t turn out exactly the way I planned it.”

  He opened his mouth to reply, then turned to look over my shoulder.

  “Hey,” he said. “Where did you come from?”

  I lifted my head from his arm. Tara was standing in the yard by the corner of the house.

  “What the flark?”

  “Hey,” Tara said. “Nice to see you too.”

  Jordan pulled his arm out from behind me and stood.

  “Come to join the party?”

  Tara scowled.

  “Sure. Toss me a beer, huh?”

  “Tara,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Well,” she said, “Sarah pinged me after lunch and said you were ditching today. She said you weren’t dead, and you weren’t in jail, which are the only two legitimate excuses for ditching a workout three weeks before Sectionals that I’m aware of. So, I thought I’d jump out before last block to make sure you had a full and complete understanding of Doyle’s policy on missing practice without a written excuse.”

  I looked up at Jordan. He raised one eyebrow.

  “I’ve got a written excuse. I’m not dead or in jail, but according to the ping Doyle got from my doc I’m at the PT today, getting my hamstring checked.”

  Tara turned to stare at Jordan.

  “You’re ditching practice?”

  Jordan sighed.

  “I know, I know—but I feel a weird sense of obligation to Marta right now. Don’t ask me to explain it, because I can’t. Promise I’ll get in a workout on the treadmill tonight.”

  “What about Micah?”

  He rolled his eyes.

  “Micah’s not about to leave me alone with Marta. He got his fake grandmother to send Doyle an excuse. Which reminds me—you got a pass set up, Hannah?”

  “Uh . . .” I said. “No, I don’t. I guess I didn’t know Doyle had a policy.”

  “He doesn’t,” Tara said, “because in the history of Briarwood cross-country, nobody has ever missed practice without a notarized excuse. You weren’t planning to be the first, were you?”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Do you care?”

  Tara’s face twisted into a scowl. She took a deep breath in, closed her eyes, and let it out. Her voice was softer when she spoke again.

  “Look, Hannah. I know I’ve been kind of . . .”

  “Awful?” Jordan said.

  “Yeah,” Tara said. “Kind of. It’s just . . . you have to understand, when we work so hard, and someone like you just comes in and . . . anyway, it’s not your fault. You didn’t ask for the cuts you got, and you don’t deserve to get shit on for them. I’m sorry.”

  I thought about saying, “I work hard too,” and I thought about saying that half the kids on the team were Engineered in one way or another, and I even thought about telling Tara to take her half-assed, semi-racist apology and shove it up her ass. In the end, though, I looked up at Jordan, and he shrugged, and I rolled my eyes and sighed.

  “Give me five minutes,” I said. “I’ll go get my gear.”

  “So,” Tara said. “What’s with the cabal?”

  I slouched forward to rest my hands on my knees, and spit onto the track. We were halfway through a set of quarter intervals, and I didn’t have the breath to answer. I had the juice to hold even with Tara at her best on a long woods run, but she still had enough flat-out speed to pretty much put me away at anything less than a half mile.

  “Seriously,” she said. “I totally get the need for a mental health day, but I talked with Jordan while you were getting changed. He made it sound like what you guys were up to was more like a revolutionary-cell kind of thing.”

  I looked up at her.

  “Long story,” I said. “Maybe later?”

  Doyle waved us up to the line then, and counted down the last five seconds with his hand. His arm slashed down, and we went.

  I was a little surprised that Doyle hadn’t questioned the fact that I hadn’t been running with Tara for the past week, but I get it now. He saw himself as a great coach—objectively, I guess he actually was a great coach—but he thought the role of a great coach was pretty much the same as the role of the pit crew in a NASCAR race. He wanted to optimize our performance as athletes. He did not have any interest in dealing with us as people. He obviously knew that Tara and I had lost the “fr” from our frenemy status for a while, but he wouldn’t acknowledge that this was a problem unless it began to hurt our performance. I was running harder than ever. Tara was obviously still doing her thing. As far as Doyle was concerned, everything was copacetic.

  Well, it was, right up until I finished that last quarter, anyway.

  We were supposed to do a mile at half pace to loosen up, and I was going over to take a hit from my water bottle before getting started. Tara was walking beside me, one hand resting on the back of my neck, almost as if we’d reset to the beginning of the season and she was auditioning to be my big sister again, when her fingers tightened and she stopped me short. I looked up. On the other side of the field, Doyle was talking to what I first thought were a couple of town cops. They had the standard-issue black boots, black pants, black shirts that looked like they might be covering black flak jackets—even matching black shades, although the sun was mostly down by then, and hiding behind low red clouds.

  They weren’t wearing badges, though.

  “Hannah!” Doyle yelled. “Tara! Get over here. These gentlemen would like to have a word with you.”

  I looked up at Tara.

  She looked down at me.

  The non-cops started toward us.

  We ran.

  20. In which Jordan reconsiders his choice of associ
ates.

  When Tara came and dragged Hannah off to run around in the woods, I sort of assumed Hannah would tell the rest of us to clear out. I mean, who leaves a bunch of randos alone in their down-low castle? I wouldn’t have. Hannah didn’t seem to care what we did, though. She just poked her head into the den where Devon and Marta and Micah were digging around in her father’s stuff, and told Devon she’d be back in a couple of hours, and that we should ping her if we found anything interesting.

  “Sure,” Devon said. “Hey—what do we tell your parents if they get here before you do?”

  “They probably won’t.”

  “Right,” Devon said. “But if they do?”

  Hannah gave that a few seconds’ thought.

  “If it’s my dad,” she said finally, “tell him you’re super interested in genetic engineering, and you were hoping he could give you a long lecture on how you can make corn more resistant to rust blight. Then, after he’s been talking for an hour or so, tell him you have to get home for dinner.”

  “Got it,” Devon said. “What if it’s your mom?”

  “Yeah,” Hannah said. “If it’s my mom, run.”

  “So,” I said when she was gone. “How’s the corporate espionage going?”

  Devon was sitting in a wheeled desk chair in front of a four-monitor console. She frowned, and pivoted around to face the screens.

  “Honestly,” she said. “I’m not really sure.”

  She waved at the leftmost screen. A cluster of molecular diagrams popped up on the two center monitors, and streams of numbers began marching by in columns on the right and the left.

  “Hey,” I said. “That looks pretty good, espionage-wise.”

  Devon shrugged.

  “Maybe. I mean, it looks like we’re through the walls.”

  “Looks like?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, yeah. We’ve got DNA maps going here, and the numbers look kinda like transcription affinities.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So what’s the problem?”

  “The problem,” Micah said from a settee under the picture window on the far side of the room, “is that we’ve been looking at the same diagrams and numbers for the last half hour.”

  Marta came over to stand beside me.