by Anna Todd
Eventually you find the file in question. It looks like an image file but refuses to load. You open it up in a text editor and see it’s just a string of letters and numbers disguising itself as an image file. There are any number of things it could be.
You start researching encryption methods, downloading different heuristics programs that might help. The world falls away, and it’s just you and this puzzle to solve. You try different approaches, different ideas. You keep thinking you’re getting close, only to find yourself thwarted. Your heart is racing. You’re having fun. This is what you used to love, the creativity of technology. The artistic process of learning something and solving a problem.
You stay in bed, hunched over your laptop, for hours. You forget about showering, eating, whatever else you might have had planned for the day. And then, at last and all of a sudden, you figure it out. A wrong turn trying to reverse one encryption method reveals a partial clue in the text, and you use that like a thread to pull at, carefully, slowly, until the whole thing unravels and reveals itself. It’s a location, geographic coordinates, and a specific time. You have no idea what that information means or why it’s important, but presumably Kim does.
You sit back, kind of extremely pleased with yourself. You have information Kim Kardashian needs. She asked you for help, and you have totally been able to help her. Okay, there is the fact that you’ll be going to jail if anyone finds out, but still. Kind of a cool day. You’ll have to think a little bit about what you’re going to actually do now that you have this information. But now that you’ve started on this path, you do kind of want to see where it goes, if you’re honest. But would you really do that? Betray your boyfriend like that, your government, your country?
You look at the time and realize how late it is and decide to table that mental debate for later. You delete all your work and drop everything onto the floor, grabbing a towel and running for the shower. You have to be at work soon. A good lesson: never experience happiness, because something will immediately remind you not to be happy.
AFTER YOUR SHOWER, you’re brushing your hair when you accidentally catch sight of yourself in the foggy mirror. You flinch, like you’re seeing a ghost. You wipe off the glass to see yourself better. You stand there and look at yourself, hardly recognizing what you see. Honestly, you hardly look in the mirror anymore. Like, ever, if you can help it. You hate what you look like, so what is even the point if it’s just going to ruin your day and confirm what you already know to be true about yourself?
You’ve tried the Instagram makeup filters, and they kind of help, but not really. It’s not enough. You’re not even sure you’re doing them right. There are tutorials, lessons you can buy to help you learn how to achieve better results with the makeup. How to make it look like you know what you’re doing. You haven’t purchased them yet, but you feel, on a deep level, like you should.
You give up on your hair and your appearance and walk back to your bedroom, and your heart immediately launches out of your chest because Hi! There’s your boyfriend, standing in your room, holding the phone that Kim gave you.
“Um, hi?” you say, your voice more meek and unsure-sounding than you intended.
Your boyfriend looks at you, and those are not his eyes. “We need to talk,” he says, and that is not his voice.
“Okay,” you say, and you sit on the edge of the bed, waiting. You are in trouble. You are in So. Much. Trouble.
“Where did you get this?” he asks simply, coldly.
You do not 100 percent want to answer this question, but you sense this is kind of an important crossroads in your relationship.
“What are you doing here?” you ask.
“I asked you where you got this.”
“Why are you going through my stuff?”
You can see the thing fluttering beneath his jawline. “I came home to surprise you and saw you were in the shower, so I came in here to wait, and I saw this”—he holds the phone out, directly in front of your face—“on the floor, so I picked it up to see what it was, and now I have to ask: Where did you get this?”
You can feel every cell in your body vibrating. What is this conversation? What does it mean? You mentally scan through twenty different lies you could offer him, but they all sound terrible. And also: he’s your boyfriend. Since when do you lie to him?
“It’s from work,” you say.
“You found it at work? When? Or someone gave it to you at work? Who?” This isn’t a conversation. This is an interrogation.
“Kind of. Not exactly.”
“This is a phone with a front-facing camera. A front-facing camera like the ones used for selfies! Do you even know how illegal this is? If someone gave this to you, I need to alert my team. I need to bring them in immediately.”
“I—” you start to say, then stop, unsure how to proceed, really just wanting this conversation to be over. Wanting him out of your room. Wanting to fast-forward past the next big chunk of your life. You’d been in such a good mood when you decrypted that file, and now you feel like scum, like the lowest, most terrible person on the planet. Why can’t you just tell him where you got the phone?
“I wasn’t doing anything with the phone,” you say, trying to sound reassuring. “I mean, it’s not connected to the internet or anything.”
“That’s not the point. The point is there are laws, laws I have sworn to uphold. And I find out my girlfriend, right under my nose, has been—”
“I’m sorry!” you say. “I’m sorry, okay? I just brought it home yesterday. I’ll take it back tonight, and you won’t see it ever again. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
No lies so far, yay, you.
“What were you thinking?” he presses.
“I just . . . it was a project I was doing at work. I found the parts and just started messing around with them.”
Well, so much for that; those are definitely lies, and you are definitely terrible.
Your boyfriend is quiet, staring at you, and you finally meet his eyes. They reflect nothing back—no emotion, no love, no patience. This is awful. He must hate you so much right now. Why are you putting him through this?
“You made this,” he says.
You nod.
“You?” he asks, for confirmation.
“Wait, are you saying you don’t believe I made it?” Your voice is rising; you start to feel yourself getting defensive. Okay, technically you didn’t make it, and it would never have occurred to you to make it, but is it beyond all reason or possibility that you could have? What kind of question is that for him to ask, anyway?
“What is wrong with you?” your boyfriend asks. “Why are you doing this to me?”
“Doing what to you? You don’t believe I could make this? I used to be pretty great at electronics, you know. It’s how we met.”
Your boyfriend had been one of the viewers #actually-ing you in the comments. Not one of the really nasty ones, of course. He didn’t say you were ugly or a slut or anything like that. He just suggested that you were misinformed about the usefulness of modding the firmware on your router. And it was obnoxious, but it was so comparatively less obnoxious than the comments you typically received that you responded and engaged with him. It led to a thread that suggested he was at least communicating with you in a way that took you kind of seriously. And that had led to emailing, and that had led to meeting up IRL, and that had led to the entire rest of your life up to this point.
Your boyfriend looks confused, conflicted, frustrated. You know you’ve backed him into a corner now. “It’s not that I don’t think you could have hacked this phone,” he says. “It’s just, it’s just—” His voice starts to quaver. There are almost tears in his eyes.
What is going on?
“Why do you suddenly feel the need to take selfies?” he asks. “Don’t you like the pictures I take of us?”
He’s shaking, dropping the phone down by his side, looking off at the wall. Oh. OH. This is about his hurt feelings. Tha
t’s different. That’s easy to fix.
“Oh, sweetie,” you say, rushing to him and wrapping your arms around him. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. I love the photographs you take of us. I love being in your pictures. I love all the pictures of us. You do a GREAT job. Better than any pictures I could ever take of myself. I don’t need to take selfies, I promise.”
He’s wiping the tears from his eyes. “I always try to take at least one good picture of us on every date,” he offers quietly.
“Yes, you do. And I love them,” you say. You’re holding his face in your hands. “I’m so sorry. I was just messing around at work, and I didn’t think about how it would affect you. The pictures you take of me are more than enough for me. You don’t need to be worried, okay? I’ll take the phone apart and put everything back at work. No one will ever know, I promise.”
He nods, sniffling, drying his eyes.
“Okay? Are we okay? I’m sorry. I’m so so so so sorry.” You lean up to kiss his cheek. He’s still not looking at you.
“I have to get to work,” you say. “Do you want to drive me? So we can get a little more time to hang out? I like when you drive me places.” You move away and start to get ready. You take the phone out of his hands and feel his eyes on you as you bend, as casually and meaninglessly as possible, to throw it into your backpack.
“Okay,” he says. “Sure.” There’s something going on behind his eyes. He’s still so far away. You feel like your love is a chain, you feel like he’s hanging off a tall bridge from the end of your love, and you have to haul that love, hand over hand, all the way up, to bring him back to the bridge, to reality, to life, to you. It’s delicate work—at any minute the love could slip from your hands and he’ll fall back down, and you’ll have to begin the work of pulling him up again. It’s exhausting.
“I need to finish getting dressed and then we’ll go, okay?”
You pick up your clothes and turn away, pausing briefly as you think of the phone lying in your bag on your bed. Part of you wishes there was a way to take the bag and walk away, and then just keep on walking, forever. But that’s not realistic. There is no part of you that’s capable of something like that.
HOURS LATER, it’s well into your work shift and there is another balding male customer yelling at you about something. You’re not really paying attention. You’re still thinking about your interaction with your boyfriend earlier and feeling weird about how you left things. He drove you to work and you apologized a million more times, and you asked for more details about his day, trying to be very interested and supportive, but it didn’t help. You felt like his mind was still elsewhere.
You asked if you could hang out later and talk after work, and he said he had a project that was probably going to keep him busy. He looked at you and you had no earthly idea what was going on behind his eyes. But you knew that it was your fault. You knew you should just tell him. About Kim, about the phone, the file, everything. Why not just come clean and start again? Really do the work of proving your devotion to him.
On the other hand, it was all going to be over soon anyway, so why even make a big deal about it? Kim would sneak back in after your shift, you would give her the phone and the information, and she would sneak back off to her life of illegal selfies, while you returned to your life of . . . whatever it was. To this. To getting yelled at by some customer because he didn’t like your tone.
You stand there and let the customer’s anger wash over you. You are a rock. His anger is a stream, traveling swiftly around you. Only wearing away at you on the smallest, most microscopic level. It would take years of this man yelling at you before it caused any visible damage. You have built up a thick, callused layer of emotional skin over the years of being yelled at IRL and on the internet. There is no way for you to exist, either corporeally or electronically, without being a vessel into which people can empty their anger.
Yes, okay, you are saying to the angry man, who hasn’t stopped to take a breath in as long as you could remember. You nod. Encouraging him. Letting him know that you are sympathetic, which you aren’t, and actively listening, which you aren’t.
It isn’t as though this is going to go on forever. The customer yelling, sure, he’ll lose focus and end the discussion and decide to be mad at someone else eventually? Hopefully? Although some days there seemed to be no bottom to the well of male anger. But also this, your job at Best Buy. Eventually something will happen. Maybe you’ll find another job? Or maybe when you marry your boyfriend you’ll have him and the house and the kids to focus on. That would save you from this job, anyway. Kind of a decent escape plan. Or is it? Is that your plan? Work at Best Buy until you have to get married and pregnant? Why does it all seem so inevitable? It shouldn’t feel inevitable, right? It should feel like there’s some kind of choice involved. But maybe that’s what love really is: not seeing any choices. Seeing only one way forward for your entire life.
Now the customer is demanding to speak to your manager. Which is excellent.
“Okay, I’ll get my manager—wait right here,” you say, and walk away.
You do a slow loop around the perimeter of the store, not looking for your manager but not not looking for him either. Nothing is going to help; this man is always going to be mad at you, and his anger will always be directed at you, and there is nothing you could have done to prevent it except not have been born. It’s dark out, at least, so soon the store will be closing and the angry man will have to leave. Although the store seems a little busier than it normally does this time of night. Lots of men kind of standing and hovering around, idly looking at video games or toner cartridges or GPS systems. Their glances shifting from one to another and then back to whatever. At least none of them seems interested in yelling at you. Small favors.
You decide to go back into the storeroom and hide until the angry customer is gone. As you’re leaving the showroom floor and turning down the hallway that leads to the storeroom, someone comes up behind you, uncomfortably close. You turn and try to distance yourself from them but they’re practically on top of you. They’re dressed all in black, hooded, and with a scarf obscuring their face.
“Um, excuse me, it’s employees only back here,” you say. The person lifts their hood and pulls their scarf down and you see, peeking out at you, the wickedly conspiratorial smile of Kim Kardashian.
“Kim!” you practically shout as Kim’s gloved hand shoots up to cover your mouth. You are weirdly delighted to see her. She nods and pushes you farther away from the showroom, following close behind, her hand on your lower back, guiding you where she wants you to go, but gently, affectionately, not aggressively.
She stops you behind the office, out of view of the showroom.
“Kim! What the heck are you doing here?” you ask. “I thought you were coming by later.”
“Sneaking in after hours is hard, and we had that close call with the security guard. I like to change up my schedule and try to never do the same thing two days in a row. And I’m kind of worried about my timeline, so I thought I would try to catch you early. But now I’m kind of regretting the decision—is it always this busy in the store this late?”
You frown. “No! It’s weird. Definitely more crowded than normal.”
Kim looks away, chewing over something mentally. You just keep staring at her because, ugh, Kim Kardashian. For the first time since this morning, you feel happy and kind of relaxed, which is weird and makes no sense, except this very famous and notorious illegal celebrity has come to visit you at work twice in two days? And it all feels kind of magical? She smells amazing, btw.
“Did you have a chance to look at that file?” she asks.
You nod. “Yup. It was definitely an encrypted file. It was a location and a time. It didn’t turn out to be super difficult to crack the encryption; it was just having the phone in general that was the problem.”
Kim hesitates and then smiles quickly, knowingly. “Why’s that? Were you tempted to
take a selfie?”
“No, no, not really. Just that my boyfriend caught me with the phone, and it was a whole thing.”
Kim makes a sympathetic face. “Sorry. Boyfriends are trash; they don’t know anything.”
“Well, mine kinda does. He’s on the task force.”
All light and joy immediately disappear from Kim’s face, and it’s kind of heartbreaking for you. “Wait, what? The task force that’s looking for me?”
You nod.
Kim’s eyes glint like light reflected off knives as she turns to look back to the store, worrying at an idea. “You said there aren’t normally this many people in the store this late.”
“No. Why? Is that important?”
“What would you say is the average number for this hour?”
“I don’t know, like three or four?”
“I counted fifteen men. Is that about what you counted?”
You realize that the showroom has become oddly quiet. Normally, even back here, you can hear all kinds of blooping and bleeping and yelling, the low murmur of people trying to assuage their vague unhappiness with rampant consumerism. But now there’s suddenly nothing. Just quiet.
“Um. I didn’t count the men. I spend my life trying not to think about them more than I have to.”
“They hate that,” Kim murmurs. She pulls her bulky jacket off, revealing a skintight black bodysuit. It looks like it’s been molded to fit her perfectly weight-trained hourglass shape. “We’re in trouble,” she says as she takes out a phone and begins swiping. She’s suddenly all business, highly focused. “Do you still have the phone I gave you?”