Antisocial

by Jillian Blake

  Oh God. No. What was Rad thinking?

  It’s the most earnest thing Rad has ever said in her life. She’s obviously just so, so desperate. But using Timmy as her voice?

  I look over and see Haven with his face in his palm.

  “Now that was an honest, if slightly syrupy, gesture, I think we’ll all agree,” Timmy says. “There is a teachable moment to be—” But Timmy stops. “Hang on—in just this second, it looks like we may have a response already! From Nikki Davis, whose story you’re all perhaps a little too familiar with!”

  I cringe.

  “Fuck you,” it begins, “you fucking bitch.” Timmy pauses now. “Actually, people, that appears to be all of it.”

  The thought then crosses my mind…I bet Timmy’s the one who called in the threat, to retaliate for his suspension! Or to give himself a captive audience.

  He continues with the conviction of the reborn. “What we’re seeing is that a strong dose of the truth is what we all need,” Timmy says. “Which is a perfect segue to my next guest. Aiden ‘Mac’ McDonald. Mac’s account on the gay hookup site Grindr was leaked in the last round. That he has an account was, of course, news to his girlfriend, Alexis Bowman. But today, Mac has decided that, although painful, sunshine is sometimes the best disinfectant. So he’s agreed to tell us the names of some of the other gays longing to be free.”

  “This isn’t funny,” Mac says, joining in. “But I’ve come to think it’s important.”

  Holy crap. Are they doing what I think they’re doing?

  “Sounds like you’re ready to throw open those closet doors.”

  Suddenly, as if on cue, the doors of the library fly open. In come the police with their simultaneously adorable yet terrifying canine team, who do a quick sweep of the library. And on Timmy’s show, out the names get dragged.

  This is intense, to say the least.

  Sandy Gillis, a sophomore on the football team.

  Geoff Ames, a junior on the baseball team.

  Last but not least: Andrew Yang, a senior on the lacrosse team.

  ’Scuse me?

  Haven is furrowing his brow and staring at me.

  “Andrew?” I text him from across the room.

  Haven texts back:

  Don’t know what to think anymore. I could be gay. You could be a dude. Which would be fine. But, just saying, nothing would surprise me anymore.

  Andrew has always been a solo-YOLO-type guy. Avoids proms. Avoids dates. Avoids girls except for Rad…who he was supposedly sleeping with. Oh man, now I see: they used each other. Not as sex toys. As—what do you call it?—beards.

  I don’t care about the fact that Andrew’s gay—of course not; it’s the twenty-teens, get over it. But it makes me pretty sad for Andrew that he thought he had to keep it a secret from all of us now that the secret’s out there.

  I slam my eyes shut like a little kid trying to make everything disappear.

  Now Nichols is back on the speaker system.

  The sweep came up with nothing.

  The lockdown is over.

  —

  We find Andrew kicking the chain-link fence with the toe of his Converse. Good to know the more things change, the more he still wants to smoke weed in the same place. “Hey, dudes,” he says when he sees us.

  I feel my throat constrict when I see how bloodshot his eyes are. He’s been smoking, I’m sure, but I think he’s also been crying. I step forward and give him a quick hug. I breathe easier when he returns the embrace.

  After a few seconds, he gently pulls away and looks at us sadly. “It’s been a shit day, you know? I’m sorry I wasn’t the one to tell you guys. I wanted to, but it didn’t feel right to before I told my mom and dad, and there’s no way I was going to tell them. So…” He trails off. For several seconds he’s quiet, concentrating. Then he goes on, “I’m going to have to tell them now, though. Tonight, at the latest. If I don’t, they’ll either get it from the Net, or some friend of my mom’s will give her the news that her son’s a fag.”

  I wince when he uses that word. I can feel Haven beside me wince too.

  “Please don’t talk like that, Andrew,” Haven says. “Nobody cares that you’re gay. At least, nobody who really matters.”

  Andrew lets out a joyless laugh. “Except my parents.”

  “We could go with you when you tell them. Safety in numbers?”

  Andrew shakes his head. “Thanks, but I’ve got to do this one alone. I mean, everybody’s got their own shit to deal with these days. Me, Nikki, now Jethro.”

  “You heard from him?” I squeal.

  “Twenty minutes ago.”

  My heart feels like it’s going to thump out of my chest. “Jesus, what did he say?”

  Andrew shrugs. “It was from a random number, probably a burner. Said he’s so sorry this is happening to me. To stay strong. I texted back, saying I know he didn’t do the leaks, that we could fight what people are saying about him.”

  “Did he respond?” I ask.

  Andrew looks down, then up again. “The crazy thing is, he said he’s leaving in twenty-four hours. Probably never coming back.”

  “C’mon,” Haven says, laughing darkly. “That seems a little dramatic. I mean, where’s he gonna go?”

  “He said everyone thinks he’s responsible. That he’s got no other choice.”

  My heart starts to race. I turn to Haven. “We have to find him.”

  Haven says to Andrew, “Dude, can you give me that burner number?”

  Once Andrew does, Haven gives him a hug. Not a weak man hug. A real hug—full contact, full body. A hug that delivers the message that he loves Andrew no matter what. I kiss Andrew’s cheek and squeeze his hand. He gives a smile and then crouches down, packing another bowl.

  “What are you gonna do?” Haven asks. “Do you want to come with us?”

  Andrew shakes his head. “I need to smoke this, then I need to tell my parents. Course, I was thinking about beating the shit out of someone on the way home.”

  Haven sniffs. “Who? Mac? For outing you?”

  “Nah,” Andrew says. “I was thinking Mattie Eizenberg. He has it coming, right? Plus, it just feels like a good story to tell my kids someday. Like, rather than the gay Asian dude getting beat up after being pushed out of the closet, he goes and lays a serious beat-down on some straight misogynist dude who messed with his friends.”

  My head is swirling. “Better in theory than in reality, probably. Don’t do anything you’ll regret,” I tell him. “Please.”

  “Good luck finding J,” he tells us, returning to his bowl. “And thanks.”

  Jethro lives with his mom in Columbia Heights, on a street that’s somewhere between okay and iffy. Their rental house is small and strangely bald-looking—there are no trees or bushes around it, and the front yard is more dirt than grass.

  Today his dead-end block looks even spookier than usual. The house is tagged from top to bottom. Words varying from hacker to fag to troll are graffitied across the door, the brick of the house, even the small, dilapidated porch. The lidless eyes of the windows have spiderwebs or are shattered entirely. The swing Jethro and I have sat on a thousand times—where we’ve debated everything from our favorite Grimes song to the worst Tarantino movie—is on the ground, the chain cut.

  We walk to the front, stepping over the overturned and broken outdoor furniture. “This is all my dad’s fault,” Haven says, surveying the damage. “What a dick.”

  Jethro hasn’t returned any of our texts on the burner number Andrew gave us. And Haven and I both know: Jethro’s one of the smartest people we know. If he doesn’t want to be found, he won’t be found. Not even by us.

  I press my face to the glass of one of the windows. The living room has an enormous television, a PlayStation, and two leather recliners, but also a dining table with a lilac tablecloth, packed bookshelves, and some cheery floral wallpaper. Decor that is a compromise between a mother and her son. Given what it looks like out here, it’s kind
of surprising that the living room looks exactly as I remember it.

  Haven’s eyes open wide, as if he just remembered something.

  He hurries to the edge of the yard and crouches down beside a small cast-iron turtle, then slides off the turtle’s shell and pulls out a key.

  —

  I haven’t been in Jethro’s bedroom since pre-Palmer times. Which is weird, since he and I have had sex in the meantime. It smells more like Jethro in here than even he does—a kind of magnified version of his soap and aftershave and something unnameable that makes my heart ache ever so slightly. The bed is messy; the shades are down. On the walls hanging in front of Haven and me: a poster for Mr. Robot in Chinese, Sleater-Kinney and Deerhunter vinyls slapped up with grip tape.

  “Maybe he went to his gram’s in New York,” Haven says.

  “I already tried calling her,” I say. “Unless she’s the best eighty-year-old liar in the world, she hasn’t seen Jethro since last Easter.”

  Now Haven holds up Jethro’s copy of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. “Cal Tech would probably still take him even if they thought he did this. MIT might not, but Cal Tech is more…forgiving. Maybe he finally manifested his destiny.”

  “Jethro said if he ever went to California, he’d take me with him.” I swallow the tiny knot in my throat.

  Haven shrugs. “You really think he’ll just leave?”

  “Wouldn’t you?” I ask, sifting through the papers Jethro’s left on his desk, searching for any clue about where he might have gone. An address, a number, anything.

  I freeze in place when I catch a glimpse of something sitting where his computer normally goes (it’s not here, of course, but this is the one clean area of the desk). On a small canvas is a half-finished oil painting of a Steinway piano turned inside out, strings popped and keys strewn across a jazz-club floor.

  I blink. I know that painting well. I hated it so much that I threw it away even after it had crossed the Rubicon—the point of no return—that Mr. Touhey always talks about. You have to finish what you’ve started once you’ve invested more than forty hours in it—that’s his rule. A week’s work. But in this case, I ignored Touhey’s rule. Jethro probably rescued it from the trash. That must have been a year ago, at least. Maybe he thought I would change my mind someday. That I would finish it for him.

  “I could DM some of his camp friends,” Haven says. “See if they’ve heard anything. I think I might follow a couple of them on Instagram.”

  “Why not,” I tell him. Haven pulls out his phone, starts typing and swiping furiously. I can’t look at my piano anymore, so I plop down on the bed, take in the room one last time. Up until a few months ago, this room was like a home away from home. How many times have I sat right here, listening to Jethro tell me about the virtues of slasher films, or the importance of goats to people in developing countries, or all the reasons why applied math is better than theoretical?

  Applied math.

  Something clicks in my mind. In one corner of Jethro’s room, all his awards and trophies have been stuffed and piled up. But in Jethro’s case they aren’t track medals or soccer trophies. They’re from science fairs and Odyssey of the Mind and It’s Academic. I hop back up from the bed and start looking through them. There’s one in particular I want to find. I’ve seen it once or twice, when the sun hit the little pyramid at just the right angle.

  “This is from that nerd Super Bowl you two were part of, right?” I ask Haven once I’ve got it in my sweaty palm.

  “Nerd Super Bowl?” Haven shakes his head in disbelief. “Mathletes, Anna. The math olympiad. Only the most competitive calculus prize on this side of the Atlantic—”

  “Yeah, yeah, sorry,” I say, studying the plaque at the bottom. “Look, weren’t there a couple of seniors on the team with you? Other hackers?”

  “Garrett and Peter? I called them, looking for J, already.”

  WINNERS: GARRETT KEATING, PETER CERVIERI, JETHRO STEPHENS, HAVEN DODD

  “What did they say?”

  “That they hadn’t heard from him.”

  “Where are they?”

  “College,” Haven says. “Well, Peter’s already in a master’s program, actually, after only two years. They’re both at Johns Hopkins.”

  Johns Hopkins? Didn’t Jethro say he was in touch with someone there?

  Palming my keys, I move out into the hall. “What’s the prize for finding missing friends wanted by the police?”

  —

  According to the GPS on Haven’s phone, the drive was supposed to take us only an hour and fifteen minutes, but it takes us that long just to get up the Baltimore–Washington Parkway and into Baltimore. Jethro and I binge-watched The Wire over July Fourth weekend, and it’s the first time I’ve seen D.C.’s sister/rival city since. Jethro and Haven’s friends share an off-campus apartment near Johns Hopkins, and finally we make it to their neighborhood. Just row after row of brick townhouses. I wonder if this is what I should expect on the RISD campus.

  Haven presses the buzzer for, like, a minute. “These guys are nocturnal,” he says. “We need to get them out of their coffins.”

  “It’s five p.m.,” I say, wrinkling my nose.

  “Exactly.”

  After another minute, there’s the sound of feet clomping down steps, and then an irritated male voice saying, “Jesus, wait a second, wait a second. I’m coming!”

  I’m starting to feel the nerves that automatically crash down on me when I’m about to meet someone new. Next thing I know, the door’s thrown open by a tall, slightly overweight guy with thick, blue glasses, in a Shrek T-shirt. Headphones are dangling around his neck, heavy metal blasting out of them. Not too intimidating, anyhow.

  “G Moneypenny,” Haven says.

  “Haven!” Blue Glasses says with a grin.

  “Garrett, this is Anna,” Haven says.

  Garrett looks at me for a second, as if he’s trying to place my face. “Come on in. And sorry for the hostile greeting. I thought Pete had forgotten his keys again.”

  He leads us through a dark hallway into a kitchen area. It’s somewhere between boy dirty and boy filthy, the sink piled high with dishes, the microwave door thrown open, the insides splattered red, flies buzzing around a spot of what looks like dried maple syrup on the counter. In one corner is a life-size statue of Daisy Ridley as her Star Wars character, toting a badass fighting staff. On the fridge is a magnet that says THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE 127.0.0.1.

  Garrett tugs the refrigerator handle and then sticks his head inside. “Want OJ that may or may not have expired? Grape Crush that’s definitely gone flat?”

  “Um, Garrett,” I say awkwardly, dropping a paper-towel square on the seat of a chair before sitting on it, “we’re actually here to find Jethro.”

  Garrett stares into the fridge without looking back. “Jethro? I told Haven here we haven’t heard from him. Sorry. But tell J we said hey if you do.”

  “You haven’t heard from him?”

  “Nope.”

  I give Haven a look, but he just shrugs.

  I’m not giving up. Not on Jethro. Deep breath, then: “So, Jethro told me that he was gonna get you guys to help him find out who hacked our school’s system. That you guys were figuring out some algorithm or whatever.”

  “That’s not what an algorithm is.”

  “O-kay, can you not mansplain to me what an algorithm is? We’re here to find Jethro. That’s what’s important right now.”

  “Just told you,” Garrett says. “No idea where he is.” He closes the fridge and turns to Haven. “Can you hit her Off switch, dude?”

  I feel heated, like my face is flushed. I’m pissed. And sick of beating around the bush in this nerd bro’s gross kitchen. “You must know what’s going on at Prep, right?”

  Looking uncomfortable, he squares the THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE 127.0.0.1 magnet with his thumb. “Yeah, we saw. Who hasn’t?”

  “Then you know everyone thinks Jethro’s behind the leaks, right?” I sa
y. “They think he intentionally posted our friends’ and everyone else’s stuff, despite the fact that he would never do anything remotely like that. Now he’s gonna run, and everyone who thinks he did it will have all the proof they need. He’ll lose everything he’s worked for. He’ll lose his place at MIT.” I’m pacing around the middle of the kitchen now, practically panting. I feel my eyes get wet just from saying those words out loud. “So if you have any idea where he is, maybe you should be a real friend to him and tell us so we can get him to put an end to all this.”

  Garrett glances over at Haven. “Like I said, would love to help. Unfortunately, Jethro hasn’t been here in months, and I have some coding to get to. Maybe while I’m at it, I’ll build, like, a really cool algorithm.”

  Haven looks at him seriously. “Garrett, c’mon, we’re trying to help Jethro.”

  “Look, dude,” he says, nodding toward the front door. “Nothing else to see here. Wish there was something else I could do.”

  Droopy-shouldered and defeated, Haven and I make our way back to the car.

  I drop into the driver’s seat, and my head sags onto the steering wheel. The leather feels cool against my forehead.

  I can’t really think of where to go next. Jethro has a much older half sister in Chicago, but they’re not close. Could he have gone there already?

  I feel so helpless.

  “Yo,” I hear Haven say. He points through the windshield.

  And there stands Jethro in the doorway to the apartment. He must have been hiding from us somewhere in the back. Now he’s on the porch.

  “What!” I shriek. “Is he kidding?”

  I jump out of the car and run to him. After this wild-goose chase of a day, I almost expect him to run when he sees us. But he’s still. His eyes are red, and he looks exhausted. I fling my arms around him.

  I pull away from our embrace so I can see his face. “Tell me you’re okay,” I say.

  “I’m okay.”

  “We were so worried. God, I was so worried!” I’m rambling now, words piling out. “Please, come home with us. We’ll get it all figured out, I promise.”