“Tom, just call the police—”
Holding the gun now, I turn toward the closed bedroom door.
“Anything,” repeats the Taylors’ dachshund.
Mrs. Taylor screams as Mr. Taylor throws open the bedroom door and, bat raised, comes running in. I shoot him in the face. The gun is deafening. Blood and brains spatter the wall. Mrs. Taylor screams again. And then with a shock, she realizes it’s me.
“Billy?” she says.
I blow Mrs. Taylor away.
Of course, this doesn’t happen. This is a youthful imagination twisted and distorted by the soulless idiocy that is movies and television.
The Taylors’ dachshund sighs with impatience. “With no place to run and no place to hide,” it says, “an animal freezes and hopes for the best.”
I’m just standing there when Mr. Taylor opens the door, charges in and, screaming, brains me with the baseball bat. I hit the floor like a sack of grain. I lie there. I can feel blood beginning to pool beneath my head. I’m vaguely aware of Mr. and Mrs. Taylor looking down at me.
“Billy?” says Mrs. Taylor.
Fortunately another option presented itself.
“Tom!” screams a terrified Mrs. Taylor as Mr. Taylor comes rushing in with nothing in his hands. He stops in surprise. Mrs. Taylor sticks her head into the room, behind him.
I’m holding the dachshund in my arms. The gun is in the bureau drawer. I’m trying to look as if I have no idea what’s going on.
“Billy?” says Mrs. Taylor.
“Hi. You’re home,” I say. “I came over to feed, y’know, the dog?”
Twenty minutes later, I’m back at my house, sitting at the kitchen table, a bowl of cold cereal in front of me. Far from being suspicious, the Taylors have been ridiculously grateful. Mr. Taylor has even given me twenty bucks “to say thanks.” I should probably have told him that there was a time when neighbors did things for one another for free, that it never occurred to them that they were going to get rewarded for helping out, that everyone was in it together and that they had to be to survive. But frankly, I wasn’t around at that time so I took the money.
“Billy?”
Somewhere someone is talking.
“Billy!”
I look up. The someone is Mom.
“Huh?” I say.
“I said, did you have a good time last night?”
For a moment I think she’s talking about the Taylors.
“What do you mean?”
“Gretchen,” Mom says. “Did you have a nice time with Gretchen?”
Oh.
“It was okay,” I say. “We went to the movies.”
“Has she changed much?” says Mom.
“She’s older,” I say.
“Well, I know that,” says Mom.
“She’s still nice,” I say.
“I’m sure she’s lovely,” Mom says.
Suddenly, and I’m not sure she even knows it, Mom looks sad and faraway. It suddenly makes me wonder if she has dreams of Dorie too. Mom catches herself. She tries to make herself look happy. She’s not as good at it as I am.
“You’ll have to have her come over sometime.”
“Sure,” I say.
I finish my cereal, hardly tasting. I’m thinking about last night. I’m thinking about this morning. I’m thinking I’m not sure if there is a word that adequately describes what sleep is to an insomniac. Release? Relief? Liberation? Mostly I’m thinking it might be time to go a little outlaw.
23
When Gretchen comes out of her first period class, I pretend I’m not there waiting for her. I just happen to be there as if studying strange linoleum is something I do on a daily if not hourly basis. Gretchen, of course, is talking to other girls. Girls always are talking to other girls. When she sees me, though, Gretchen stops and comes right over. She seems happy to see me. Which is pretty great because frankly I’m so glad to see her it’s all I can do not to roll over on my back and pee on my belly like the Taylors’ dachshund.
“Hey,” Gretchen says.
“Hey.”
We’re both scintillating conversationalists.
“I thought you were going to call.”
“You know how I don’t have a driver’s license?” I say. “Well, I don’t have a phone either.”
“Maybe you ought to do something about that,” says Gretchen. Which is also pretty great because what she’s saying is if I had a phone and I called her, yes, she’d answer every time.
I’m starting to feel a little calmer.
“I thought I could walk with you to class or something,” I say. Because we’re just standing there.
“Okay,” Gretchen says, and we turn and walk.
All of about twenty-five feet.
“Well, here we are,” says Gretchen, stopping.
“Whoa. Pretty convenient,” I say. Which it is but not necessarily for me. We stand there for a moment, not really looking at one another. It feels like everyone who passes is staring at us. It’s not a feeling I’m entirely crazy about.
“I was thinking we could hang out together again,” I say. Actually I don’t say it, I just sort of breathlessly blurt it. “Iwasthinkingwecouldhangouttogetheragain.”
“I’d love to,” says Gretchen. Which, when you get right down to it, is really the perfect thing to say.
“What do you like to do?” I say.
“Anything,” Gretchen says.
“That makes it easy.” Gretchen giggles and all of a sudden I’m feeling sort of confident. It’s a nice feeling and I’m almost getting ready to trust nice feelings. But then it all goes very bad.
“Hey! Hey, Quinn! Yo! G. Quinn!”
Gretchen and I both turn. Across the hall, John Montebello and his jock posse are passing, pushing through the crush like a herd of muscle-bound primates. Montebello, looking enormously entertained, is leering at us.
Correction. At me.
“Careful, it might be contagious!”
John Montebello twists his face and puffs out his right cheek. He begins to walk like a zombie as if his head weighs too much for his body to carry. His buddies, as usual, find him hysterical.
Har-har! Har-de-har-har!
The port-wine hemangioma on my face flares so hot my eyes seem to melt. The hallway is suddenly a blur and my ears are filled with laughter and noises that sound like static. “Leave him alone,” a voice somewhere says. I turn and walk. There are people coming at me as if through a fish-eye lens. I have to push around their wide, distorted bodies and between their bulging faces. I have to force myself not to run. When someone grabs at my shoulder, I spin, raising a fist, ready to swing.
Gretchen flinches and backs away a step. The lens snaps back to normal. I can hear again. I drop my hands.
“Are you okay?” Gretchen asks. She’s breathing hard. She sounds concerned. It might have been her voice I heard.
“Fine,” I say. “Why?” My voice is under control. I’m glad it is. “I gotta get to class, is all.”
“We are going to do something, right?”
“Yeah. Sure. We’ll figure it out.”
“Okay.” Gretchen seems to be waiting for me to say something else but I don’t.
“Well…” she finally says, “okay, see you.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Great.”
Gretchen turns and walks toward her classroom. It occurs to me she might look back and so I spin away and move down the hall. I go to the boy’s lavatory on the other side of the school. I go into a toilet stall and lock the door behind me. I don’t come out until sometime after lunch.
I solidify my plans.
24
Ephraim’s bedroom is a filthy mess of comic books, discarded clothes, DVDs, video game posters, potato chip bags, soda cans, and on a table against the wall, computers in various stages of disrepair. The smell of sweat, mold, unwashed sheets, and pimple cream is even worse.
On Ephraim’s Dumpster of a worktable is a CyberPower PC Black Pearl computer which co
mes with two graphic cards; a six core, 12thread chip processor; six gigabytes of RAM; and an 80GB memory board. All told, it costs over four thousand bucks and is the only clean-looking thing in the room.
I’ve given Ephraim a copy of the local newspaper and explained to him what I want him to do. Thrilled to be of use, Ephraim gets right to work.
Fact.
The first invented computer was called an automatic sequence calculator. It was fifty feet long. It weighed five tons. In 1969, UCLA and Stanford linked computers, creating the first information highway. Almost immediately the first hackers appeared at MIT.
Ephraim is what’s known as a green hat. This means he sits in the middle of the modern hacking community somewhere between the black hats who are cybercriminals searching for flaws, glitches, and zero-day vulnerabilities in software and computer networks, and the white hats who are the so-called security experts trying to stop them. It’s yet to be determined which direction Ephraim will go. Either way he’s going to make a lot of money. United States of Nerd, on the planet Geek.
Sidebar.
Computer engineers and futurists now predict that the event known as the singularity will happen around the year 2036. This is the moment when the intelligence of a single computer will surpass the collective knowledge of all of mankind. It is seen as an event horizon, which means no one has any real idea what will happen after. It could be Terminator Time. Rise of the Machines. Or it could be the dawning of a brand-new age. As the computers continue to get smarter and smarter, in order to be compatible with them, mankind will choose to merge with them. We’ll insert little pea-sized computers into our brains and microscopic machines into our bloodstream to repair our bodies and fight disease. Deus ex machina. God from a machine. We will know everything. We will feel nothing.
Just another thing to look forward to.
The Singularity, of course, is contingent on whether or not the computers don’t wake up, take a pixilated look around, and quickly self-destruct in mass horror.
I’m sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at a movie poster of the naked Queen of Sparta telling me I will not enjoy this, when Ephraim slams the table in excitement. “Backdoor! I’m in!” he says. He spits the air in disgust. “Puh! Their security isn’t even security.” He’s all smiles. It’s taken him all of about a minute and a half. “So what’ll it be? Names, addresses, account status? You want it, we got it.”
Thirty minutes later sirens are screaming as a fire engine descends on a home one hundred yards up the street from the Landgraf house. Police cars and home security vehicles already line the curb. An hysterical Mexican maid is trying to explain herself to a crowd of distrustful cops.
“No ladrones! No es un fuego! No fire! La alarma no funciona! Crazy—loca!”
Ephraim and I are sitting on the stone wall in front of his driveway watching. Call it a trial run. To prove he can do it, Ephraim has hacked into his neighbor’s home security company’s database. From there he’s burrowed his way into the neighbor’s security system where he’s activated every alarm in the house. Even I have to admit the results have been both educational and entertaining.
“Told you,” says Ephraim, proud of himself.
I’m equally proud of him and have no reason to hide it. I hold out my hand, palm up and open.
“This is between you and me,” I say.
Looking excited beyond words, Ephraim taps my open palm with his fist.
“Totally.”
25
“I’m goeing 2.”
It’s written in bold letters on the page of an open spiral notebook.
It’s mid-week, late morning, third period English, and Twom, Ephraim, and I are sitting at desks in the back of the classroom. In the front of the room the teacher, Mrs. Soriano, she of the Brillo-pad hair and the hips like a yardstick, is lecturing on the subject of Beowulf.
Point of reference.
Beowulf is an epic poem that was written on something other than paper sometime around the eighth century. It is considered one of the most important works of Anglo-Saxon literature and is, needless to say, even more brain paralyzing and irrelevant than Hammurabi.
“Grendel isn’t just the enemy, he’s a personification of evil,” Mrs. Soriano says. “He’s a fiend out of hell, lusting for flesh, working evil in the world.” Mrs. Soriano isn’t so much talking to the class as she is breathlessly talking to herself. Her eyes are glassy and she keeps licking her lips. It’s like she’d like to have sex with Grendel. Or maybe Beowulf. Or maybe a threesome with both.
I turn to a fresh, clean, lined page in the spiral notebook, scribble a message and show it to Ephraim.
“You suck, Ephraim.” I underline “suck.” I am truly pissed. Ephraim looks away, guilty. He should be.
“Beowulf can be seen as a naked battle for not just the flesh but the soul of the world.” In the large, color illustration on the whiteboard, Grendel appears to have a huge penis and a port-wine hemangioma on his face.
“I thoud we wer bruthers, Billy,” Twom writes in the notebook.
“We are,” I write back.
“R we?” writes Twom. “R we reely? Cuse when yu keep me in the dark, yu miht as well b lying to me. An bros do not ly.”
It suddenly seems obvious that text messaging was invented by people with learning disabilities.
“In Beowulf, good is not just the opposite of evil,” says Mrs. Soriano. “Good is the avenger of evil done to us in the past.”
“I em in,” writes Twom.
“No way,” I write.
“If he goes, I do too,” writes Ephraim. The brain-dead idiot has opened his own notebook. Unlike Twom’s handwriting, which is heavy and clear, Ephraim’s scrawl is just about illegible.
“No,” I write. “This is my gig.” I underline “my.”
“ARS,” writes Twom. He capitalizes and underlines “ars.”
“EAT ME.” I capitalize, underline, and italicize “eat me.”
Twom and Ephraim share a look. Twom nods to Ephraim as if to say, Go ahead.
“… you need my help to do this,” writes Ephraim. He hesitates and then writes the rest of it out fast, as if afraid not to. “Unless we can come … I won’t.” He looks to Twom for approval. Twom nods again. I am truly disgusted. This is so obviously a setup.
“Then don’t!”
I immediately realize I’ve sort of blurted this out loud by mistake. It’s an appalling loss of control.
“Excuse me! Is there a problem back there?” says Mrs. Soriano. The aggrieved look on her face says that Grendel and Beowulf have pulled out and fled the bed. She’s obviously not happy about it.
“No,” I say. “We’re just comparing notes.”
“Unferth!” hisses Mrs. Soriano. “Unferth is the Danish warrior who is unwilling to engage evil, thus proving himself inferior to Beowulf!”
When I look back down at my desk. Twom’s—or is it Beowulf’s?—notebook is back in front of me.
“We R yr whole in th wall gang.”
I don’t know whether to laugh, scream, or cry. Probably Unferth didn’t either. Twom just beams at me, happy as a clam in six feet of water.
I pick up my pen. “Assholes in the wall gang,” I write. I close the notebook.
Really, if there was good in the world, it would avenge the evil of people never shutting up, in person or in print.
26
“Count me in,” says Deliza.
It’s several days later between classes, and through some mysterious but undoubtedly fevered alchemy, Twom and Deliza are an unembarrassed couple now, cruising the halls together, joined at the hip. Grief-stricken, the fat girl, Ophelia, has taken to a nunnery.
“Forget it!” I say. “The whole thing’s off.”
I can’t stand it. Right at the moment, I can’t stand them. I turn and start walking. Of course, they follow me.
“Come on, dude,” says Twom, “what’s one more?”
I shouldn’t respond but I do. I should keep on
going right to class but I don’t. I turn and face them.
“How about five more?” I say. “How about a hundred more? We’ll have a party! Invite a cast of thousands! Invite the whole world.” Even though I’m practically spitting in his face, Twom doesn’t seem remotely perturbed or impressed. I suppose this is to be expected from someone who’s used to being arrested.
“Tell me she can keep her mouth shut,” I say, gesturing at Deliza. “Tell me. No. Don’t bother.” I turn to Deliza. “Because you can’t!”
Deliza is wearing a sleeveless white top with thin, little lacy straps over her shoulders. She’s wearing frayed, cutoff shorts that barely cover the bottom of her butt. Twom has told me Deliza never wears underwear. Along with the shorts, it’s an unfair advantage.
“I don’t go,” she says, “I tell everybody what you’re doing. And if you don’t go, I tell everybody you planned to.” She smiles pleasantly as if what she’s just said remotely makes sense.
“She will, dude,” Twom says, loving every minute of it. He begins to chant like a dimwit at a basketball game.
“Bill-lee, Bill-lee, Bill-lee, Bill-lee—”
Deliza joins in. Her voice is low and seductive. “Oh, take me, Billy. Ooh, Billy, take me, big boy.” She reaches under my chin and gently rubs her fingers up and down my throat, as if she’s jerking off my trachea. People are looking. People will look at anything. State of the Union addresses. Nervous breakdowns. Guys ejaculating through the top of their heads.
Fact.
Peer pressure is when friends attempt to influence how you think or act. When dealing with peer pressure it is important to analyze the situation, consider the consequences, make a rational decision, and then voice that decision.
“NO WAY!”
Sidebar.
The problem is you have to follow through.
27
It’s eleven-thirty at night when we come over the wall into the Aavetzes’ backyard.
All is going according to plan.
It has taken Ephraim about two seconds to confirm that newspapers keep their subscribers on an automated database. Unlike the Taylors, most people who go out of town put a hold on their paper over the phone or the Net. The hold is kept on record. Stop date. Start date.
The Tragic Age Page 7