by Danny Tobey
“We’re very interested in you, Charlie. Please understand, this is no guarantee of admission. There’s a long process, and your grades will play a role, as will your SAT score, your AP scores, your extracurricular activities. We’ll be particularly interested in how your senior year plays out, given the bumps in the road you’ve experienced. You’re probably too late for early admissions, but you’re right on time for regular rolling applications.”
The man paused, took stock of the room, reset himself.
“The purpose of this meeting, Charlie, is to let you know that Harvard isn’t about one thing. We don’t consider just one dimension of a person. We like to say we’re looking for well-rounded students or well-lopsided students. And really, there are so many smart applicants with good scores—I like to say it’s a good thing I don’t have to apply now—so we’re really looking for something more. Call it character, if you want, or life experience. It’s diversity, actually. A diversity of viewpoints, of backgrounds. You have that, Charlie. You’ve seen things most students your age can’t understand. I understand you like computers.”
Charlie almost laughed out loud. “I do.”
“You program?”
“Yes. C++, Python, Java, PHP.”
“Whoa, you’re ahead of me.” The man smiled not unkindly. “You know Mark Zuckerberg went to Harvard.”
“Before he dropped out.”
“Yes. Same with Bill Gates. We have a quite a good track record for our dropouts. Our graduates do okay, too.”
Charlie nodded.
“I heard about the work you and your friends did in the Tech Lab here. There are a lot of vocational students who are learning important skills because of the technology you set up.”
Charlie felt the guilt of his fight with Vanhi. This was her dream, too. “We did it together. The five of us. My friend Vanhi—”
“You founded the club, no?”
“Sort of. But—”
“And the other things you’ve done. Your work to end truancy courts, freshman year. Impressive.”
“It didn’t work.”
“You hit the brick wall of bureaucracy. Not the school’s.” The man glanced back at Principal Morrissey and Mr. B. “They supported your efforts. But the district would rather keep giving tickets and making money. That won’t be the last time you hit a dead end. I hope you won’t stop trying. Did you know we offer a whole class at the Graduate School of Education on diversionary programs, like the one you proposed?”
“No.”
“Did you know more than eighty percent of our students are from public schools?”
“No.”
“You have a lot of supporters here. They’re not naïve, Charlie. They know you’ve hit a snag. They know you’ve taken it hard. But they see something in you. They wanted me to see it, too. I’m the regional liaison to the admissions office. I don’t say yes or no. I scout. I fill in the gaps in the paper admissions. What I want you to know, what I think you understand because you wanted to give truancy defendants a second chance before scarring their permanent records, is that nothing is set in stone. There has to be room for salvation. Otherwise, why would anyone change? So I guess my question to you, Charlie, is this: What do you want?”
Charlie glanced around the room. Vanhi was on his mind. His dad was on his mind—Arthur had picked up the pieces of his life and found something new. Couldn’t Charlie do the same? Wasn’t it time to stop punishing himself? He thought about his mother, watching from above, from a real heaven (I wish!) or a digital one. This was a portal in time suddenly open in front of him. He could step back through it and become the person he was. Or he could flail ahead as the person he’d become. He had to choose.
He didn’t have time to think. This was the fork in the road. He knew it wouldn’t come again. Charlie locked his eyes with the baby-faced man from Harvard and said with finality:
“I want this.”
60 VEXATION
Vanhi ran from the Tech Lab to the darkest corner of the library, away from Kenny, away from any prying eyes. She knew she didn’t have much time.
Charlie would meet the man from Harvard. They would love him of course. Why not? She did. And how many kids would Harvard take from one middling public school in Texas?
She’d never had a class with Mr. B. He didn’t know her from Adam. He’d never give her the leg up he just gave Charlie. No essay, no matter how grand, would save her. She had to erase that D once and for all, and only the Game could do that.
Charlie had let his dad accept the restaurant, knowing full well it probably meant the prior owner’s downfall, and he’d accepted the Game’s gifts to him, too—the posters, and thus the recruiter—all while playing the saint and claiming to have quit the Game. What bullshit. She saw the beauty of the Game’s offer now: Charlie had chosen the Game’s gifts over her, but she was the real player, the nonquitter, so it gave her the trump card, the chance to choose the Game’s gifts right back over him. The vicious circle was as appropriate as it was bleak.
She put on her Aziteks and logged back in.
The Harvard system was right where she’d left it. Charlie’s application and her own, in flux. He would never know. When the rejection came back, no one would know why. No one ever understood why one person got in and another didn’t.
The word SUBMIT was still flashing at the bottom of the screen.
She could feel someone watching her from behind.
She turned and saw the figure floating there. Even as a bright young skeptic, she could appreciate the beauty of Lord Krishna’s fresh face, his blue skin, the luminous nails on his toes and fingers glowing like moons. She heard his words from the Bhagavad Gita, but his lips didn’t move as he stared at her: Gird up thy loins and conquer. Subdue thy foes and enjoy the kingdom in prosperity. I have already doomed them. Be thou my instrument.
His eyes twinkled as he split into his trinity: Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, Shiva the destroyer. Vanhi understood. Creation is just destruction. Destruction is just creation.
Death makes way for life.
One last, desperate time, she went back to Google and looked for anything, any sort of trouble, on Tremont Street.
Still nothing. No house gone up in flames. She had just delivered one more package in the Game’s postal system: another bass pedal, more Azitek glasses.
Without thinking, Vanhi hit SUBMIT. The Harvard screen closed instantly. She was locked out. No way back in.
It was a giddy moment. It was small, it was huge, it was terrible, it was nothing.
Whatever, Vanhi thought, trying to ignore the tidal wave of guilt coming at her, it’s done.
* * *
Alex wore sunglasses because his eyes were red with deep circles. He passed through the metal detectors into the school.
The halls were deserted. He went down to the Tech Lab, to the 3-D printer. It was empty during first period. He put on his Aziteks, and the printer smiled at him. It had a wide mouth and many teeth. Its casing was covered in gray scales and oozed with a black squiddy ink.
The Game had given him a simple instruction. It told him he could do this, one step at a time. He could always change his mind, at any point. And the direction now was simple.
Feed the beast.
Alex took the object from his bag, a Torah-like scroll the Game had given him. He could almost feel it in his hand, it had become so natural to operate in the AR world. The printer opened wider and licked its chapped, scaly lips. Alex put the Torah in, his hand disappearing for a moment into the machine, and it lapped the instructions up.
“How long?”
“As long as it takes,” the printer told him. “Come back later.”
“I’ll wait.”
He put his feet up in a chair and watched. The printer began working, building in three-dimensions, one layer at a time. Above, the loudspeaker crackled.
There was a mandatory assembly.
61 MALICIOUS AND NUTRITIOUS
The entire s
chool was summoned to a Must Attend assembly.
The auditorium was packed with nervous anticipation. There had been only one other unannounced Must Attend assembly in recent memory, after an unfortunate incident at a pep rally. The teachers milled now around the outer aisles, and the students were chattering away or buried nose down in their phones texting people across the room. The Turner Tiger—the stuffed papier-mâché one for pep rallies, not the bronze one mounted on a pedestal in the atrium—was tipped up against the wall, staring ferociously at the air-conditioning vents along the ceiling.
Charlie came in and saw Kenny across the room with a bunch of kids from his first-period calculus BC class. They met eyes. Vanhi was there, too, near the front, next to Stacy Shearman, whom Charlie thought Vanhi was pining for these days. He tried to will her to look at him, but she didn’t turn around. Peter was in the room, near the middle. Alex dragged himself in, looking whiplashed but curious.
Principal Morrissey took the stage and teachers began shushing fervently, as if their year-end bonuses depended on it. Mr. Sanders, the school safety officer, stood behind her. She cleared her throat into the microphone and waited for the room noise to reach a low simmer. She wore a serious brown suit and looked like she hadn’t slept all weekend.
“I am sure many of you saw the newspaper article portraying our school in a dim light,” she began, her eyes moving over the room but not looking at anyone in particular, “in regards to a certain graffiti that was plastered on our main façade last Friday. Certain claims were made about our school, about you, that are not reflective of the values we hold dear.” She eyed the audience. Half the students were back to their phones; the other half were staring as focusless as the Turner Tiger. Charlie and Kenny met eyes. Peter, too. Even Vanhi stole a glance back. No Vindicator had owned up to it to the rest of them, but they all wondered if the Game had driven one of them to it. Kenny felt a creeping nausea. He tried to look calm.
Morrissey sighed noticeably and seemed to switch gears.
“I know this is a tough time,” she said, sounding more human. “Not just for all of you. For everyone. This election is…” She caught herself, changed tacks. “There is a spirit of divisiveness I haven’t seen before. Not in my lifetime. Anger. There’s a lot of anger. And fear. And the things we hear on TV, what we read online, it’s not helping. But…”
She paused for effect and seemed to be speaking from the heart. A few more ears perked up in the audience. The teachers were studying her carefully.
“But … what was written on the side of our school is disgusting. It’s horrifying. I don’t know if it was serious or some sick joke or maybe even by someone not even from our school trying to put a stain on us. God, I hope that’s the case. I don’t want to believe that one of you, any of you, could write something like that. I am sure you have all heard by now what happened this morning. There was a savage fight because of that graffiti. I’m not going to go into the details, but it was ugly and disgusting and we have a student in the hospital now. This will not go on.”
Kenny felt his whole body tense up. He started looking for the closest exit, in case he really did puke, which was starting to feel entirely possible.
A chatter started arising among the students in the auditorium. Charlie noticed it first in the front corner of the room. He thought it was a response to the news, but that wasn’t it. It was moving sporadically through the audience. And not in any physical way. Excitement would pop up in a cluster here, then in another spot across the room, then in another place entirely. Something was causing a stir, and it didn’t seem tied to Mrs. Morrissey’s impassioned speech.
“… zero tolerance for hate,” she was saying.
The sounds morphed into a tittering, a nasty, cruel noise. Gasping and glee. Charlie locked eyes with Kenny, who seemed puzzled, too. Then they saw Vanhi put on her Aziteks. She looked back at Charlie and tapped the glasses. Charlie dug his out of his backpack—after seeing his mom last night he couldn’t leave them home, Game or no Game—and looked through the magic lenses. Like X-ray vision, he could see through the seats between them then. In the middle of one cluster of laughing students, the kid in the center had his cell phone hidden between his legs, tilted up. It glowed red in his vision. The girls on either side leaned in, peering at it, snickering. Charlie looked across the room and saw other phones glowing red. The lit screens were spreading geometrically, lighting up throughout the auditorium. The teachers were starting to figure out something was going on, although they were plainly steps behind. One teacher shushed a group of students near her.
In a flash Charlie realized what it must be—Peter had released the video of Kurt Ellers after all, exposing his most desperate secret, even though Peter had promised he wouldn’t. Charlie scanned the room for Kurt and found him sitting with Tim in the back row. They looked as smug as usual, but neither had his phone out yet. Didn’t Kurt know his humiliation was spreading virally through the room, coming like a plague, while he sat there looking like a vicious prick?
“I’m now going to turn things over to Mr. Sanders, who as you know is dedicated to the safety and security of every student in this school.”
The murmuring grew louder, and a couple savvier teachers were scanning across the room now, noticing the trend. One of them grabbed a phone from a group of gawkers and looked at it. At first she looked confused. She lifted her glasses and held it closer. Her mouth dropped. She put the phone down quickly.
“I know some of you may not be feeling safe right now,” Mr. Sanders was saying. “But I assure you…”
A red-glowing phone popped up in the corner of Charlie’s vision. It was down the row from him, near the aisle. He heard someone say, “Oh, man, you gotta see this.”
Someone else said, “That’s messed up!”
Charlie thought of Kurt’s private pain, his most intimate, hidden moments out there for the world to see, and shuddered.
Charlie pressed his way down the aisle until he got to the guy with the phone, and as soon as Charlie saw the screen, his heart sank. He felt it literally cave and drop in his chest. The kid looked up at Charlie and his smile dropped, as he knew Charlie wouldn’t like the joke.
It was Kurt Ellers all right, but out of sight, and not in the way Charlie had assumed.
Instead, the picture was eerily familiar. The portable buildings out back. The pile of bricks and other construction debris.
There was Alex, standing alone, his pants down around his knees, his dick hanging out for the whole world to see. And now it had.
The asshole thugs who pantsed him were out of the frame. The picture was just of Alex, alone, crying, jeans and underpants around his ankles. It was probably taken the second before Charlie had rushed out and smashed Kurt’s phone, but of course the pic had already gone to the cloud.
Charlie immediately looked back to where Alex had been sitting. He was gone. “Oh, shit.”
Charlie looked at Tim and Kurt, who were slipping out the back.
“Turn that off,” Charlie said pointlessly to the kid next to him.
He had no idea where Alex had gone, but maybe Tim and Kurt were following him to taunt him more, so Charlie went after them out the back doors of the auditorium.
The halls were empty. He passed the Turner Tiger in the main lobby, the real one, bronze and polished, paw raised, on a pedestal. He forgot that his glasses were on and jumped when the tiger flicked its head toward him and gave a low growl.
Tim and Kurt were at the end of the hall, going around the corner.
Charlie went after them, and when he cleared the turn, they heard him coming and faced him.
Then he realized he had no idea if they had spread the pic or the Game. “Did you do it?”
“What did you think was going to happen?” Tim asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You came after my girlfriend? Peter came after his?” Tim nodded over at Kurt.
“It’s their choice,” Charlie said.
“Your friend tried to put those posters up? Mocking me?” For once, Tim didn’t talk like a bully or a monster. He was speaking quietly, reasonably.
“They were just drawings,” Charlie said.
“Of me naked. What did you think we’d do?”
“You destroyed him.”
But still, something was nagging in the back of Charlie’s mind. No one deserved what had happened to Alex. Yet hadn’t they come after Tim, unprovoked? Hadn’t Alex tried to humiliate Tim in his own crazy way? Did Tim have a point? Charlie squelched the thought—it was flat wrong, he knew it.
“We just did what you tried on us. But better. An eye for an eye.” Tim shrugged. “Maybe we took two.”
You destroyed him. What will Alex do now?
The worry started spiraling inside Charlie: What would he do if someone sent his naked pic to the entire school? Add to that Alex’s instability, his depression and darkness and drugs. With a shiver, Charlie recalled how quickly Alex had offered to cut himself with the razors in the boiler room when Kenny balked. Charlie thought of Alex’s words at his house: Nobody likes me. I’d be better off gone.
“Did you see where he went?” Charlie asked desperately.
Tim almost said something snide, but then he saw how worried Charlie was and gave him an honest answer. “He went toward the lot.”
Kurt had been quiet this whole time. The sadist in chief, Tim’s henchman, stood just behind him, strangely muted. He’d finally gotten his way, shown the world his masterpiece of bullying, captured in a single image. Maybe it hadn’t felt as great as he’d hoped.
Charlie wanted to be magnanimous, since they’d told him where Alex had gone, but he couldn’t help the rage inside. He wanted to attack them, but it would be suicide: Tim had batted him away like a fly last time, and now it was two against one. But he had to say something.
“How would you feel? If someone posted something secret about you?”
Tim thought about it. Behind him, did Kurt shudder just a little, or was Charlie reading in?