Is this the real American Dream? Everyone climbs the ladder of success and then pulls it up behind them so they can laugh, with all the other people who’ve made it, at those who are still jumping desperately to catch the bottom rung? Do they end up like Mrs. McHenry, automatically assuming that Rosa is trouble because she’s from the latest nationality of immigrants being picked on?
If that’s the way it is, maybe the people who were camping outside Dad’s office are right to protest.
Mom looks awful when she gets home after work and picking up RJ from Photography Club. Her eye makeup is smudged and her hair is sticking up like she’s spent the day trying to tear it out. Not that I blame her. I know the feeling. RJ gives me a warning glance as he heads to the refrigerator for a snack.
“Are you okay?” I ask. “You look kind of … rough.”
“Not now, Sammy,” she says in a quiet, even voice. She swings her bag off her shoulder and winces as it brushes her chest. “Ow.”
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing,” she says. “But I want to know why I got unexcused absence emails from your four afternoon classes.”
Crap. Maybe I should have spent less time reading about Dad’s emails and more time thinking of an excuse. Since I don’t have an excuse, I go with the truth.
“People were staring at me at school all morning. I didn’t know why. And finally someone asked me if I was okay and I said I would be if it didn’t feel like I was walking around with a Kick Me sign on my back and then he showed me some of the headlines.”
“The ones about Dad?” RJ asks.
“Yeah. And I was so freaked out by them that I couldn’t face going to school for the rest of the day. So I skipped out,” I admit. “For the first time in my life, I’d like to point out.”
“Running away from your problems is no way to solve them,” Mom says. “This is going to be difficult, for all of us. For some time to come. You can’t just cut class.”
“Did Dad really say all the things the papers say he did?” RJ asks. “The stuff that was kind of racist and totally not PC?”
Mom doesn’t answer. She just slumps into a kitchen chair and rubs her temples, like she’s got a killer headache.
“ ’Cause if he did, that’s so wrong,” RJ continues. “Don’t you always tell us we’re supposed to accept people for who they are?”
Mom, who is usually so quick with answers, remains silent, her head in her hands.
“Mom,” RJ persists.
“I heard you,” she says, slowly raising her face. “I wish I knew what to say.”
Most of the time, it annoys me that my parents think they have all the answers. But my mom admitting that she doesn’t scares me.
“In theory, we’re supposed to accept people for who they are,” Mom says. “But once you get out into the world, life gets much more … complicated. There are pressures … You have to be part of a team … and—”
“That doesn’t even make sense, Mom,” I point out. “Like there aren’t pressures in high school? Like you don’t have to be part of a team? What are you even saying?”
“Sounds like a great big pile of grown-up bull to me,” RJ says.
I stare at RJ, eyes wide, wondering what has gotten into him. He never talks this way, especially not to Mom.
She doesn’t take it well.
“Okay, that’s enough. I’ve had it. I need a Mom Time-Out. Go upstairs and do your homework.”
“But I didn’t do anything!” I protest.
“I don’t care. Upstairs. Now.”
RJ grabs his backpack and stomps out of the room, but I feel compelled to make a statement. “Fine, Mom. But I want to state for the record that you’re being totally unfair.”
“Get used to it, Sammy,” Mom says, pulling out her phone. “Life is unfair.”
It feels like she’s saying that as much for her own benefit as for mine.
I turn on my heel and head for the stairs, but I stop halfway up when I hear Mom on the phone.
“… And they’re asking me questions that I can’t answer, Dick. It’s not fair. You’ve got a work crisis, but we’ve got a crisis at home, too. More than one. I need you here.”
And then I hear her losing it. Big-time. Not gentle, quiet crying. Loud, snorting sobs. I hesitate, torn between going down and putting my arms around her to offer comfort, and continuing upstairs to my room like I never heard anything.
I stand and listen to the heartbreaking sound of my mom’s sobs for another minute, then quietly go up the rest of the stairs to my room and shut the door on her pain, the way she told me to.
My phone has been buzzing with texts the whole time, but clearly, family drama has been taking priority over everything today.
Two-thirds of them are from Rosa.
where were you today? did you skip out?
you must be wiggin! i am, kinda.
is all this stuff in the papers true?
where are you?
why aren’t you answering me!
have you gone into the witness protection program?
will i ever see or talk to you again?
And then, ten minutes later:
are you dead?!! please tell me you’re not dead!!!!
Witness Protection Program?! Wow, Rosa’s been binge watching too many action movies again.
this is sammy’s ghost. i regret to inform you that sammy is, in fact, dead. she says it was great knowing you.
also, now she doesn’t have to worry about a date for prom.
My phone rings three seconds later.
“Oh my god, Sammy, I was fereeeeeeaaaaaaking out. How come you didn’t answer any of my texts?”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry. I guess …”
“Margo’s been texting me to find out what’s going on. She’s worried, too.”
“I don’t have much to tell you. I’m just as confused as you are,” I admit. “Helene’s losing it completely and Dick’s still at the office—which is pretty much the norm lately.”
Rosa’s quiet for a moment, then asks, “Do you think it’s true, though? I mean … all the things they’re saying on the news that he put in those emails? The … craptastic stuff?”
I don’t want to believe it’s true, but I saw the emails myself on the website where the hackers posted them. And I’m mortified, because Rosa’s my best friend and she’s Hispanic and my dad didn’t call out his colleague who made a racist comment. He just went on to make one of his own. Is my dad no better than Margo’s mom?
“I don’t know.”
“It just … seems so unlike your dad,” Rosa says. “He’s always so nice, and funny and polite. It just seems so … weird.” She sounds sympathetic, but underneath, there’s hurt and something else. Anger maybe? Which I could totally get. But I don’t know how to talk to her about it. Not yet, anyway.
“Weird doesn’t even begin to describe it. I feel like I don’t even know Dick anymore. Like maybe he’s not the same person I always thought he was.”
“What, like now you find out he’s the Dark Lord of Evil or whatever? Sammy, I am your FATHER!”
I have to laugh, because it’s just so Rosa to go overboard. I might be freaked out and upset by some of the things that my dad supposedly said in those emails, but “Dark Lord of Evil” hadn’t even crossed my mind.
“Or not. Maybe he just acts one way at home and a different way at work?”
“But … isn’t that the same for everyone?” Rosa asks.
“What do you mean?”
“Well … you act one way around your parents and then totally different when you’re with me,” she explains.
“True,” I concede. “And I guess even differently with some friends than we do with others, too.”
“Exactly! Like I can make fart jokes with you, but Margo thinks they’re gross and stupid.”
“Promise me you will never get mature enough to think that fart jokes are gross and stupid,” I beg Rosa.
“I promise that when
we are ancient crones sitting in rocking chairs in our nursing home, I will keep you amused with fart jokes,” Rosa says. “That’s if I don’t get Alzheimer’s and forget everything like my poor abuelo.”
“I feel so much better now,” I tell her.
“Do you? Really?” she asks.
The truth is, I don’t know how I feel. I won’t know that till I can talk to my dad.
“Yeah,” I lie. “Except … does that mean I have to start worrying about a date for the prom again? Because Ghost Sammy enjoyed not having to think about it.”
“Yup. And APs. And taking your road test next week.”
“Good thing there’s such a relaxed atmosphere here at home,” I say, pushing the irony pedal to the metal.
“Ha! Well, at least you still have your sense of humor,” Rosa says.
“Yeah. I guess there is that.”
Cue awkward pause. There’s an elephant on the phone between us, one that neither of us seems willing or able to name.
“Well, hasta la vista,” Rosa says.
After she hangs up, I stare at my cell, wondering how long things will be awkward between us. I wonder if Mom’s stopped crying, and if Dad’s on his way home yet. But most of all, I wonder if life will ever go back to normal again. Since I don’t have answers to any of those questions, I put on the Einstein’s Encounter channel and do the one thing I’m good at, which is drilling for the APs. At least if my future ends up being totally destroyed, no one can say it’s for lack of studying.
Dad finally gets home at like nine thirty. Noah told me to give him a chance to explain, but pretty much as soon as he walks in the door, my dad calls us downstairs. RJ is already half-asleep, but Dad shouts up that he needs to come down anyway, because it’s important.
This sounds ominous, not like a Hey, let’s have a cozy chat about this situation thing. Not only that, we don’t get called into the family room but the “formal living room” with its stiff-backed armchairs, the World’s Most Uncomfortable Sofa (TM), and the antique coffee table we’re not allowed to put our feet on, even when we’re not wearing shoes.
Ominous and ominous-er.
Mom has stopped crying, but her eyes are red-rimmed and she’s twisting a bunch of tissues nervously with her fingers. Dad looks even worse than he did yesterday, something I wouldn’t have thought possible twenty-four hours ago. You’d never know this was the same guy who looked so confident and in control on the cover of Fortune six months ago as “The Bold Face of American Banking” (whatever that means). He’s sitting in the biggest armchair, the one we jokingly called the Throne, like he’s about to dispense some medieval justice.
“Sit down, kids. We need to talk,” he says.
As I take a seat next to RJ on the World’s Most Uncomfortable Sofa (TM), I wonder if there’s ever been a time in the history of parenting when the kids are ushered into the most ornately furnished room in the house and told, “We need to talk,” and it ends well. The probability of that is zero, and I wonder what new ax Dad’s about to lower on our heads.
“There’s been some developments with the hacking situation,” Dad says. “And this time, it involves you.”
“What do you mean, involves us?” I ask.
Mom twists the tissues in her hands even tighter. If they were someone’s neck, that someone would be a goner.
“What I mean is that the hackers targeted us personally,” Dad explains. “Well, specifically me personally, but in doing so, you were caught in the net.”
RJ and I look at each other. I can tell he’s just as clueless about what Dad means as I am.
“Caught in what net?” I ask. “What are you talking about?”
“What I’m talking about is that they targeted me at home,” Dad says. “Which only goes to show how unscrupulous these people are.”
“But what did they do?” RJ asks. “And what does it have to do with Sammy and me?”
“They hacked our cloud backup,” Dad says. “And—”
“But how could they do that?” RJ interrupts. “Don’t we have a firewall? I thought that guy from Geekify put one in.”
“Geekitude,” I correct him. “Yeah, at the same time he set it up so all of our devices ‘seamlessly sync to the cloud.’ ”
“Firewall, schmirewall,” Mom mutters.
“It had nothing to do with the firewall,” Dad says, like he’s writing a chapter in Hacking for Dummies. “The problem was with cloud backup protocols. Because there’s so much publicly available information about me, they were able to request a password reset and get onto our backup that way. It’s what’s known as social engineering.”
I hear RJ asking Dad what this means, but I am already frozen with horror because I think I already know: that they have everything that is on my laptop and my phone. Pictures. Emails. Texts …
“Oh my god!” I start shaking when I realize the worst part of all. “They have my diary.”
“You keep a diary?” RJ asks. He sounds disappointed that he’s missed an opportunity to find dirt on me that could be used as leverage to get me to give him stuff or drive him places when I get my license.
“Yeah. I thought I was being smart by keeping it on my laptop so you couldn’t snoop in my room to find it.”
My parents don’t seem to be paying attention to me. They’re too busy exchanging pointed looks at each other. My mom appears as if she might detonate at any second. Dad gives her a heated stare and shakes his head slightly, like he’s warning her to keep her finger off the red button.
“What else does the ‘seamless sync to the cloud’ back up?” RJ asks.
“Everything on your phone and your laptop,” Dad says.
“What, you mean my texts?” RJ is finally catching on to just how awful this is.
Dad nods.
“And pictures? And chats?”
“All of it,” Dad says.
“But that’s not fair!” RJ says. “How can they do that? That’s our personal private stuff!”
“If these hackers don’t care about breaking the law, what makes you think they give two hoots about our privacy?” Mom snarls, and it’s hard not to feel like her rage is directed at us as well as at them.
“They don’t,” Dad says in a slow, even voice. “This is a malicious act of vandalism, and the FBI is investigating. But in the meantime, we have to deal with the fallout. CodeRed, our crisis communications company, which is already working with us to respond to the corporate hack, is going to help us manage our way through this hack of our personal systems as well.”
“What do you mean manage our way?” I ask.
“He means stick to the script,” Mom says. “And do as you’re told.”
“What script?” RJ asks. “I don’t get it. Do what as we’re told?”
“I need your phones and laptops until I’ve had a computer-security expert go over the home situation,” Dad says.
“What?!” RJ explodes.
“This is a joke, right?” I say at the same time.
“Trust me, this is the furthest thing from a joke I have ever said to you,” Dad says. “Do you kids understand the gravity of this situation?”
“Do you understand that I have AP exams starting in three weeks? How am I supposed to study if I can’t use my computer?”
Playing the high-stakes-tests card gets Dad’s attention. I watch my parents. At times like this, it pays off.
He looks to Mom for assistance, but she gives him a This is your mess, get yourself out of it look and examines her fingernails like the condition of her nail polish is her number one priority in this time of crisis.
“Uh … you can go to the library. They have computers there. Study at the library. Either stay after school or go to the public library.”
“But, Dad—”
“It’ll only be for a day or two, until I can get the security consultant here,” Dad says in a tone that tells me not to argue. “And I don’t want you going onto any of the hacker sites that post those documents. Do I make
myself clear?”
“Crystal clear,” I mutter.
“Clear as mud,” RJ complains. “This sucks. It’s so unfair.”
“Who ever said life was fair?” Dad asks.
“You guys did!” RJ shouts. “You said we had to share, otherwise it wasn’t fair. You said to tell the truth, otherwise it wasn’t fair. You told us to accept people for who they are, or else it’s not fair. You always tell us to do the right thing, otherwise it isn’t fair. And now it turns out you’re nothing but a bunch of h-hypocrites!”
His voice breaks on the last word, and he gets up and storms out of the room.
“RJ, get back here!” Dad shouts after him, but it doesn’t do any good. A minute later, my brother’s door slams with such ferocity the chandelier in the hallway tinkles.
My brother’s idea of payback is still primitive. But he’s young. There’s time for him to refine it.
Dad looks at me, his lips compressed into a thin line of not very well concealed frustration.
“I trust I can count on you to behave in a more mature and rational manner, Sammy.”
I think of all the things that I want to ask him. About the things I saw in those emails that made me wonder if he’s been lying to me all this time. But as Mom said, everyone has secrets. And when my parents find out mine, I’m dead.
“Sure, Dad. No problem,” I assure him.
I can still pretend I’m a good kid. Even if my cover is about to be blown to smithereens.
April 8
One H-bomb detonated. Who knows what’ll be waiting at school.
I can’t believe this is happening. The APs are in three weeks and I can’t use my laptop or my cell phone. This is my future we’re talking about.
I had to dig out this Hello Kitty diary with a tiny little lock and key that Uncle Kenny and Aunt Cindy gave me for Chanukah when I was seven. The last entry was “Mom and Dad said they’re going to take me to the American Girl store for tea for my birthday! Rosa went and they give you a teapot and tea set for your doll, too. I’m saving my money to buy Coconut, the American Girl dog, because Mom and Dad won’t let me get a real dog. L”
Scruffles and I just had a laugh about that. I told him that I bought Coconut, but a stuffed dog is no substitute for the real thing, no matter how cute and fluffy it is. I never gave up nagging my parents and they gave in two years later.
In Case You Missed It Page 7