Double Digit (6 page)

“Oh, you’ve got a lot left to lose, sweetheart.”

Danny and I left my parents at the Marriott and went back to my dorm.

“How many people die from hypothermia here every year?” Danny was rubbing his hands together and banging on the radiator, a trick to spontaneously produce heat that he’d seen in a movie.

“I know, right? It’s fifty degrees, and I feel like I’ll never get warm again. January’s going to be ugly.”

Danny walked around my room, picking up everything in his path and examining it. “I still can’t believe you’re in college. And that you live so far away. I’m assuming you like it because you didn’t shut up at dinner.”

Could he possibly be trying to tell me he missed me? I hadn’t really thought about him alone in the house with Mom and Dad, table for three every night. “I definitely miss you guys, but it’s been pretty amazing being here. I mean, it’s how I imagine coming out is for gay people: it’s like I am finally allowed to talk about all this stuff that’s been floating around in my head all these years. And there’s so much stuff I don’t know that I sometimes can’t sleep just thinking about it.”

Danny was smiling. “Nerd sanctuary. Awesome.” He ran his finger over Tiki’s Adam Ranks poster. “You keep a kidnapped guy’s artwork just to remind you of the good old days?”

Uh, yeah, hello, other subject that keeps me up at night.
“No, and I am thinking I may accidentally destroy that poster.”

Danny was shaking his head but still staring at the poster. “Don’t destroy it. This 3-D overlay thing he does—it looks like it’s alive.”

Danny and I decided to go for a walk around campus, figuring it was probably just as cold outside as it was in my room. I took him around the Brain and Cognitive Science building and past the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. I showed him where Professor Halsey’s office was. I told him about my dream job and how I knew that it was just a matter of time and patient stalking before it was mine.

“Digit, you are one nutty squirrel.” He pulled off my hat and messed up my hair like he used to do when I was seven. Ahead of us, we saw a couple kissing on a bench, feverishly and without any regard for the dropping temperature. Danny whispered to me, “Get a room. And an electric blanket.” I started to laugh, but then saw that it was Howard. And that blonde he was with was not, I repeat not, Tiki.

I didn’t say anything to Danny, just shuffled him ahead and looped back around to my dorm. I took his arm to steady myself. My first reaction was rage. I felt as if my hair could have spontaneously turned red and stood straight up on its own. Then I felt sad, so sad and disappointed for Tiki, who was completely committed to their relationship and had gone to MIT just to be with him. And then panic. I couldn’t tell her. There was no way that the words would come out of my mouth, no way. I was not going to be the messenger, the one to break her heart with an offhanded
Guess what I saw on my walk this weekend?
No way.

Looking back, which I’m really going to have to start doing a lot less of, telling Tiki the truth about Howard would have been a lot easier than the mess I got into for keeping my mouth shut. And by “mess,” I mean stuff like assault, abduction, and felony treason. You know, a mess.

I
LOGGED EXACTLY NINETY MINUTES AT THE
Copley Place mall with my mom, less than I’d promised but more than she expected. I got an army green midweight jacket, a brown sweater (my choice), and a gray sweater with navy blue cuffs (her choice). I swear sweaters are getting more complicated every year.

Tiki got back the next day right as my family was leaving for the airport. My mom threw her arms around her. “Darling, how is your great-grandmother?”

“She’s a goner.” Tiki looked around and laughed. “No, sorry, not dead. But she’s gonna be. She’s ninety-eight, and everything’s starting to go, so I’m pretty sure she’ll be done this week.”

Danny gasped. “Done? Like a turkey?”

“Sorry, I know it sounds crass, but we’ve got a lot of people on this planet. She’s been here almost ninety-nine years and has done a lot of great stuff. But I mean, let’s keep this system moving, you know? Out with the old, in with the new.” She started unpacking and talking about how much better the weather was in Virginia until my family left.

“Tiki, are you okay?”

“I am. I mean, honestly, I love my great-grandmother, but she can’t go on like that with a machine breathing for her. I really hope she goes soon.”

“I read that ventilators can keep a person alive as long as their . . .” She wasn’t listening to me at all. “Is there something else?”

She plopped down on her bed, crossing her impossibly long legs beneath her. “It’s Howard. I’m probably just being stupid, but I feel like there’s something going on with him. I can just feel it, you know?”

Yes, I know, feel it. Please.
“What do you mean?”

“Well, like last night I called him six times and he never picked up. You know how that guy always has his phone at the ready. So this morning he said, ‘Yeah, sorry, babe. I went to bed early.’ He never goes to bed early. Ever.”

This was hardly a smoking gun, but I was starting to feel more and more relieved. She went on: “And
then
I called him on my way back from the airport to see if he wanted me to stop by, and he said, ‘No, sorry, babe. I’m turning in early.’ What the hell, right?”

Anyone without the information that I so unfortunately had would have suggested that maybe he was sick. I decided to feed the beast. “That is weird. What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know. I can’t imagine he’s . . . I mean, he wouldn’t . . . Let’s check Facebook.” She pulled out her laptop and started banging away.

“Tiki, if he’s doing something he doesn’t want you to know about, he’s not going to post about it.”
Duh.

“But someone else might have. I just need to see what was happening on campus last night. Someone’s got to have a photo.” It didn’t take long for her to find a photo of Howard dancing with that blond girl at Simmons Hall.

“Oh,” I offered, sympathetically.

“It’s not enough.” Tiki was up and pulling at her hair, adjusting the spikes like she was trying to secure a clearer connection to the universe. “I’m not going to go down as the crazy high school girlfriend who overreacted to a photo on freakin’ Facebook. I need proof. I need an eyewitness.”

Actual real-life eyewitness said, “But there is no eyewitness.”

We went back and forth like this for a long time before Tiki decided we needed to hack into his Facebook account and read his private messages. “Let’s try the obvi passwords. It used to be Tiki and my birthday. No? Okay, try Tiki is a ten, all one word. No? His dog’s name is Snoopy?” We exhausted everything we could think of—including the name of the girl in the photo.

“You could just ask him.”

“I can’t. I don’t want to get into a whole big thing and come out of it seeming crazy because he’s just denying it. He has a way of turning everything around and making me seem like I’m paranoid. I’ll end up apologizing to his cheating ass. This has happened before.”

I kept trying logical passwords, then adding numbers to the end. It could take a century to crack a code this way, but I was getting hypnotized by it. Snoopy124, Snoopy125. Tiki may have read my mind. “Before you slip into the Digit Zone, why don’t we download one of those brute force programs that go through every possible iteration to crack a password? It can run while we sleep.”

Scott had showed me one of these programs on that first night in the dorm. They were pretty simple; they just tried various combinations of letters and numbers in an orderly way. Eventually the code would be cracked. They were written in any one of the coding languages I’d been learning in my computer science class: C, LISP, Perl, Java. They were really beautiful languages, some better than others, but they were all like paints that you could use to either create a big red circle or the
Mona Lisa.
The power was in the mind of the programmer. I’ll admit it: The idea of just pressing Go to run one of these programs left me a little flat. It’s like painting by numbers or making a cake from a box. What’s the point?

“We could get into a lot of trouble if someone caught us buying one of those programs. How would we explain it? If you’d just give me a little while, I can write one. We’ll run it, get the password, and I’ll erase it. The perfect crime.”

“You’re going to write a program? Because I’m suspicious of my boyfriend?”

“No. Of course not.” I could hear how stupid I sounded. “You should probably just talk to him.” I got under my covers and felt a little relieved. I mean, I’m not a hacker, and there’s no reason for me to learn to be one. Just so that I could prove that Tiki’s boyfriend was a scumbag. Scumbag. Scumbag1, Scumbag2, Scumbag3. Okay, I had to write that program.

I opened my laptop in the dark and got to work. I didn’t know exactly what I was doing, of course. I just wrote a little code, ran it, tinkered with it, and started again. And I was done at eight a.m. It wasn’t what they’d call an elegant program, but I’d go back and fix that. Probably before lunch. But it ran, and within twenty minutes, we had his password: Luckydevil. Not for long.

About a week later, after Tiki had found a ton of flirty messages in Howard’s inbox and dumped him without an apology, I was still writing code. I had my laptop with me everywhere, massaging my program to make it run faster and do more with fewer iterations. I never even intended to use it again, but it was creative and addictive and orderly. I really couldn’t stop. Intervention, anyone?

I ran pieces of it by Ella and went to Clarke when I got really stuck. They were delighted that they’d brought me into the inner circle of hacking. To them, hacking was more of a lifestyle than a means to an end. Besides the dorm room switch-around, they never benefited from it. The hacking was just about proving they could get in, and then get out. I wanted to show them the whole program, but I wasn’t quite ready to let it loose. Plus the truth is that as much as this was just an exercise for my mind, it was a hacking tool. And I had actually used it to hack. A little.

“You’re going to have to give this up.” Tiki caught me hunched over my desk at noon on a beautiful fall day. “I want you to delete it.”

Delete it? Right. It was becoming stronger and better every day.

“I miss the days when you were heartbroken and mopey. I could really go there with you now. Could you give the hacking a rest?”

“No.” I didn’t look up.

“Listen, Thursday night there’s a toga party.”

I had to look up. “There are really toga parties?”

“Apparently. They’re for real people, away from their laptops, who want to have a good time. Are you listening?” She swung my chair around so we were eye to eye. “Howard’s going to be there with that girl. And I look really hot in a toga, trust me. You’re going with me. And we’re going to have normal college fun. Clear?”

“Yes.”

“No matter what?”

“I promise.”

“Now this is going to be epic.” Truer words were never spoken.

I did as I was told and shut Oscar down before leaving for work on Thursday. (Oh, yeah, Oscar was my pet name for the program. Not that I was going to say it out loud, but when you get sort of attached to something, you develop a certain affection for it. The program was like a tenacious little pug, happily blasting his way through firewalls, wagging his little tail as he went. A perfect Oscar.) After work I’d meet Tiki back in the dorm to get all toga’d up. This was one of ten things that week that only John would have thought was funny. I composed a clever text and deleted it.

My promise was nearly derailed by Professor Marcello and his bogus nuclear research lab. He needed information for his Friday morning presentation to the committee that funds his research. (Again, by “research,” I mean his spy novel.) It wasn’t that much work—I just had to take a ton of data and present it in a way that was easier for them to understand. The problem was that it was going to take me forever to get the data. He usually let me know what data he needed a few days in advance, and I would have time to find it online or submit a request to the proper government authority. The government agencies generally approve your request for information within twenty minutes but won’t actually give you the document until six to thirty-six hours later. It was my bad luck that the information I needed was from the U.S. Department of Defense. And that they take forever to deliver documents. Professor Marcello assured me that I’d have what I needed by eleven p.m. on Thursday and could complete my work then. Goodbye, toga party.

So what was I supposed to do? Really. I already had Oscar running at a pretty advanced level. I’d just have to try a few things to take it up about a hundred notches. I mean, I made a promise and sort of wanted to prove to myself that I could go out and be normal. Who knew, maybe I’d look hot in a toga too? It took a lot longer than I thought to get into the DOD, but by six p.m. Thursday night I had the document I needed. By eight p.m. I was done with my work and back in my room getting decked out in a white sheet. At worst, it was a victimless crime. At best, it was a timing difference.

D
RESSING FOR A TOGA PARTY IS
pretty straightforward for anyone who’s ever seen
Animal House
or has Internet access. The necessary materials are a white sheet and maybe a little ivy for your hair, for extra credit. How hard could this be? Very.

Tiki was, as promised, seriously hot in her toga and all ready to go by the time I got back to our room. She had a sheet and an ivy crown waiting for me, and I was completely focused on being a good sport. I’d been a drag for the past few weeks, flipping between my obsession with my ex-boyfriend and my obsession with Oscar. But now I was there and I was game. But not for an off-the-shoulder toga.

“But that’s what a toga is. And you’ll show a little shoulder . . .”

“Put me in something asymmetrical, and I’ll be showing a little seizure.”