“Let’s get out of here,” she said.
Ange’s mom and sister were out again, which made it easy to decide where we were going for the evening. It was past supper time, but my parents had known that I was meeting with Barbara and wouldn’t give me any grief if I came home late.
When we got to Ange’s, I had no urge to plug in my Xbox. I had had all the Xnet I could handle for one day. All I could think about was Ange, Ange, Ange. Living without Ange. Knowing Ange was angry with me. Ange never going to talk to me again. Ange never going to kiss me again.
She’d been thinking the same. I could see it in her eyes as we shut the door to her bedroom and looked at each other. I was hungry for her, like you’d hunger for dinner after not eating for days. Like you’d thirst for a glass of water after playing soccer for three hours straight.
Like none of that. It was more. It was something I’d never felt before. I wanted to eat her whole, devour her.
Up until now, she’d been the sexual one in our relationship. I’d let her set and control the pace. It was amazingly erotic to have her grab me and take off my shirt, drag my face to hers.
But tonight I couldn’t hold back. I wouldn’t hold back.
The door clicked shut and I reached for the hem of her t-shirt and yanked, barely giving her time to lift her arms as I pulled it over her head. I tore my own shirt over my head, listening to the cotton crackle as the stitches came loose.
Her eyes were shining, her mouth open, her breathing fast and shallow. Mine was too, my breath and my heart and my blood all roaring in my ears.
I took off the rest of our clothes with equal zest, throwing them into the piles of dirty and clean laundry on the floor. There were books and papers all over the bed and I swept them aside. We landed on the unmade bedclothes a second later, arms around one another, squeezing like we would pull ourselves right through one another. She moaned into my mouth and I made the sound back, and I felt her voice buzz in my vocal chords, a feeling more intimate than anything I’d ever felt before.
She broke away and reached for the bedstand. She yanked open the drawer and threw a white pharmacy bag on the bed before me. I looked inside. Condoms. Trojans. One dozen spermicidal. Still sealed. I smiled at her and she smiled back and I opened the box.
I’d thought about what it would be like for years. A hundred times a day I’d imagined it. Some days, I’d thought of practically nothing else.
It was nothing like I expected. Parts of it were better. Parts of it were lots worse. While it was going on, it felt like an eternity. Afterwards, it seemed to be over in the blink of an eye.
Afterwards, I felt the same. But I also felt different. Something had changed between us.
It was weird. We were both shy as we put our clothes on and puttered around the room, looking away, not meeting each other’s eyes. I wrapped the condom in a kleenex from a box beside the bed and took it into the bathroom and wound it with toilet paper and stuck it deep into the trash-can.
When I came back in, Ange was sitting up in bed and playing with her Xbox. I sat down carefully beside her and took her hand. She turned to face me and smiled. We were both worn out, trembly.
“Thanks,” I said.
She didn’t say anything. She turned her face to me. She was grinning hugely, but fat tears were rolling down her cheeks.
I hugged her and she grabbed tightly onto me. “You’re a good man, Marcus Yallow,” she whispered. “Thank you.”
I didn’t know what to say, but I squeezed her back. Finally, we parted. She wasn’t crying any more, but she was still smiling.
She pointed at my Xbox, on the floor beside the bed. I took the hint. I picked it up and plugged it in and logged in.
Same old same old. Lots of email. The new posts on the blogs I read streamed in. Spam. God did I get a lot of spam. My Swedish mailbox was repeatedly “joe-jobbed” — used as the return address for spams sent to hundreds of millions of Internet accounts, so that all the bounces and angry messages came back to me. I didn’t know who was behind it. Maybe the DHS trying to overwhelm my mailbox. Maybe it was just people pranking. The Pirate Party had pretty good filters, though, and they gave anyone who wanted it 500 gigabytes of email storage, so I wasn’t likely to be drowned any time soon.
I filtered it all out, hammering on the delete key. I had a separate mailbox for stuff that came in encrypted to my public key, since that was likely to be Xnet-related and possibly sensitive. Spammers hadn’t figured out that using public keys would make their junk mail more plausible yet, so for now this worked well.
There were a couple dozen encrypted messages from people in the web of trust. I skimmed them — links to videos and pics of new abuses from the DHS, horror stories about near-escapes, rants about stuff I’d blogged. The usual.
Then I came to one that was only encrypted to my public key. That meant that no one else could read it, but I had no idea who had written it. It said it came from Masha, which could either be a handle or a name — I couldn’t tell which.
> M1k3y
> You don’t know me, but I know you.
> I was arrested the day that the bridge blew. They questioned me. They decided I was innocent. They offered me a job: help them hunt down the terrorists who’d killed my neighbors.
> It sounded like a good deal at the time. Little did I realize that my actual job would turn out to be spying on kids who resented their city being turned into a police state.
> I infiltrated Xnet on the day it launched. I am in your web of trust. If I wanted to spill my identity, I could send you email from an address you’d trust. Three addresses, actually. I’m totally inside your network as only another 17-year-old can be. Some of the email you’ve gotten has been carefully chosen misinformation from me and my handlers.
> They don’t know who you are, but they’re coming close. They continue to turn people, to compromise them. They mine the social network sites and use threats to turn kids into informants. There are hundreds of people working for the DHS on Xnet right now. I have their names, handles and keys. Private and public.
> Within days of the Xnet launch, we went to work on exploiting ParanoidLinux. The exploits so far have been small and insubstantial, but a break is inevitable. Once we have a zero-day break, you’re dead.
> I think it’s safe to say that if my handlers knew that I was typing this, my ass would be stuck in Gitmo-by-the-Bay until I was an old woman.
> Even if they don’t break ParanoidLinux, there are poisoned ParanoidXbox distros floating around. They don’t match the checksums, but how many people look at the checksums? Besides me and you? Plenty of kids are already dead, though they don’t know it.
> All that remains is for my handlers to figure out the best time to bust you to make the biggest impact in the media. That time will be sooner, not later. Believe.
> You’re probably wondering why I’m telling you this.
> I am too.
> Here’s where I come from. I signed up to fight terrorists. Instead, I’m spying on Americans who believe things that the DHS doesn’t like. Not people who plan on blowing up bridges, but protestors. I can’t do it anymore.
> But neither can you, whether or not you know it. Like I say, it’s only a matter of time until you’re in chains on Treasure Island. That’s not if, that’s when.
> So I’m through here. Down in Los Angeles, there are some people. They say they can keep me safe if I want to get out.
> I want to get out.
> I will take you with me, if you want to come. Better to be a fighter than a martyr. If you come with me, we can figure out how to win together. I’m as smart as you. Believe.