“Wow. How’d you follow that?”
“I didn’t! Until she told her story, I was going to do what everybody else did and puff myself up so people would like me. But once she said what she said, I realized I couldn’t, so I just passed.”
“Did you two end up friends?”
“You’d think so, right? I mean, that seems like where the story’s going. Thing is, I was in awe of her bravery, but I was so caught up in my own freshman-year awkwardness, I didn’t really know what to say to her-or how to act around her-so no. Not that I was rude to her or anything. I’d say hello when we ran into each other. But I never told her how inspiring her story was to me. I never told her how much it helped me realize my own teen angst was so much self-indulgent bullshit.”
“And I’m guessing from your tone that you can’t tell her now. What happened?”
“The same thing that always happens when someone has a genuine, human moment. Someone else came along to shit on it.”
“How so?”
“One of the guys in our first-night group talked some smack about her to his friends. They started teasing her for sport. Next thing you know, the whole campus is in on it, and her sixth-grade picture’s stapled up all over campus-only then her name was Thomas, not Rebecca. They turned her into a pariah. A sideshow attraction. And while plenty of kids spoke out publicly against it, none of them-none of us-had the guts to actually be a friend to her; we just made tutting noises from afar. She was a cause to us, not a person. And truthfully, I don’t think anyone was too surprised when she turned up dead.”
“Suicide?”
“The cops said no. Officially, her death was ruled an accidental overdose-one of four that year on campus, although the others weren’t fatal. Doesn’t it just fucking figure the only time anybody looked at her like she was a normal kid was when she was laid out on a slab?”
“That’s awful-but it doesn’t exactly explain why you left school.”
“I left because of what happened after.”
“What happened after?”
“That’s the problem. Nothing-or at least, not officially. In the months she’d been at school, Becca had reported dozens of instances of harassment. Her dorm room had been vandalized, her Facebook and Twitter accounts spammed. She’d put up with catcalls, hate speech, and public ridicule. But once she was found dead, the school pretended like none of that had ever happened. They just wanted to sweep any unpleasantness under the rug and move on.”
“I take it you had other plans?”
“You’re damn right I did. I felt like shit for not standing up for her-for not standing with her-when I had the chance. When it might’ve mattered. When it could’ve saved her life. I was too self-involved. Too timid. Too afraid. But I felt sick at the thought that the people who’d made her life a living hell would get away scot-free. So I took it upon myself to make sure they didn’t.”
“How?”
“The only way I knew how. My interest in school was graphic art-a handy skill set for an ID forger, by the way-but my first love, and greatest talent, has always been computers. Mom raised me on them. I’ve been coding for as long as I’ve been reading, and I’ve been breaking into secure networks for sport for going on eight years. So I did what I do best. I hacked the dickbags who’d been harassing her online. Wrote a worm that’d infect their smartphones and look for any correspondence in which the name Becca was mentioned. Ditto the words tranny, she-male, and half a dozen other terms so awful they’d make you blush. Then I did the same for anyone who’d received those messages. In the end, I had a list of twenty-three hard-core offenders. Anyone who had just stood by while they jawed, I dropped from my list, because I figured they weren’t any worse than me-all they did was not speak up.”
“And what happened to those twenty-three?”
“I rigged their search history so it looked like they’d visited chat rooms of known terror groups. Added them to the no-fly list. Posted their Social Security numbers and credit card information on the dark web. Made a website for each of them that kept track of their online-porn-viewing habits and rigged the SEO so it’d be the first hit anybody who Googled them found.”
“Damn. Remind me to never piss you off.”
“Better to have me as an ally than an enemy,” she agreed. “Anyway, I mighta bragged a little that I was behind the sites, and the administration caught wind. The dean of students didn’t appreciate my efforts. It turns out one of the kids who’d been harassing Becca was a legacy whose family name was on our sports complex.”
“They tossed you out?”
“Yeah. For violating school policy on bullying, of all things.”
“Ouch.”
“The irony wasn’t lost on me,” she said. Then she patted his stomach gingerly. “You’re all stitched up, by the way.”
Hendricks inspected her work. For someone with no medical training, she’d managed a passable suturing job. It wouldn’t heal pretty, but it’d heal. One more scar for the collection, he thought. There’d come a day he wouldn’t be able to tell this one from all the others.
“Thanks,” he said. “You got anything to eat? Seems like I should replace some of the stuffing that I lost.”
“Sure,” she said. “You want ramen or ramen?”
Hendricks smiled. “Ramen’s fine.”
Cameron filled her electric kettle and turned it on.
“Shame you don’t have a TV,” he said. “I’d love to check the local news, see if anybody’s looking for us.”
She looked at him like he’d just lamented her lack of a Victrola. “What century is it again? I don’t need a TV-I have a laptop.”
“Oh,” he said, chastened. “Right. Fire it up for me, would you?”
Cameron took a USB drive from her pocket, inserted it into the port on the side of her laptop, and turned the laptop on. It booted scary-fast. “Can you take it from here,” she asked, “or do I need to explain to you what a browser is?”
“I’m good, thanks.”
Hendricks went to Google News, but before he’d typed anything in the field, the day’s top headlines caught his eye. “Ah, hell,” he muttered.
“What’s wrong?”
“There’s been some kind of attack.”
“Where?”
He clicked through to CNN. A video began to play-three talking heads blabbing at once, with a disaster scene behind them on the big screen. “San Francisco,” he said. “The Golden Gate.”
“Oh God,” she said, crossing the room and peering over his shoulder at the screen. “I grew up just south of there, in Redwood City. Is it still standing? Is anyone hurt?”
“The bridge is still there,” he said, watching shaky helicopter footage of first responders trying to rescue people trapped atop it. The faces of the stranded were filthy and slick from the spray of the fireboats below. Their expressions were a mix of hope and terror. Thick dark smoke mingled with the rising steam and periodically blocked the bridge from view. “But it looks like there were casualties.”
The kettle clicked off, the water inside boiling. Neither of them moved.
They watched awhile in heartsick silence. The images of the rescue efforts were soon replaced by cell-phone footage of the attack itself, film that looked as if it was initially intended to be a cheery home movie. Then came a grainy video of a young man with a scraggly beard dressed in traditional Muslim garb. He claimed credit on behalf of a terror group whose name meant nothing to Hendricks-which was odd, he thought, given that his old unit had hunted terrorists for years-and promised there were more attacks to come. After that was a statement from the president urging calm, followed by a tirade from that blowhard Senator Wentworth, who insisted America close its borders and turn the Middle East into a parking lot. Between each segment, the talking heads parsed, speculated, stoked, argued, and divided.