“Not with your track record, young man,” Mom said as she cleared the salad dishes.
Dad was ignoring the interplay, still tapping out e-mails on his tablet.
“Mr. Mulroy didn’t know what other things the young man had been up to. All he knew was that he’d been associated with extensive vandalism incidents.”
“So does the vandal have a name?” Alix asked.
Dad looked up at her, frowning, suddenly serious.
Alix stopped short, surprised. It was the first time he’d really looked at her all night. Normally, Dad was Mr. Multitasker, thinking about other things, working out puzzles with his job, only half there. It was a joke among all of them that you sometimes had to ask him a question three times before he even heard you. But now he was looking at Alix full force.
When Dad focused, he really focused.
“What?” Alix asked, feeling defensive. “What did I say?”
“No.”
“No, what?”
“No, he doesn’t have a name.”
“Nice. Ghost in the machine,” Jonah said, as usual completely unaware of the way the energy in the dining room had changed. “The man with no name.” He made a funny ghost noise to go with it. “Woooo.”
Dad didn’t even look over at Jonah. He was still looking at her, and she felt suddenly as if she was picking her way through a conversation that had become more important than she expected. Like the time Jonah had joked about seeing Kala Spelling’s mom having coffee with Mr. Underwood, the European History teacher.
“So…” Alix hesitated. “If they don’t know his name… then how do they know who they’re looking for? I thought you said he was identified.”
“He has a track record,” Dad said.
“But you don’t know his name?”
“He has a nickname,” Dad said, finally. “Something he marks his work with.”
“And it’s…”
“2.0.”
“That’s my GPA!” Jonah said.
“In your dreams,” Alix retorted. To her father, she said, “What’s the name supposed to mean?”
“If anyone knew, I’m sure they would have caught him already.”
Alix couldn’t sleep. The strange day and conversations hung with her. Finally, she got up and turned on her computer. Jonah wasn’t allowed to have a computer in his room, but Mom and Dad trusted her not to do “anything inappropriate,” as Mom put it, without actually meeting Alix’s eyes when she said it. So Sophie and Denise had spent a year jokingly warning her not to do “Anything Inappropriate” with her computer in her room.
She opened a browser and ran a search for 2.0.
She just came up with Wikipedia entries. A lot of entries for Web 2.0… Health 2.0… Creative Commons and the Apache Software Foundation came up. There were fistfuls of computer listings, actually. Software companies released new versions all the time, tracked by their release numbers. .09 beta. 1.2 release. 2.0. The Chrome browser she was using now had a release number, too, except it was something like 33.0.
2.0…
She tried image searching and scrolled idly through the pictures that came back. Lots of corporate logos, antiseptic and staid, even as they tried to claim that they were doing something new. Gov 2.0, City 2.0, and—seriously?—even a Dad 2.0. Apparently everything was 2.0. Even Dad could get a new version. Alix tried to imagine what a “Dad 2.0” would look like, but all that came to mind were paunchy, old dudes wearing hipster plaids and skinny jeans while swaggering around in Snuglis—
An image caught Alix’s eye. She scrolled back up. She’d almost missed it, but it was different from the others.
A spray-paint tag on the side of a smokestack. Instead of the carefully designed corporate brands with 2.0s affixed as an afterthought, this was 2.0 as red scrawl spray. From the image, it looked like it was maybe at an oil refinery. And the graffiti was high up, almost impossibly high. The image was a little blurry, shot with someone’s phone, but the 2.0 was starkly legible. In the foreground, dark and sooty pipes ran this way and that, linking grimy holding tanks in an industrial tangle. Against that dark foreground, the number was like a beacon, rising high above the pipes and steam.
2.0. Bright and red and defiant.
Alix clicked through to the site, hoping for more images or an explanation, but the site the image came from was just a website for street graffiti from around the world. Random people uploading their random exploits. Among all the other art, the one that she’d found wasn’t particularly compelling. It wasn’t complex or wildly colorful. It wasn’t particularly clever or strange or thought-provoking. Except for its location, it was an unremarkable tag. Not like a Banksy, for example. Over the winter, Cynthia had become obsessed with Banksy because he’d been in the news again. She’d persuaded Alix to catch the train down to the city for the day to go on a treasure hunt for the guerrilla street art. They’d spent the day canvassing New York, digging up every instance they could find of where the street artist had left his mark.
Alix kept scanning images, focused in the way she normally focused on Calc prep. Half an hour later she found one more picture with the 2.0 tag, this time on the side of what looked like a metal-sided warehouse. The picture looked like it had been snapped from beyond barbwire, but when she clicked through, there wasn’t any information on this one, either. Just a big metal building in some place that looked like it might have been a desert, judging from the yellow dirt around it.
2.0…
A new version of… something.
Alix kept scrolling, but those were the only images that seemed to particularly relate to 2.0 and vandalism, and even those didn’t carry any real information. She went back to the smokestack picture and studied it again.
The graffiti was ridiculously high up on the smokestack. Impossible for anyone to miss. A red scrawled challenge. An arrogant mark. A statement, standing out like a beacon above the soot and industrial grime of the refinery.
2.0.
Something new.
3
WHEN ALIX PULLED HER RED MINI into Seitz’s parking lot the next day, she found herself being challenged by a cop, who allowed her to park only after he saw her and Jonah’s school uniforms.
“Use the spaces on the far side of the lot,” he said.
“What the hell?” Alix muttered as she maneuvered the MINI through the clogged parking area, avoiding students and other cars searching for spaces. She found an empty slot and parked.
“Is there some kind of event happening?” Jonah wondered, as students and people from off the street streamed past.
“Guess we’re going to find out.”
Alix grabbed her schoolbag and climbed out of the car. Standing beside her MINI, she scanned the crowd around the Seitz main gate. Maybe someone famous was coming to tour the school. Seitz students and teachers, along with town bystanders, clogged all the sidewalks and approaches to the grounds.
Alix caught sight of Derek and Cynthia in the throng. “Come on,” she said to Jonah. “And stick close, for once.”
She pushed into the crowd, bumping and nudging through, wedging herself between students and bystanders. Up ahead, she spied yellow crime-scene tape and heard someone shouting for everyone to move back, move back.
Broken glimpses through the crush of the crowd showed the flashing red lights of an ambulance. Alix’s heart beat faster.
I hope someone isn’t hurt, was her first thought. Followed quickly by, I hope it’s not someone I know.