At age ten, a series of pictures marked his two months in Singapore as an exchange student at a Chinese-language immersion program at one of Hunting Valley Academy’s sister schools, followed by shots taken all over China on vacation with his family. He’d pleaded with his parents not to send him overseas by himself, and he’d overheard bits and pieces of their arguing with the board on his behalf, citing his understandable predisposition to separation anxiety. But the Avillage board had refused to budge. And it turned out he’d actually enjoyed himself once he’d gotten over there.
Age eleven saw a gradual shift toward more pictures with friends and fewer with his parents, although he did pose proudly next to his dad as co-champions of the Father-Son Invitational Golf Tournament at their country club.
After a single picture from his twelfth birthday party, a new picture he’d never seen before popped up in the frame, featuring a sheet of plain white paper with a hand-written message in penciclass="underline" "Check out your mom’s purple shirt." He didn’t get it.
In the final shot before the loop restarted, he was lying on his stomach on top of his sheets, the back of his Cleveland Browns boxers prominently featured, craning his head up and back to squint perturbedly at his parents as they entered his room. His dad must have already wirelessly uploaded the photo from just a few minutes prior. Ryan couldn’t help but laugh. But that was not staying on the frame.
After finishing up his breakfast, he reached over and hit the sleep button on the frame, stood up to stretch, and then took a long nostalgic look around his room. The pirate bed had been replaced by a mundanely conventional queen-sized bed. The desk and chair were no longer kid-sized, the huge closet, stocked with far fewer clothes, seemed even bigger in its emptiness, and the color of the walls had changed. But for a brief moment he could see the room just as it had appeared that first day. The unique smell that every house has, which he’d become so accustomed to that he hadn’t noticed it in years, came back in a wave, and he sniffed it in with a long deep breath, gently closing his eyes as a lump began to develop in his throat.
He shook his head, embarrassed by his emotions, forced a half-smile, and headed for the shower.
Ryan still hadn’t told anyone what he knew about AVEX ticker symbol RTJ, which was now hidden in an alphabet soup of symbols representing former orphans on the half-full back page of the New York Times Business section.
Strict rules restricted the press from revealing the identities of publicly-traded minors, but it had dawned on him after watching his stock price rise five percent the day after he’d won the spelling bee that his identity was not an especially well-kept secret.
A week or so later, he’d convinced one of his friends at school to request a prospectus on each and every symbol on the exchange, to avoid having the material show up at his home address.
In his sparse free-time, usually after his parents were asleep, he’d begun to track down other orphans. Some were easy — like J’Quarius Jones. Others were harder. Some seemed downright impossible. One poor orphan he was never able to locate had been relegated to penny-stock status after her prospectus had revealed that she’d been diagnosed with “an aggressive hematologic malignancy.” Never having learned her identity, Ryan could almost feel her struggle as her stock price bounced around under ten cents a share for the next two months. His heart had sunk one morning when he noticed SUZ had dropped off the exchange altogether.
So far, he had a list of close to a hundred names matched with their probable symbols. None of them were in Cleveland, and he had yet to try contact any of them.
“Ready?” Thomas asked, as Ryan deposited the breakfast tray on the kitchen counter next to the sink.
“Time to go back-to-back!” Ryan said, looking forward to the defense of their father-son golf championship. “Bye, mom,” he yelled to the living room. Then he turned back to his dad with a perplexed expression, “She’s not wearing a purple shirt. What were you talking about?”
“Uh… I have no idea,” Thomas said, looking every bit as confused as Ryan.
“Yeah, right. Those pictures you uploaded this morning?”
“I don’t know anything about any pictures,” Thomas answered with a sarcastic grin, but still not fully clued in. He had only uploaded one picture.
“Whatever,” Ryan said rolling his eyes. He still didn’t get it.
Dillon Higley knew something terrible was about to happen when the power went out in the Boston townhouse he lived in with his dad. The mid-September weather was picture perfect, and their house was equipped not only with a backup generator, but a separately-housed backup to the backup generator. And his dad religiously checked the fuel status of each one twice a week, whether they had been in use or not.
Dillon crept over to the window and peeled back the lower corner of the curtains to see if the traffic lights were out. No. And the lights were still on at the bike shop across the street.
As his gaze shifted away from the bike shop, out of the corner of his eye, he just caught sight of an oblong black object about the size of a soup can hurtling toward him. A fraction of a second later the sound of glass shattering was followed by a heavy thud, as the black pill-shaped object struck the living room floor and began to spin, spitting out a thick cloud of caustic smoke.
Coughing, wheezing, tearing, Dillon pulled the collar of his shirt up over his nose and ran for the back of the house, yelling for his dad as he caromed off furniture and walls nearly blind, helplessly trying to blink away the irritants.
Just as he finally reached his dad’s bedroom, a battering ram punched through the back door, splintering the wood around the bronze door knob, which fell to the floor next to his feet.
Before he could get the door to his dad’s room open, he was snatched by a masked FBI agent in full assault gear and carted off to a field unit half a block away to have his eyes irrigated with sterile saline.
The next time he would see his father, they would be separated by an inch of plexiglass and fifteen years, minimum. His father would be convicted on every count brought against him, ranging from piracy in his early days to more recent (and far more serious) theft and distribution of classified United States government documents.
Aside from being a closeted anarchist, Horace Higley had actually been a pretty great parent. Dillon’s mother had left without so much as a goodbye to either of them when Dillon was six months old, so Horace was the only parent Dillon had ever known.
Horace genuinely loved his son, and he’d done everything he could to try to give him a reasonable, almost typical, childhood. He’d signed him up for soccer on his sixth birthday, since that seemed to be what other six-year-olds were doing. He’d even brought the post-game snacks and drinks once per season for the two seasons Dillon had stuck it out. But after wasting a dozen fall and spring Saturday afternoons sitting on the sidelines of the soccer field, Dillon on the bench, Horace in a lawn chair, they quietly bowed out, accepting the obvious fact that sports weren’t Dillon’s thing.
Next he tried music. But it took only two months of formal piano lessons and regular at-home practice on the small keyboard that Horace had bought him to convince Dillon, his father, and his piano teacher that music wasn’t where his talents lay either. It was really by exclusion, environment, and quite possibly genetics that Dillon ended up following his dad into computer programming.