By four o’clock I’d been read my rights, formally arrested, and released to my parents on $40,000 bail. I couldn’t tell by that number if I was a huge flight risk or a minor one. The CIA could move at warp speed if it wanted to, and they seemed to be in a huge rush to wrap this up.
Quick reality check: Sure, I was in a pretty stressful situation, but stress is completely relative. There is no absolute value to stress. There was a time when I thought that picking a lunch table was stressful. Of course, that was before I had to crack Jonas Furnis’s asinine code to keep him from blowing up Disney World. So if you’re wondering why I’m not curled up in a ball sobbing because there’s a 99 percent chance I’m going to be thrown in jail for some period of my youth, it’s because of these facts:
At this point, a quiet year in a white-collar prison with time to think about all that had happened and what I was going to do with the mess I’d made of my life . . . Well, it didn’t sound that terrible. And they don’t even make prisoners wear stripes anymore (deal breaker). I double-checked.
M
R. AND MRS. BENNETT INSISTED THAT
my parents check out of the Holiday Inn and that we all come spend the night at their house. I’m done saying,
What? You have a house here too?
I’m at the point where I pretty much assume that wherever they go, there’s going to be a perfectly appointed home. This one was a normal-size house on a normal-looking street in McLean, Virginia. It had a welcoming porch with rockers and a freshly painted white swing with green-and-white-striped cushions on it. The front door opened to a wide staircase, with a living room on the left and a dining room on the right. Delicious smells came from the kitchen in the back of the house, and the fireplaces were lit. It smelled like normal.
Mrs. Bennett led us upstairs to the four bedrooms. Theirs, plus one for my parents, one for John and Uncle Bob, and a room for Danny and me. “Sorry, sis, you’re bunking with me.” Danny gave me a too-hard nudge and a too-big wink that made me wish the tiny landing was an awful lot bigger. And darker.
Mrs. Bennett saved me. “Danny, would you be averse to my offering you a proper pair of pants?”
“Averse?” He looked to me for a definition. “I don’t think so.”
After dinner I sat with my mom and Danny in the kitchen. We drank tea and talked about non-terror-related topics at home. Mom didn’t seem too concerned that Danny had missed a bunch of school, and I waited for him to announce that he wasn’t going to apply to college anyway. He didn’t.
Instead he said, “Bet you never thought Digit would be the kid going to jail.”
Mom looked up from her tea, eyes only. “At least she’s dressed for it.”
“Ha-ha. I’ll be fine. Danny’s new hula-girl look would probably get him the wrong kind of attention in there anyway.”
“Hello, I’m wearing pants now. Brooks Brothers khakis, no less. How could you possibly get arrested in these pants?”
After tackling the big topics, I found John and Dad and Mr. Bennett on the front porch. They stopped talking when they saw me. “What’s going on?” I asked.
“Just a couple of old guys meddling.” Mr. Bennett gave me a little smile.
John put up his hands. “I found them like this. I’ve tried to switch topics, but my life is everyone’s business now.” He patted the seat on the swing next to him, inviting me to sit.
“It’s not your life that we’re all that interested in, son.” Mr. Bennett gave John a nod and clapped his hands once. “So we’re all clear here? Good,” he said, and got up to leave.
Dad took his cue. “Yes, good talk. Good talk. Good night.”
I maneuvered myself so that John would have no choice but to put his arm around me. Some people may not be familiar with this move, maybe because I made it up. It involves a bit of nudging in the direction of the person next to you. So much nudging in fact that the victim’s arm feels a little short of breathing room. Invariably, the arm will rise up and rest around the assailant’s shoulders. Disclaimer: I’ve only used this move on one person, but it works like a charm. “So, you guys have all the world’s problems worked out?”
“Just ours.”
“How’s that?”
“We wait.” Here we go. “Those two are more worried about you wasting your potential by hanging out with me than I am. It’s not flattering.”
I took his free hand. “So, I don’t get to decide who I waste my time and potential with anymore?”
“Guess not.”
“Come on. Be serious. What were you talking about?”
“I’m not sure if you’re too close to see what’s happened, or if you’re too far away.” He turned to face me. “We could have woken up this morning to a nation with no energy sources and a dead economy. We would have been subsisting off of a couple thousand windmills and whatever crops we could grow without tractors and farm equipment. Either that, or Manhattan would have been blown off the map. Do you understand what you did yesterday?”
“I cracked a code. It was a hard one, but it was just a code.” I understood, but I wasn’t comfortable pulling the camera angle back quite that far yet.
“You’re smart, Digit. Lots of people are. But the government doesn’t have anyone with abilities like yours. I doubt the world does. You’re important to me, maybe everything to me. But yesterday you were everything to the world. See what I mean?” I really only processed “everything to me.”
So I nodded, enthusiastically. “So what do we have to wait for exactly?”
“I don’t know. But my dad is obsessed with my letting you be until you’re twenty-three, and your dad is obsessed with all of us just letting you be.”
“Twenty-three?” Don’t make me do that math for you.
“I thought that was crazy too. I agreed to twenty-one. And believe me, I just want to take you to the airport right now and be gone. Like not check back in for twenty years. But your dad just asked me, what if you and I had been at the movies yesterday or hiking in Nepal? Jonas Furnis got all that money and those weapons without you. He could have just launched them, to get things going.”
“So, you’re saying if you and I are together, it’ll be the end the world.” I was getting the big picture here, but c’mon.
“Maybe.”
This wasn’t funny anymore. “So, really what’s going on here is that you’re breaking up with me because of my gift.”
No air quotes, it is what it is
. “That’s discrimination.”
“Yeah, can we just get back to that? Breaking up? I’m not breaking up with you. I was trying to tell you that six weeks ago. Breaking up is what you do when you don’t want to be with someone anymore. Trust me, Digit, I want to be with you. I want to take up all of your time. Can you hear the problem there? You are, at eighteen, a threat to national security and the key to solving any number of the world’s problems. What if you had an education? What if you got to work with your precious Professor Halsey? Do you see? You can’t miss that.”
I did see. But what I couldn’t explain to him is that I was exhausted, that maybe I didn’t want to save the world. How did all these problems become my problem? And since when do all the world’s problems cost you your boyfriend? I have honestly never heard of a person who has so many people trying to steer the direction of her life. “So what are you and the dads proposing again?”
“My dad is adamant that I not see you until you graduate. Your dad is adamant that this is none of his business. I think I like him as much as you do. But he is concerned about you missing out on your education. And toga parties.”
“There was just the one.”
John smiled and gave me a hug. “I’m glad you went. This is going to be worse for me than for you. You’re going to be busy; I’m going to be waiting.”
When did I get to be this high-drama crime fighter? I just wanted to go to college and see what was there, and suddenly everyone had all these plans for me. Even my dad, who tries to play it all neutral all the time. I knew he was silently cheering me into battle.
“Even that lunatic gave me choices.”
“You always have a choice.”
“Not between being with you and waiting. Or being normal and saving the world.”
“You do. I just don’t want to make that choice for you.”
I imagined going back to school to work full-time for Professor Halsey and then coming back to my dorm or maybe a small apartment and having John there ready to take me to dinner or out for a walk to hear about my day. I let out a small laugh.
“What?”
“I think in my perfect world, you are my prisoner. That’s not fair either, is it?”
“I think we’ve done enough of the prisoner thing. Here.” John fixed the pillow at the end of the swing so that we could both put our heads on it and lie down. He kept his arm over me as we swung to keep me from falling off.
I had a thousand things to say, most of which sounded really good in my head. They were snappy movie script lines, the kind that would stay with him forever as he sorted through a box of old photos and remembered me as the one who got away. At some point, my mind must have rebelled. It had had enough of codes and puzzles, both numeric and emotional. My eyes were heavy, and I was relatively safe. I guess I dozed off in John’s arms.
I
WOKE UP ON THE PORCH SWING
at seven
A.M.
, and John was gone. Someone had covered me in a heavy down comforter and tucked it all around me. The morning was cold, but I could only feel it on my face. The neighborhood seemed to be awake and to have had at least one cup of coffee. There was a newspaper on the lawn, and in the distance I could hear a garage door opening.
I stared at the perfectly manicured hedge that defined the Bennetts’ property. It wasn’t the kind of thing you’d ever find in nature. Nature seems to work more in curves than it does in straight lines. Nature would construct a different kind of hedge; I guess it would be called a forest. I thought about the earth and the rivers over it, like my veins. I thought of Mother Earth as a living organism, being cut back and managed and tamed. All of a sudden my carefully tucked comforter felt like a straitjacket.
I freed my arms and found a small piece of paper on my pillow. “The waiting begins now. I love you.”
By the time I went in for breakfast, I was puffy-eyed. Mr. Bennett informed me that John had left for New York at four a.m. No one had seen him go, so I couldn’t ask about the puffiness of his eyes.
Everyone was seated in the kitchen except for the moms, who were scurrying around preparing way too much food. It seemed like one of those kitchen competition shows.
Danny was practically draped over his waffles. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked.
“What do you think?” I was in no mood to play pleasant.
“Right. That.”
Mr. Bennett and my dad looked at me intermittently over the newspapers. Mr. Bennett had folded the paper over so that the page facing me was a large photograph of Jonas Furnis and a headline:
ECO-TERRORIST ESCAPES FEDS AND TEEN HACKER.
The longer I sat there, the madder I got. I mean, I didn’t volunteer for this. I really liked my boyfriend. I never even got to go to New York to do the whole romantic weekend thing. Or Hawaii, by the way! And now here they were, John included, deciding that I should be a monk and study my brains out so that I could help the stupid world with its stupid problems.
Mr. Bennett gave me one line: “Do we need to talk?”
“No. I get it. I don’t like it, but I get it.”
“Good.”
My mom gestured with a wooden spoon. “Darling, have you thought of joining a sorority? I read that they rush in September, but you could start looking into it . . .”
“Rebecca, she’s not a sorority girl.” Mrs. Bennett seemed to think she was defending me, but her comment was my breaking point.
“Hey, how about this? How about since I’m old enough to be tried for a felony and sent to prison, how about we let me decide what kind of girl I am? And how I spend my time. Okay?” The kitchen was silent. I’d either gone too far or not far enough, I couldn’t tell.
“I’m sorry, dear.” Mrs. Bennett turned off the bacon and came to sit next to me. “None of this is fair to you.”
“If I were just a normal person, I would be having a normal, happy life.”
“If you were just a normal person, none of us would have ever met you.” Mrs. Bennett put a hand on my shoulder, and I started to cry again. No one minded. Mr. Bennett went back to the paper.
Uncle Bob came downstairs with a healthy appetite for bacon and very little new information. (It also turned out that he was an entertainment attorney, dealing mostly with movie stars’ contracts. You know, who gets their own trailer with a bowl of blue M&M’S, etc.) He informed me that I’d violated something called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
“Is that all you’ve got?”
“Yes.” He seemed to think it was plenty. “You got anything?”
“Sure. An ulcer and a future in an orange jumpsuit.”
“No, I mean any ideas? You know, for your defense.”
“The law’s pretty black-and-white, and what I did was pretty illegal and intentional.”
“Yes, there’s that. I have some kids from MIT who want to speak at the trial in your defense. That’s good, right?”
I imagined Tiki recounting the whole “Howard’s a cheating jerk” story in gruesome detail. It made me feel better for a minute.
“And I think I remember seeing once in
USA Today
that in 2010 the longest sentence ever handed down for hacking was thirteen years. So we know what the worst case is. That’s good, right?”
Yep, my lawyer was basing my defense on something he thinks he may have read in
USA Today.
That’s good, right?
The next morning we said our goodbyes and headed up to Boston. Mom, Dad, Uncle Bob, and Danny had to get back to L.A. that afternoon and were, of course, coming back in two weeks for the trial.