Was it because he had simply taken Thaddeus for granted?
"Well, good luck," Thaddeus said. "It sounds interesting. But don't be disappointed if you fail to pull this off the first time round." Leaning forward, he fixed Cadel with a searching look. "People aren't motherboards," he said quietly. "They're not like chemicals—they don't always respond the same way when you mix them, no matter how precisely you might have measured and calculated. I can teach you about the Myers-Briggs Personality Test, and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, and the Global Assessment Function, but in the end, Cadel, there really isn't a formula for predicting people's behavior."
"Don't worry," Cadel replied, with a confidence that he could only afford to air in the privacy of Dr. Roth's consulting room. "If there isn't a formula now, there soon will be. I'm working on it. And this dating service will help me."
It was Dr. Darkkon's computer phone that allowed Cadel to develop Partner Post. Without the converted cell phone, Cadel never could have carried out his plans; he wouldn't have had enough time online. From the very start, he had to spend hours working on e-mail messages, organizing client information, and developing character charts. (Keeping records of the various people he created was especially important, because he had to be consistent. He couldn't afford to forget what color someone's eyes were supposed to be, or how many children they were supposed to have.)
Thanks to the computer phone, the Piggotts didn't get suspicious. Whenever they began to wonder what Cadel was doing and poked their heads into his room, they would find him lying on his bed, fiddling with his cell phone. That didn't seem to worry them. Apparently, they were delighted that Cadel even
had
any friends—especially friends who wanted to speak to him for hours at a time. As far as they were concerned, endless phone calls were a normal part of growing up. They congratulated each other, loudly and proudly, over the dinner table every night. Cadel, it seemed, was shedding his antisocial behavior. At last he was starting to blossom.
Maybe, said Lanna, he would actually bring some
girls
home soon. Like a normal teenager.
In fact, Cadel's off-line social life was almost nonexistent. Even online, he had separated himself from the society of his fellow hackers. There was a huge population of bright sparks out in cyberspace, and for a while Cadel had become involved in Internet associations like the Masters of Deception. He enjoyed the company of others who spent their spare time burrowing into heavily protected networks. He liked sharing thoughts on code-breaking modules, encryption programs, dynamic passwords, and electronic re-mailers. The trouble was that to some of these cyberspies, nothing was sacred. Because Cadel himself had whipped up some very challenging little firewalls featuring "asymmetrical ciphering" (to protect sensitive material like his Partner Post database) he became a target for some fellow hackers. They sent in sniffing programs to intercept his access code. They bombarded him with the contents of password dictionaries. They pestered him like mosquitoes until he became enraged.
From then on, his user name disappeared from newsgroups and bulletin boards frequented by the world's hackers. He simply didn't trust them enough to make friends, though he did keep an eye on the latest breakthroughs.
As for his face-to-face contacts, they were just as unsuccessful. He was only thirteen when he entered twelfth grade, around the beginning of first term. All the other kids in this grade were four or five years older than he was, and they thought him a joke. A freak. Their interests revolved around cars, clothes, sex, and (sometimes) exams, so Cadel didn't fit in at all. He wasn't old enough to drive. He was too small to wear most of the trendy clothes. And he'd never had sex, of course, though he was starting to think about it a good deal, simply because of Partner Post. There was a lot of sex talk on his secure sites—more than he'd ever anticipated—and he was reluctant to ask Thaddeus for help on
this
subject. Fortunately, the Piggotts kept a large stock of dirty magazines in their dressing room. And a few of the twelfth-grade boys talked about sex endlessly, obsessively.
So Cadel was able to piece together some convincing replies to his clients, many of whom, he thought indignantly, were quite disgusting. They didn't deserve to have real partners, in his opinion. They didn't deserve to have partners at
all.
Cadel spent eight months in twelfth grade, and over this time the Partner Post client base grew from eight to sixty-eight. Only two of these clients were ever introduced to other clients; most of them were provided with fake partners, designed to meet their every need. Cadel even bought an old Photoshop program and pasted together fake "happy snaps" of his fictional clients. He enjoyed doing this. He also enjoyed the challenge of sparking someone's interest, and eventually managed to calculate a primitive kind of formula that allowed him to slot each applicant into one of ten different categories.
Thaddeus and Cadel had spent entire appointments thrashing out an assessment form that would define the personality of each client. "Sometimes," Thaddeus pointed out, "what they say they want in a partner isn't really what they need in a partner. You have to watch that. You have to watch for the red flags. The use of language—that's very important. There's always a subtext, Cadel,
always.
Never take
anyone
at face value. Everyone always has adjustments to make in this world."
"And what if they're lying?" Cadel queried. "What if they say they have a university degree, for example, and they really don't? How do I work out what they need if I don't know the truth about them? I can run online checks, but there might be gaps."
Thaddeus looked down his long nose at Cadel.
"You might as well ask the same thing about everyone you meet," he observed. "What have you been doing this last year? You've been researching Crampton. And how have you been doing it? By insinuating yourself into people's conversations. By watching and listening and judging. Isn't that so?"
"I guess..."
"Well, then." Thaddeus adjusted his spectacles. "Just continue to do what you've been doing, Cadel. Most people aren't good liars—not like you. They don't have the memory for it. They aren't comfortable with it. They overreach themselves. Don't worry," he added, turning back to the first draft of his personality-test questions. "They're bound to slip up before too long. And you're bound to notice when they do."
Cadel rubbed his nose. He said, in a small voice, "You think I'm a good liar?"
Thaddeus glanced at him. "Don't you?"
"I suppose so." Cadel had never really thought of it as
lying.
He had thought of it in terms of stalling, outwitting, omitting. He liked to regard himself as a heroic loner, battling mighty forces, not as a sneaky little outcast.
Thaddeus surveyed him with a detached, appraising expression.
"You have the face for it," he went on. "An innocent face. Not all of us are so fortunate. If you said that you'd never let food pass your lips, I'd almost believe it." Seeing Cadel's troubled look, he narrowed his eyes. "What I told you about never taking people at face value, Cadel, applies just as much to words. Words don't really have fixed definitions. You'll find that out as you grow older. The word
liar
isn't as straightforward as it sounds." Once again, he turned to his draft questions. "Now," he said, "we might throw in a few multiple-choice questions here. Just to relax 'em. What do you think?"
Much to Cadel's surprise, Partner Post attracted more male than female clients. This meant that he was forced to impersonate a lot of women, and he found it very difficult indeed. Women's magazines proved helpful, as did some of the novels he borrowed from the library. He also eavesdropped on the twelfth-grade girls, who talked ceaselessly about boys, movies, music, and clothes. He would copy down what they said, then use some of it in what he privately called his "smoochy" emails. Because he was so small and quiet, he was usually able to listen in without being noticed.
After a while, he even became quite attached to some of the twelfth-grade girls. He couldn't help it. Most of them were stupid, and a few were quite cruel, but two, at least, were bright, and nice, and pretty. Ayesha wanted to be a musician (she played the viola) and had long, smooth dark hair, a vivid, intense face, and an eccentric taste in clothes. Rhiannon was different; she was freckled and witty, with a bubbling laugh, generous curves, and a razor-sharp mind when it came to puns, insults, and one-liners. She was also very good at foreign languages, having mastered at least three.
Cadel admired both these girls. When he tried to talk to them, however, he didn't know what to say. Ayesha was often so distracted that she hardly registered his attempts to make conversation. She was always running off to rehearsals, or arguing with someone about Greenpeace, or scribbling frantically away in a notebook with a worn leather binding. Rhiannon was less busy, but she was always surrounded by a circle of laughing friends. She was hugely popular because she was so funny—and sometimes she was funny at other people's expense.
This became horribly clear to Cadel one day when he was in the library at lunchtime. It was a sunny day, and the windows were open; a soft breeze carried the sound of distant shouts and squeals from the playground into the dim corner where Cadel was sitting. Then, to his surprise, he heard Rhiannon's voice. He realized that she was perched on a bench just beneath the library window, talking to her friends Seth, Sally, and Caitlin. They were talking about a classic German film called
M,
and Rhiannon was impersonating an old movie actor called Peter Lorre. She was an excellent mimic, on top of everything else.
"But it was a silent film," Caitlin objected. "Peter Lorre didn't talk in that film."
"Jesus, didn't he?" Rhiannon retorted. "Then I guess it must have been the voices in my head. Come to think of it, they
were
telling me to 'kill, kill, kill.' Naturally, I assumed it was Peter Lorre."
"Peter Lorre went to Hollywood, you dong," Seth pointed out wearily, addressing himself to Caitlin. "He was in lots of films. That's why most of us know what he sounded like."
"Well,
I've
never seen him," said Caitlin. "What's he been in, anyway?"
"
Arsenic and Old Lace,
" Rhiannon replied promptly.
"Never heard of it."
"You've never heard of anything," Seth sighed.
"You know who he reminds me of? Peter Lorre?" Rhiannon suddenly remarked. "I was watching that film, and you know who I thought of? Cadel Piggott."
Cadel's heart skipped a beat as a burst of laughter greeted this comment.
"Cadel
Piggott?
" Sally exclaimed. "No."
"They don't look anything like each other," Caitlin declared.
"Except for the pop eyes," Seth mused. "And the pudgy hands. And the moon face."
"I'm not saying they
look
alike," said Rhiannon. "I'm saying they
act
alike. They sort of creep around like cockroaches—"
"You think Cadel Piggott's a
killer?
" Seth demanded in melodramatic tones.
"Who knows?" said Rhiannon. "I wouldn't put it past him. He's bound to be an underwear stealer."
"An underwear
sniffer!
" Seth yelped.
"Oh, for sure." Rhiannon laughed. "You can see the skid marks under his nose!"
Cadel got up and closed his book. He left the library. From that day on, his admiration for Rhiannon turned into acute dislike. He had overheard other twelfth-grade students joking about his personal life but had never considered Rhiannon capable of jumping on that bandwagon. It made him very bitter.
He became disillusioned with Ayesha shortly afterward. Rhiannon and Seth were an item, he knew, but Ayesha didn't appear to have a boyfriend. Although she enjoyed the company of Chris and Bruno, she didn't seem to be going out with either. Bruno was a handsome smartass who played in a band. Chris was a stringy-looking hippy with a gentle soul and no critical abilities to speak of. He played acoustic guitar.
In Cadel's opinion, Ayesha stood head and shoulders above both these boys. What's more, she scoffed at "traditional" attitudes toward mating and dating. So when plans were announced for the end-of-year formal, which was still several months away, it crossed his mind that this might be his opportunity to connect with Ayesha. If she had a problem with all the tired, conservative "pairing-up" that went on at a school dance, she might actually consider going to the formal with him. As a kind of statement.
"No thanks, Cadel," she said, when approached. "I don't think so."
"Are you going with someone else?"
"I haven't decided."
"Then, why not me?"
They were standing near a lilac bush, and there were tiny mauve petals sliding down Ayesha's hair. They looked so pretty—
she
looked so pretty—that Cadel had found the courage to speak out. "It would be a non-ageist decision, don't you think?" he pressed. "And we could do it in style."
"Style isn't my style," Ayesha pointed out.
"No. That's true." Cadel ticked a mental box. Of course, Ayesha wasn't a limousine sort of person. "All right, then. No limousine. But you have to admit I've got more up here"—he tapped his head—"than most of the kids at this school combined. So why won't you take a chance? Since you like to be different."
Ayesha gave an exasperated sigh. She shifted her books from one arm to the other and tucked a strand of black hair behind her ear.
"You see, that's exactly why I don't want to go with you," she said. "I mean, you're so damned smug. 'I'm rich, I'm smart, I'm pretty, I've got the lowdown on everyone.' You sit there looking superior—can't even be bothered talking to people—"
"But—"
"You might think you know everything about everything, Cadel, but you don't know a thing about yourself. If you weren't so snotty, I'd feel sorry for you, I really would. Coming up to me like you're doing me a favor..." She shook her head. "And if you really
are
gay, like everyone says, then it's even sadder. Be honest with yourself. Take a look at yourself. Don't be pathetic."