Authors: Stephen Graham Jones
Just before she picked me up, my dad surely driving home from his shift, his face grim as ever, his talk radio whispering to him—I was having to time this so perfect—my phone buzzed with a text.
It was the lamp in my living room, the image I’d deleted. It was just standing there. Different anonymous number.
I looked to RJ’s house and the one light that was on, it went off.
Pulling away with Lindsay, then, we passed RJ’s dad, and, right before she turned right for her house, I caught RJ’s dad’s brake lights flaring. So he wouldn’t run over that shattered bottle on his concrete. So he could get out, be sure he was seeing what he was seeing. So he could walk inside, ask RJ what he knew about this, RJ looking up at him from his laptop, a tolerant grin already pasted on his face.
I shut my eyes, rubbed a cold beer against my face, and I’m sure it goes without saying here that, when we got to her place, her parents were gone like she’d said—that was never the part anybody lied about—but four of her friends
were
there, and they
had
brought movies.
They held their hands over the back of the couch for the beer, laughed and giggled, and I slept in Lindsay’s little brother’s bedroom, could at least say now that I had spent the night at Lindsay’s, even if it was in dinosaur sheets. But I walked home the next morning without waking any of them, telling myself in my head that this was part of it, that this is how you grow up, that you can’t be a complete adult until you’ve acquired the requisite amount of shame, and all I was doing was placing one foot in front of the other, so that I heard that distinct little
pop
at nearly the exact moment I realized I’d just stepped up onto my driveway.
That pop, that shot, it had come from next door. From RJ’s. It was the sound the counselors and principals and police had all seen coming, that they were probably all ready for.
I stepped back to the middle of our yard, could feel the parentheses forming around my eyes, the hole starting in my chest, in my life, and then, like he’d been listening for this to happen for nine years now, like he could already see RJ’s dad slumping down against the wall by his bedroom, my dad straight-armed our door out, was walking down our flagstones with purpose.
Down along his right leg was the revolver he kept tucked into the seat of his no-nonsense chair.
In the bushes then, I heard something, a rustling, and my face prickled, my eyes caught on fire, and I knew as true as I’ve ever known anything that Cedric was about to push through, that his mouth was going to be bright with jewelry, and for a moment I even saw just that—the gold, splintering the early morning light—but then it was RJ, half his face dark with blown-back blood, his chest rising and falling, his dad’s small pistol already raised, his pace quick behind it, like he’d told himself he couldn’t do this, but maybe he could if he just walked really fast and pretended it was all a movie.
He was already pulling the trigger too, and it was soundless, or, all I could hear, it was all the women’s rings he was wearing, clacking against the trigger guard.
The first shot hit our brick wall where the roses used to grow, and the second whipped into the grass by my right foot, and the third slapped into my dad’s shoulder, spun him around a little, this sideways red plume hanging behind him now, just like a paintball that had gone all the way through somehow.
This had been coming too long for that to slow him down, though.
He was walking and shooting as well, pointing his gun like a finger at RJ, like it was some hard-earned truth he was telling him here. Like this lecture wasn’t over yet, son.
They met on the oil-stained concrete of our driveway, almost gun-to-gun, and neither stopped until they were empty, and just before RJ slumped over, back into the bushes, the best parts of him spread all over my yard, he looked over to me like he was seeing me over Cedric’s grave for the first time, seeing that he wasn’t going to have do this alone after all, and I could see in his eyes that he was saving me, with this. From my dad. That our summer romance wasn’t over yet.
And then the rest.
Our app, dead. Our web page, dead. RJ and my dad, dead. Cedric’s grave empty. The school in mourning, extra counselors bussing in, news vans lurking. My mom getting a triangle flag she just put in the top of the closet. Somebody down at the grocery store saluting me so that I had to duck down an aisle I didn’t even want.
Over, done with, gone, end of program, reboot.
Except.
Three days ago, thumbing through my app drawer, I lucked onto ours. The last version RJ had rigged, the black-backgrounded one, with the maroon letters so faint you had to kind of just trust they were there.
It was a terrible design. The old people would hate it.
It was going to go viral.
I’d never even tried it, though.
I hovered the pad of my thumb over it, knew I was going to light it up, that I had to, for RJ, that I owed him that, but then made the command decision that if I could see the scaffolding first, the haunted house wouldn’t get to me.
I sucked the app onto my laptop, scrolled through the code, lost myself in the elegance again, the simplicity. The innocence, right? All it was was a camera with a different trigger, then a bit of post-capture image processing, a harmless call out to a hidden directory. It might get us into some school for marketing, but, as far as programming went, it was practically juvenile.
It might get
me
into marketing school, I meant.
And then I found RJ’s last fix.
He’d commented it out, even, in case we wanted to go back. Our routine was, when combing each other’s lines, the second one through would erase the notations as he went.
It meant this version, technically, it wasn’t complete yet.
I arrowed my cursor up to his trailing escape slash, highlighted the whole note, inverting the text of the last thing he’d said in here . . . what? Two weeks ago? I unpacked his cryptic timestamp in my head. The first week of school, yeah. When I was in Life Science, getting a lab partner. I bit my lower lip in, shook my head. Who even timestamps their comments, right? RJ, that’s who. He always did it, for—his words—
his
posterity’s sake. And then he’d reach back into his pants, for his ass, and try to slap me on the shoulder, really rub his hand in.
I backspaced the comment, left the cursor blinking there at his new line, his last innovation.
All it did was pull a horizontal flip on the image. The easiest thing in the world.
It was why his hall had started turning up backwards. It was software, not the mirror, not the hardware.
I saved it, then saved it again to make it stick. The cursor just blinking up at me like I was being stupid here.
It was right.
But still—something didn’t fit. It wasn’t Area 51, either. Area 51 had been hidden in the
hidden
directory, and the hidden directory was gone, burned down by the police to keep sickos from leaving digital roses on its stoop.
At first I thought it was that one line of code—code that was explicitly just reversing whatever the camera had captured—it wasn’t nearly enough to scrub RJ from the image, from the reflection he was backed up against to reverse his hall, but then I had to thump my temples with the heels of my hands: there
was
no mirror, idiot. Get off that horse already.
And then one of those moments of calmness hit me, where I could feel myself breathing, could feel the rasp of all those air molecules diving down my throat.
Yes.
I fumbled my phone up, my fingers shaking, and peeled through the texts he’d sent. The images. They were all in our forever-long thread. I snapped it off to give me a useable scrollbar and paged through, holding all those air molecules in now.
It couldn’t be, though.
Each image, each snap he’d taken of that long hall behind him, each time, the lateral was perfect. The center of focus, the bullseye, it was that back wall where they’d found his dad. In every image, there was the exact same amount of wall on each side, like the perspective, it had to be perfect to tunnel through this.
Had he—had he cropped all the images, then loaded them back on his phone to blast to me and the rest of the senior class? But, he would know that the same angle, the same positioning, that would kill the scare just the same as using the same five stock images.
Then it must mean he’d masking-taped around his feet on the carpet, stood in the exact same place each time, and, I don’t know, used a magic marker on his mom’s mirror, one that would match up with the back of his hand to get the phone in the same place time after time.
Except there was no mirror.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
And even if he’d done that, still, it would take fifty images to get one that had the exact same angle as last time.
I was breathing hard now. Too hard.
Was he using one shot of the empty hall as backdrop to them all?
It was the only thing that made any kind of sense.
I dove into the code again, deeper than deep, looking for any routine that would allow sampling from the same background.
Nothing.
Of course he could have done it all on his laptop, right? To what purpose, though? He was more careful than that, would never make a background come off re-used and tired.
Then there was only one other option.
He’d cracked the side-to-side thing, just not commented it out. Or he’d lucked into it, maybe pasted one algorithm before instead of after another, so that it got first bite at the variables, and that had made all the difference.
There was nothing in the code, though, even when I used some ancient Perl to compare the old app to the new one.
Except for that one line, and the style junk with the colors, which was in the stylesheet anyway, they were the same.
I slammed the laptop, paced my room, pushed my phone against my forehead like I could force myself to think, here.
If you’ve never cried a bit from coding, then you’ve never really coded.
It goes the other way too, though.
The rush of cracking it, of cueing into the Beauty, the Truth, it’s all the heroin any junkie could ever need.
And I was so close.
And RJ, he’d been there already, I could see that now. It was where all his calmness had come from. Take my dad’s beer, it doesn’t matter. Go with her. Let’s take it live, infect the world with it.
I stopped pacing, stared into my phone.
That was it.
I was just looking at the scaffolding, was stuck behind the curtain. Maybe the key was in the product, though.
I touched the app, breathed life into it, and was going for the living room, to snap a takeback pic from the front window, see if it would lateral up with the one I’d taken before, but of course that one was gone, deleted once and then deleted again, when it showed back up, ha ha, RJ.
And the living room would probably be too big anyway.
Instead, I just stepped out of my bedroom, into the hall. It wasn’t as long as RJ’s, but it had to be the standard width. There had to
be
a standard width. Maybe that mattered.
I pulled my door shut, turned around to face it, lowered my phone to vertical and let the shutter snap.
Then I cocked my wrist forward, disturbing the gyroscope, and dropped it down straight again, the camera burring completion in my palm.
Of course.
I did it again, to be sure, and again.