XGeneration 1: You Don't Know Me (5 page)

Janis loved flying dreams, but she wasn’t dreaming. She knew this because of the plastic egg. She had discovered it in the nest of ferns one night, near the old clothesline where her mother aired out their throw rugs each spring. A purple egg, faded and spotted with dirt, half buried—one she and Margaret must have missed during a childhood Easter egg hunt.

A week had gone by before Janis remembered the experience with the plastic egg, sparked by a trip to a McDonald’s during one of her softball camps. A couple of her teammates had gone into the play area and waded into the pit of colored balls. Colored
plastic
balls. That’s all it had taken. For the rest of the camp, whenever Janis could remember, she repeated to herself, “Plastic egg, clothesline, ferns.” Her friends must have thought she was sun stroking, but it worked. Back home, Janis didn’t even change out of her cleats. She ran through the house and out the back patio door, straight to where the ferns sprang into their wildest clumps near the clothesline. The egg was not in the exact spot, no. And it was yellow instead of purple. But what did that matter? It was
there
: half-buried, spotted with dirt—like in the experience. She twisted it open and found two quarters (her dad’s substitute for jelly beans). Now and again, she would retrieve the egg from the top drawer of her dresser and give it a little shake, the rattle of coins erasing her daytime doubts.

But she wasn’t doubting now.

Janis neared the tall bushes that formed the boundary between their yard and the neighbor’s and floated to a stop. In all of her experiences, the bushes were as far as she had gone—as far as she
could
go, it seemed, as though a force field blocked her way. She extended an arm into the dark leaves and felt it being repulsed. She’d learned about like forces in sixth-grade science, of course, had experimented with the magnets. And that’s how this felt: a charge rebuffing another like charge. The harder Janis pushed, the harder the field shoved back on her.

All right,
she conceded.
I’m not going to win this one.

She drifted backward and lifted her face to where oak branches dipped and Spanish moss hung like beards. An urge came over her to perch on one of the branches and watch the night hum and crackle around her. The experiences never lasted very long, and on this final night of her summer break she wanted to savor it, even though the out-of-body state still frightened her a little.

Janis rotated as she rose, streams of energy seeming to trail out beneath her. When her gaze reached above the rear line of bushes, she froze.

The back of the Leonards’ house appeared like a dark, dreadful creature emerging from the earth. But it was not the house that chilled her. It was the slender shadow on the high deck and the small light that smoldered red. The same light she had seen the night before and in the same place—at the height of a person’s head.

The light dimmed and fell. She pictured the threads of smoke snaking over the dark sloping yard, fording the cement culvert between their properties, filtering through the leaves. She did not know if she possessed smell in this state, but she imagined the low scent of the cigarette anyway.

When the point of light rose and smoldered again, it glinted against a pair of glasses.

The previous night, the same sight had driven Janis back to her body, back to her bed. But now she remained hovering. He couldn’t see her, after all. She was insubstantial, incorporeal. She drew courage from that vocabulary word—
incorporeal
. Drifting nearer the shrubbery, she peered past the leafy tops. The red spot of light rose and burned again. The lenses they illuminated were perfectly round.

Forward-facing.

And she could feel it too, somehow, the concentration coming from his shadow, the intent. This was not a person on a casual smoke break. Mr. Leonard was watching just as he had likely been doing at the beach that day, the throngs of beach-goers his shield, as the darkness was now.

But
why
was he watching?

Janis sifted through what little she knew of him. He had lived in the house as long as she had been aware of him. He had a wife, a pale woman with dust-colored hair, who mostly stayed inside. No kids that Janis knew of. Sometimes he substitute taught. She’d seen him in the halls of her middle school as recently as last year, his dress shirt crumpled, his thinning wreath of hair in mild disarray, as if he were always filling in on short notice. He’d even subbed her history class once, his lecture voice thin and quavering. He never quite looked anyone in the eye, either, always down and to one side. So why was he watching now?

Margaret.

Her sister’s name sprang over Janis’s thoughts like a cartoon bubble. Had he noticed her at school just as the surfers had noticed her on the beach that day? Had he become interested in her? Infatuated? Mr. Leonard had to be at least twenty years older than Margaret, but Janis’s father had warned them about “sickos” during one of his serious talks. Was Mr. Leonard a sicko?

The tip of the cigarette inflamed the lenses again.

Janis started to withdraw, then stopped.
Incorporeal,
she repeated.
I am incorporeal
. As if to confirm the affirmation, the energies that coursed throughout her intensified. Janis dove down and felt her way along the bushes, palpating with ethereal hands, probing for an opening. It seemed crucial that she discover what he was up to… before something happened.

The barrier rebuffed her again and again and—

Her arm plunged through a place in the leaves that appeared just as thick as any other spot but did not feel like-charged. She withdrew her arm and felt the soft pull of a force that seemed reluctant to release her. An opposite charge. Even as Janis leaned away, she found herself reaching forward again, anticipating the fascinating tug on her fingertips.

And if I go through, what then? Will I be able to return?

Or would she become trapped on the outside, barred from her yard, her home, the bedroom where she slept… her own body? Beyond the leaves, the tip of the cigarette smoldered red again. Janis hesitated then let herself be pulled through in a cold and silent
whoosh
.

5

Spruel household

Monday, August 27, 1984

6:36 a.m.

“What in the world were you doing in the garage last night?”

Scott jolted awake. He found himself at the kitchen table, one hand pushing his jaw askew, his other hand barely clinging to the end of a spoon. The spoon teetered over the rim of a bowl of soggy Golden Grahams. Dribbles of honey-colored milk spotted the plastic place mat.

He blinked up at his mom. “Huh?”

“You heard me, mister.”

She clopped across their all-white kitchen to the freezer, pulled out an oat bran muffin, set it on a plate, clopped to the microwave, and jabbed the panel with her thumb. The microwave roared like a vacuum cleaner.

She leaned against the counter, facing Scott in her orange skirt suit. Arms crossed, she raised her freshly stenciled eyebrows. It was her Don’t Mess with Me look. Scott cleared his throat and tried to sit straighter. His vision swam with sleep or, rather, the severe lack of it—four hours, maybe.

“My computer,” he mumbled.

“What about your computer? And enunciate when you speak.”

“It’s not working.” His cereal dissolved to mush when he stirred it. “Something with the motherboard, I think.”

“Well, no wonder. With you on that thing all the time, it probably overheated.”

“I brought it to the storeroom to fix.”

“What storeroom?”

Yeah, what storeroom, genius? Wasn’t that the whole point of bringing it back there? To hide it?

“In the garage,” he replied, too spent to lie.

His mother gave a sharp laugh. She clopped to the chair at the kitchen table where her white leather briefcase hung and began flicking through the files of houses she’d be showing that day. She yanked a folder halfway out and then slid it, knife-like, back into place.

“I’m surprised you could even get back there. Your father with his…
junk
piled floor to ceiling. I’ve given him a deadline. Thanksgiving. Everything has to be out of that garage by Thanksgiving, or so help me God, I’ll have it hauled to the fill.” She knifed another folder home. “And don’t think I won’t.”

Scott’s impulse was to defend his father, but he remained silent—as usual. Anyway, what she said was true. For all intents and purposes, his father was a hopeless, and pointless, junk collector. If something caught his eye in the ads section of the newspaper, he bought it. If he saw something on a display case marked down fifty percent, he bought it. If he could dicker low enough at a yard sale, he bought it. Lampshades, lawn chairs, lawn darts, rolls of linoleum, it didn’t matter. If it was a deal, his father bought it. And then promptly stored it in the garage.

“I can’t even remember the last time I parked in there.” She found the folder she was hunting and flicked through its papers, repeatedly wetting the edge of her thumb. “Imagine that. The luxury of parking a car in the one place for which it was actually intended.”

Scott grunted and slurped his cereal.

He was awake now, but it was a temple-boring wakefulness. After mining a tunnel through the garage last night and carrying his incriminating computer equipment, printouts, floppy disks, and Bell manuals to the rear storeroom, it was after two o’clock in the morning. He wasn’t even able to manage one last check of his bedroom to see if he had missed anything. Fully dressed, he collapsed into sleep, only to dream his door was being kicked in. The FBI always raided in the wee hours, went the rumor. So you couldn’t warn your hacker friends.

The microwave
beep-beep-beep
ed at the same moment his mother patted the files down and snapped her briefcase closed. “All right,” she said, slinging the briefcase over her shoulder. “I put three dollars on the mantelpiece for your lunch. If there’s any change, I want it. Mr. Shine might come this afternoon to weed. Tell him I’ll have his check this weekend.”

She wrapped the steaming muffin in aluminum foil, took a bite from the end, and patted her short, dark hair.

“And wake your father before you leave.”

For the first time that morning, Scott became aware of the choked snores from the living room. After pizza last night, his father had fallen asleep on the couch, trying to watch his three rentals from Video World, action-comedies from the sounds of them. His volcanic laughter had erupted on and off until about a quarter to one, then ended abruptly.

“Yeah, all right,” Scott said to his mother.

But she’d already seized her thermos of Ultra Slim-Fast and was halfway to the front door.

* * *

The early morning, though dim, felt raw against Scott’s eyes. The front yard was empty, the street still. No swarm of black Crown Victorias parked helter-skelter over his lawn, which Scott had dreamed as well. He staggered down the street, his oversized backpack bearing mechanical pencils, a scientific calculator, two sheaves of paper inside a green Trapper Keeper, and his unread copy of
1984
. The backpack, one of his father’s finds, had sagged to the backs of Scott’s knees the year before; now it barely touched the hemlines of his shorts. His summer growth spurt had been more vigorous than he realized.

He approached Oakwood’s main intersection—no cars coming—and scuttled across. But he didn’t stand beside the stop sign as the letter sent by the school had instructed. Instead, he studied the Pattersons’ driveway, where a pair of tall bushes flanked the garage door. The nearer bush looked fuller. A moment later, he was crouched behind it, peering through the leaves at the intersection. He shrugged off his backpack and held up his calculator-wristwatch. 7:02 a.m. He was probably safe unless the FBI decided to come for him at school or bide their time until the weekend, when they would have a better chance of catching him asleep.

That’s how the FBI had nailed hackers all summer. “Public Enemy Number One” the headlines announced after a big bust. “War Games II.” The thing of it was, the hackers Scott knew from the boards were harmless, not out to bring the system to its knees or start thermonuclear warfare (as if they could). To them, hacking was a challenge. It was learning how systems worked and then becoming master of those systems. It was sports for nerds. Scott had never scored a goal or a touchdown or swatted a home run—and probably never would. But he couldn’t imagine any of those matching the rush of a successful hack.

Or the terror.

Scott watched cars pause at the stop signs, then cruise down the hill toward Sixteenth Avenue, their taillights as red and bleary as his eyes felt. Most of the cars he recognized, many of them just by the hum of their engines, the cut of their tires: Volkswagen Rabbit, Chevy Chevette, turd-brown Toyota Tercel. Most recognizable were those cars that came from The Meadows, the subdivision where Scott lived. Less familiar were the ones puttering up from The Downs or coasting down from The Grove, where the biggest houses were. The Grove also featured a field with a giant oak tree and a community playground. Scott used to venture up to the field from time to time until Jesse Hoag snapped his arm.

Scott’s hand went to the place above his wrist where the bone had healed into a lump. It still swelled when he slept on it wrong, and it ached a little this morning. But his mind was preoccupied with his phone call to Wayne from the night before, those extra milliseconds between the final pulse and the ring.

How long had the FBI been monitoring him? Who had tipped them off? How much did the feds know? How much did they
need
to know? Had they pen registered his line or set up a full blown tap?

The last question didn’t matter—not really. Even if they’d only recorded the digits he’d been dialing that summer, they would know about his illicit use of 1-800 numbers. They could nail him on toll fraud. For the less fortunate hackers, the charge had meant the seizure of their equipment, thousands of bucks in fines, prison terms…

They can’t throw you in prison. You’re only fourteen
.