Three Miles Past (11 page)

He was right again.

“But we’re not like that,” I said.

He shook his head no, agreeing with me.

But still.

That guy, that app, he was our origin story. And now it was hollow. Now he was somebody we’d make fun of.

“Think the app’ll scare her?” he asked then, catching my eyes for a flash.

“You sleeping, man?” I asked back.

“Jump right out of her pants, right?” he went on, then lifted his chin to get me to look.

It was Lindsay, maybe two steps from us, balancing her water-with-lemon, her salad.

She smiled, twirled past, biting her lip in hello and doing something impossible with her eyebrows.

“Life Science,” RJ said,
not
watching her walk away. “What’s homework going to be like for that, you think?”

“Exactly,” I said, and brushed past him, my eyes glued.

~

Two days later, RJ started texting me some of the new takeback images he was generating.

I was in the library with Lindsay and two of her friends. But mostly with Lindsay. At least in my head.

So far I’d agreed to show her where she could nab papers online, places the faculty didn’t know about. I was going to show her where all the good music and movies were, too, but was going to space it out some. Surprise her on Thursday with what wasn’t in the theatres until Friday, that kind of stuff.

You use what you’ve got, I mean. This was my one chance.

And now RJ was helping.

I looked at the image he’d flashed across, then lowered it under the table, scanned both ways to see if any teachers were close.

“What?” Lindsay said.

Her dad wouldn’t let her load any apps he didn’t scan first, as it turned out. The human virus checker, as it were.

But when you’ve got a daughter like that.

“Give me your number,” I said to her—that easy—and bankshot the image off a tower two miles a way, drilled it back under the table, to her phone, balanced right there on her thighs.

It was a takeback pic, sure, but RJ had done something different, had twisted the code back on itself somehow.

Behind the washed-out version of his long hallway was the crawling girl. She wasn’t on the wall anymore, though, but the floor. And not floating two feet above it like could happen, but right on the surface of the carpet, reaching forward along it like a cat, her face just blank.

Lindsay dropped her phone. It rattled under the table.

More
, I texted back to RJ.

We were going to be so rich.

I thought that was the only way things could go, yeah. There’s going to be an empty seat at graduation now, though.

Maybe two.

~

By the beginning of the next week, RJ was a star, at least on the cell networks. Instead of a ghost, now he was dragging a fuse. Like he’d weighed his options, studied the landscape of his life, considered the future, and made the measured decision that senior year, we were all going to know his name. One way or the other.

Let me say here that I never took credit for the images he was getting the app to produce.

I’d had a hand in the initial program, had spent a hurried two hours parsing through the code with him on Saturday, his dad grilling steaks for us in the backyard, but that was just maintenance and bugkilling, trying to get it all to spec before we took it live.

Before we could do that, though, we had to nab a domain—it was actually available, and, because it was for ‘college,’ his dad floated us twenty-four months on his card, base package—we had to stake out some freebie bulletin board, complete with set-up and faq threads, each of us set up as boss moderators. We were also supposed to write up little backstories for ourselves, to attach faces to the app.

“If you have time, I mean,” RJ had said from behind his laptop, about that.

It was like we were playing battleship.

“Ha ha,” I said back, and never looked up.

“So is this the end of our summer romance?” he said back, and this stopped me.

I looked around my screen, was about to say something back—no idea what, but I could feel the words in my throat—when his dad ducked in with news about those steaks, how if you don’t pay at least glancing attention to the corporeal, then you risk getting lost forever in the abstract—his usual out-loud bumpersticker—and I forgot what RJ had said.

That night it came back, though.

Two-thirty in the morning found me at our living room window, no lights on behind me, to give away that I was there.

In the bushes there was the cherry of a cigarette, rhythmic like a heartbeat. Except slower. More deliberate. And at the wrong height for RJ.

Unless he was breaking his own rules, using Cedric’s custom little headstone as a bench

He was.

I hugged my arms to my sides, felt the coldness of my phone press into my bare skin.

Without looking back, I glowed the phone on, opened the app, and lowered my hand, the picture snapping once the phone was straight up-and-down enough.

The picture was empty, of course.

Just our couch, that stupid floor lamp I used to think was a robber. The doorway to the left of it, black and yawning.

I deleted it.

~

Probably the scariest image RJ sent to me that week, that he fully knew I had to show to Lindsay, who was going to cc the whole class, it was one of his dad that he’d doctored.

It was in the hall again, like the rest—my guess is he was using his mom’s tall mirror at the turn into the living room to orient, keep the lateral in check—but it was different in that it was just static.

Over our cheese-puffed, brainstormy weekend, we’d agreed that the suggestion of motion, of something approaching the phone, that that was all
kinds
of scary. Better than something you were walking away from, anyway.

But this one, this time, it was what he was walking away from.

It was his dad, way back by his bedroom—RJ’s mom’s long gone, of course; I don’t even remember her, so much—and he was just sitting against that wall, his legs splayed out in front of him, his head cocked over, an obvious kind of stain on the wall.

Lindsay looked up to me in Life Science when she saw it, and I looked away, wasn’t thinking about money so much anymore.

That afternoon, I found reasons to be outside, stayed there just piddling until RJ’s dad pulled up, lifted his briefcase to me on his way in.

I waved back, looked back to my house, and went inside to check if RJ had uploaded that particular shot to the hidden directory.

He hadn’t.

It was just the stock hundred we’d come up with together. They seemed so tame now.

I was about to back out of that terminal—already had, really, had to key back in—when I caught the tail-end of that list of files I’d just called up.

The count was a hundred, like I’d been expecting, and they were named sequentially after the
sneak_up
lead-ins—clever clever—but there was another directory there now.
Inside
the protected directory.

I tried “Lindsay” as password, but it wasn’t her this time.

I tabbed up, then, went root to try to at least see how many characters this password might have, but I suck in the shell, and the architecture, it was all different now, was some kind of chutes and ladders game, a labyrinth, one with dead-ends and bottomless wells and something that, when I tried to open it, locked up my system.

What had RJ done?

I rebooted, was about to just rush that file system, hit it with everything I had, but then that image of RJ’s dad was in my head again.

The bedroom door. The door to RJ’s dad’s bedroom.

I pulled my phone, called the picture up.

The doorway was on the wrong side.

Wasn’t it?

Yes. I’d practically grown up over there. RJ’s dad had encouraged it, even, after his last encounter with my dad.

But how could it be on the wrong side?

I stood, walked out into our own hall. It wasn’t as long as RJ’s, and had tables and junk all cluttered in it, but still.

I stood at the end, right by my doorway, closed my eyes and took a takeback pic.

Just normal.

I looked through the walls, to the memory of RJ’s house, and then to this hall.

The mirror.

He had the mirror.

I dragged my mom’s in from her closet—she was out walking, like always, ‘because it was daylight’—set it up against the turn into the living room.

Already I didn’t like this.

I could see myself too well. Like I was at the end of the hall, waiting for myself.

But screw it.

This wasn’t for me, this was for the app. This was for RJ.

I walked up to my reflection, held my phone down and backwards, snapped another pic.

Nothing. Just the usual.

I turned around, sure I was missing something—did RJ’s dad have some old brown-and-white photographs framed on the wall on the left side?—and lowered my phone, didn’t realize the app was still on until I felt the camera burr, the image processing.

I held it up.

It was my hall, reversed.

Except I was standing there right in the middle of it.

“What are you doing?” I said out loud, to RJ, and just then my dad stepped into the hall in his workshirt, looked from the mirror to me and didn’t even say anything. Just brushed past, shut his door behind him.

~

The day Lindsay gave me a ride home was the day RJ had to spend in the main office. There were counselors and principals and even a city police.

It wasn’t for the takeback shot in circulation today—a benign old image of Cedric he’d blacked-out, let bleed at the edges, like he was loping up behind, his mouth glittering—but for the one of his dad, shot in the head.

“What do you think they’ll do to him?” Lindsay said, both hands on the wheel.

“He’s just screwing around,” I told her.

Still, the support forum on our site had a few members now. From school, mostly, because he’d put the brand on the bottom of the images he was texting.

When Lindsay pulled up to my curb, I didn’t get out at first.

I turned to her, was in some level of prep for asking her to maybe hold back on forwarding any more of the messages, that I needed to talk to RJ first, but then her face was right there.