Immoral Code Read online

  I held the back of my hand to my forehead, faked a swoon. “Ah, my delicate sensibilities!” And turned away.

  I could feel him hovering behind me for one, two, three seconds before he bailed back to whatever dank pit of sexist fantasies had spawned him, and I relaxed. And yeah, I was there alone. And yeah, I get that that’s a risk. But I’m not in the habit of letting risks dictate my choices. Catch a ride with some rando in a windowless panel van? Probably not. But no way will I let the fact that the world is home to pervs and douchebags alongside all the awesome people keep me from doing something, going somewhere, being whoever I want to be.

  Because this is me. Reese Ethel Gregors, out by myself an hour-plus drive from home because I felt like it, and not giving a shit. Well, no. I give lots of shits about plenty of stuff. But I can’t give even one tiny baby shit about pretending to be anyone other than who I am. And who I am is an eighteen-year-old who hates pretense and loves dance music and dyeing my hair. Also art. And bad horror movies, especially ones about Sasquatch. And Julia Kristeva’s theories about abjection. Plus my family, even if I don’t currently like one of the fundamental members. And my friends, even when Nari and Keagan’s perfect teenage love song and Bellamy and San’s will they/won’t they dynamic make me a fifth wheel?, third wheel?, unicycle?, whatever because being me also equals enjoying my own company. And being ENFP. And Sagittarius. And five foot seven with overly long arms and that thing where my second toe is longer than my big one. Plus stubbornly independent. Oh, and acearo and not all that worried I’m missing out. Not on what Keag and Nari have. Not on whatever Bells and San may or may not have. And definitely not on the epic dumpster fire that is my parents’ marriage. Not that any of that is mutually inclusive. My parents could be the human equivalent of swans or termites or barn owls or some other kind of animal that apparently mates for life and I’d still be asexual and aromantic. Does anyone walk away from the explosion of their hetero parents’ marriage, pick out all that emotional shrapnel, and say, “Whew, guess I’m not straight anymore!”

  No.

  They don’t.

  So anyway, let’s just say I give some shits, and one of those involves me not giving a shit about things I don’t care about even if the world is screaming, CARE! Things like feeling sexual or romantic attraction. Or respecting curfew. Also assholes. And hypocrites. And Sasquatch deniers because have they even heard about Gigantopithecus? I mean, come on. Come on.

  I looked back at my phone.

  (6) Nari: Fine! Don’t text back! See if I care! Also? Bells heard back about her MIT financial aid, and, thanks to her rich asshole King of Prebirth Abandonment biodad, GOT ZIP. As in $0. As in up shit creek without two dimes to rub together. As in CAN’T GO. Because also again? She’s REFUSING TO MAKE HIM PAY.

  Wait. What?

  SANTIAGO

  Sunday, February 24, 3:07 a.m.

  “A toast!” Reese raised her skewer, complete with flaming marshmallow, out of the fire.

  Nari giggled. “Toast. That’s punny.”

  “Puns are the discharge of humor, Nari,” said Reese. “Goldenrod and olive’s diseased baby.” The firelight lit her turquoise hair, exaggerating its green tint. Her marshmallow, now a flaming ball of char, fell off her skewer into the fire. “But, seriously. Congrats, guys. Senior swim season over!”

  Keag, lounging across from me on a bench made of old downhill skis with Nari tucked in tight to his chest and staring at her phone, lifted his skewer out of the fire and knocked the end with Reese’s. I did the same, then grabbed a marshmallow out of the half-empty bag, stabbed it onto the end of my stick, and held it over a cache of coals. The heat and color and flames, the February night air and quiet company, were mesmerizing. It didn’t hurt that it was also a little after three in the morning and I’d been up since around six a.m. with everything in between: the actual swim meet where I swam in two relays and won the individual hundred-yard fly and diving; the last bus ride back; the party at Mike’s that we’d all left around one, piling into Reese’s dad’s car so she could drive us back here for one final post-State huddle around the fire pit in Keag’s backyard.

  I rolled my skewer between my fingers and thumb, spinning my marshmallow in a slow rotation near the coals. The air was cold and obvious, a tangible weight, a heavy curtain held back by the dry swell of the heat from the fire. When I turned my face away from the flames toward the darkness, my breath clouded. Senior swim season over.

  I felt…I felt both enormous and diminished, proud and deflated. I’d swum my career-best times in every event today, had won diving by a double-digit margin with my career-best score. When I climbed out of the pool after my final dive, dripping water, muscles shaking, as the crowd and I waited for the judges’ scores, when they finally held up their cards, near-perfect numbers securing my win, when the crowd cheered, I’d felt full, brimming. I’d held my chamois to my face, overwhelmed, and when I dropped it found Bellamy’s eyes in the crowd. On her feet, cheering for me between Reese and Nari, she met my eyes, too. Her smile made my heart swell.

  It was bittersweet, a contradiction, a double-edged sword. Because Bellamy smiling at me, cheering me on beside Reese and Nari while my parents hadn’t come to State at all, was a reminder of that schism, of how my successes are tinged by their disapproval. Disapproval for succeeding. I know how unreasonable that sounds. But it isn’t the concept of my succeeding they take issue with, it’s the breed of my success, a success that leads to more opportunities for failure than it does opportunities to succeed.

  It’s my dream, a dream so big it requires a semidelusional level of devotion, the confidence to know I can do it and the humility to accept how many times I’ll have to fail to get there. A dream that is literally, according to Bells’s math showing that the odds of winning a gold medal at the Olympics are around twenty-two million to one, a bad bet. A dream that lives behind a wall in my head, a wall so coated in doubt, the layers so thick, so robust, that no matter how many times I try to knock it down, the wall still stands. Because it’s my doubt and also my parents’. Because it’s my dream, but it isn’t theirs. Because according to my parents, my dream is utterly impractical. An unnecessary risk, an expensive, time- and energy-consuming risk. Because más vale pájaro en mano que cien volando, one bird in hand is worth more than a hundred flying, or a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

  Whatever language you say it in, the idea is the same. They don’t think I should risk realistic goals chasing an unrealistic one. To them, you don’t risk guaranteed moderate success by pursuing uncertain grand success. You don’t leave your friends and family and all you know in Mexico to move to a new country, to build a stable and secure life for yourself and your future children, only to watch one of those children risk the accessible opportunities you worked hard to earn on likely inaccessible ones. You don’t get into Stanford on a diving scholarship only to risk the education you’ll get there stretching yourself too thin with extra practices, extra competitions, extra distractions, trying to qualify for the Olympics. You do your best, get good grades, earn your degree, then come back home and get to work.

  You don’t reach for the stars when you should keep your feet on the ground.

  My marshmallow bubbled and browned. I pulled it from the heat and held it out to Bellamy, slouched back in the camp chair to my left, the flames reflected in her glasses. She pulled the toasted outer shell off the end of my skewer, leaving the wad of uncooked middle, and put the whole thing in her mouth.

  I tried and failed to read her expression in the dim light. More bittersweetness, another of life’s dichotomies to have had her worst day and my best back to back. Keag and I had been so busy with State that this was the first time we’d all been in the quiet together since she’d heard about not getting funding, and now the subject felt taboo. Too much between Bellamy and me felt taboo, or at least tentative. As though there was some formless
barrier between us, one that’d been changing texture for the last six months and that I couldn’t quite overcome. Sometimes it felt like trying to motivate myself to get out of my warm bed on a cold morning. I wanted to start the day, to get moving toward all the possibilities of what could happen next. But our friendship was so comfortable, so easy, so certain, and what if the morning ended up only being cold?

  But that was just courage and timing, willing myself to finally take a chance. This thing with her dad and MIT was…devastating.

  I took a slow, deep breath and held the gooey innards of my marshmallow back over the coals. “It feels like the first of the lasts.”

  My friends nodded, even Nari, finally looking up from her phone. Reese snuggled deeper into one of the wicker chairs we’d moved over from the porch, wrapping her blanket tighter around herself. “The end of the beginning,” she said. “And the start of the middle, where the story finally gets good.” I noticed her flick a glance at Bellamy to see if her comment had unintentionally stung, but Bells’s expression didn’t change.

  “I’ll toast to that,” said Nari, and held up an imaginary glass from within her and Keag’s cocoon. They got together sophomore year and have been inseparable ever since. Keagan-and-Nari, Nari-and-Keagan, a pair made singular, like pants.

  I pulled my marshmallow away from the coals, blew on it, and popped it into my mouth. It was perfect, crisp and sticky and almost too hot. A log shifted, emitting a puff of sparks into the still air. Beside me, Bellamy yawned, covering her mouth with her hand, then said, “Painted Pig.”

  Reese smiled wide. “Yeeess.”

  Painted Pig, or Split Pig, depending on the mood, is our very own role-playing game of hypotheticals. It works like this: The winner of the last game poses the hypothetical, sets the parameters; then we each take turns adding a layer, continuing the story until someone “wins.” Usually, with Painted Pig, winning means achieving the most innovative version of success, such as we all win the lottery and whoever does the coolest, most original thing with the money, while avoiding the pitfalls of sudden wealth, is the winner. In Split Pig, the winner is whoever survives. For example, in the last game, Reese was the only one of us to survive a hypothetical zombie apocalypse after setting our stronghold on fire and waiting out the barbecue of the reanimated on the roof atop an elevator shaft that remained structurally sound. Nari and I weren’t so lucky. Keagan and Bellamy, by that point, were part of the horde.

  Keagan shifted, sitting up straighter on the bench. Nari checked her phone again, then tucked it into the pocket of her hoodie. “Who won last time?” he asked.

  “Me!” Reese cheered. She leaned forward, still swaddled tight, and tapped her lips with a finger. Her eyes glazed as she stared at the fire, deep in thought. “Okay, got it. Brain tech. Like Feed.”

  So, Split Pig for sure. We’d all read Feed, a book by M. T. Anderson set in a future where the population is permanently plugged into a consumer communication network through a chip in their brains, in English last year and Reese had been obsessed ever since. She even did a whole series of organic/mechanical mash-up paintings that were both impressively disturbing and plain impressive.

  Reese took a sip from her water bottle, then continued, “How about, say, half of Americans already have it. Shopping, entertainment, news, social media—everything’s moving to it. So. Do you want one? Do you not? Do you resist until the inescapable pressure to conform and join the masses finally gets to you? Do you go full-on paranoid and start digging out a bunker in the woods? Nari, go!”

  Half an hour later, we were in the midst of a cyborg-versus-human civil war after the tech was hacked by a cadre of ecoterrorists. Hypothetical Nari, the leader of said ecoterrorists, whose hack accidentally created the cyborgs, was killed when her lair was overrun by one of the first cyborg gangs, or “death by irony,” as Bells called it. Hypothetical Bellamy was overtaken by her tech when it erased her personality after the network spawned its own AI. Hypothetical me met the same fate. The remaining players, Keagan and Reese, squared off on opposite sides of the divide, brought together by a clever trap devised by Keagan at the cyborgs’ epicenter: their main server. Keagan, using software written by Nari before she died, spoke to Reese through one of her own hijacked minions.

  “We are few, but we’re powerful, Reese,” Keagan said. “You and your ilk—” He looked to Nari. This was a game of theirs: Keagan stretching his vocabulary with words that he learned from a word-a-day app and that no one really needs to know or use beyond taking the ACT or SAT, while Nari awarded him imaginary points.

  “Five and half,” Nari said.

  “—should surrender while you still can.”

  Reese scoffed. “There are, like, eight of you left, Keagy. And while this hijacking software’s cute and all, I’m master of the AI, which means I’m the master of every surviving cyborg. You should just give up already and join me.”

  Keagan shrugged. “Nah. I think instead I’ll pull out this dart gun.” He threw off his and Nari’s blanket and mimed pulling out a gun. “Filled with darts armed with microchips. That I then shoot you in the face with! Spreading a computer virus to the hardware in your brain, which then destroys your precious cyborg army through your own network!” He jumped up and down, pumping a fist in the air, then faked a show of meekness and uncertainty. “You know, if that sounds like it works.”

  “Jury?” I asked, looking to Bells.

  “As we’re already assuming the existence of biologically compatible nanorobotic technology, a dart carrying nanobots coded with the necessary malware to an area of skin near the original brain implant?” She lifted a shoulder. “Sure, could work. Nari?”

  “What she said.”

  “Fine! I give up! You win!” Reese threw her hands up. “Also, yeah. Good one. And people?” She stood, shedding her blanket and leaving it wadded up in the chair. “It’s like four in the morning. I’m out.”

  With that, the rest of us started moving, slowly unfolding, stretching, standing. The fire had burned down to coals. Keagan doused them with the bucket of water he always kept on hand, and they hissed and steamed. The cool air seemed to push in around us, like it’d been waiting impatiently to take the place of the heat. Keag offered his hand to Nari, who waved at us and followed him inside.

  Reese pulled her dad’s car keys from her pocket. “Either of you need a ride?”

  I shook my head. “I left my car here before State,” I said. Bellamy looked to me, and the fact that she did tightened my gut in that nervous, delighted way reserved for Bells. “And I can give Bellamy a ride. Bells?”

  Bellamy nodded. “Sure. ’Night, Reese.”

  Reese gave us a quick salute and turned to leave as Bells and I looked back at the fire pit, watching the last of the smoke and steam rise from the extinguished coals with the porch light at our backs, the sky overcast and the clouds glowing with the town’s light above us.

  “So,” I said.

  Bells grinned and turned her attention to me. “So.” She’s beautiful. Unlike Nari, who’s striking and so carefully tailored, or like Reese, who’s interesting and hyperconfident, Bellamy is beautiful in an effortless, sky-is-blue, water-is-wet way, and I’m in love with her.

  It’s her lips, full and soft and petal pink, and more so the brilliance that comes out of them. Bellamy is one of those people you “knew when”—utterly exceptional, an outlier, the kind of person who will help change the world. And one of my favorite things about her is that if I told her I thought as much, she wouldn’t argue. She might offer qualifications or caveats, but she wouldn’t wallow through a mire of faux humility, which isn’t to say she’s arrogant or acts as though she’s superior, but when you tell her she’s extraordinary, she’ll accept that you’re right, then remind you that “the first definition of ‘extraordinary’ is more literal than the colloquial sense of excellence.”

  It’
s also because being with her is like the moment I hit the water after a successful dive. In that second, my nerves still. The water catches me, holds me. My heart, thrumming as I bounded off the end of the board, as I tucked and twisted and turned, slows. My body is the exhale after a held breath, the quiet after a clap of thunder, the steam rising off the rain-soaked sidewalk after a storm. Being alone with her like this, I felt it, the passion, the triumph, the calm and relief and quiet. I felt all of it.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” I asked.

  “MIT?”

  I nodded. “Sorry to bring it up if the answer’s no.”

  She inhaled deeply and heaved a full-body sigh. I stepped closer but didn’t reach for her even though I ached to. The barrier felt thick, viscous. “I don’t—” She shook her head. “I don’t know what to do about it.”

  I scrubbed my hands on my beanie, using it to scratch my newly shaved head. “You haven’t tried to call your dad or anything?” All I knew, from Keag, who’d been the recipient of Nari’s flurry of angry texts over the last day, was that because of Bellamy’s dad’s apparently impressive finances, she’d been denied any need-based funding. And because of that, she’d decided she wouldn’t be able to go to MIT after all.

  “Nari told me to call him up screaming,” she said, and huffed a half laugh. “Force him to pay my tuition since he’s the reason I can’t get aid.”

  “But?”

  “But.” She hugged her arms tightly around her chest. “I’ve never talked to him, San. Not once. Biologically, I’m his daughter, but…” She shrugged, not loosening the circle of her arms around herself. “I’m an automatic child-support debit from one of his accounts. And now I’m supposed to call him up begging for a shitload of money?”

  “But. Isn’t he some big-deal investor or something?” Big-deal investor or something was a bit of an understatement. According to one of Nari’s texts, there was a building in San Francisco’s financial district with his name on it. We’d all known that Bells’s dad was and always had been out of the picture. But before Friday, I honestly couldn’t remember ever wondering anything about him, let alone what he did or how much money he had. He was a nonentity in Bells’s life. Until now. “And, he’s still your dad. Doesn’t he…owe it to you?”