Immoral Code Read online

  “Molten titanium is, um, you know, molten, Keags,” Nari said. “Less than intimidating.”

  “But she could burn someone, right, Bells?” He looked at me, eyes widened, asking for help.

  “Titanium has a melting point of about three thousand degrees Fahrenheit.”

  San breathed a laugh and smiled his wide, beautiful smile at me again. My stomach flipped. “How do you know that?” he asked. “How is that a thing you just know?”

  I shrugged. “Molten titanium also explodes when it reacts with water. Or, it breaks down the water, absorbing the oxygen and releasing the hydrogen, which then explodes when it comes into contact with air. So, really, the hydrogen explodes, but still.”

  Reese stepped into the apartment through the door the boys had left open. “What explodes?”

  “Molten titanium,” said San.

  She closed the door and crossed the small living room to the kitchen nook to grab another chair. Keagan grinned at her. “That’s your new nickname: Reese the Piece of Molten Titanium,” he said, using the voice again.

  “Kick-ass,” she said, pulling her chair up next to San’s. “I should figure out how to dye my hair like quicksilver and put that on a shirt.”

  I looked at Nari while the other three laughed. The episode had circled back around to Tyrion’s narrative, but though she was staring at the screen, she didn’t seem to be paying attention.

  “Nari,” San said. He leaned forward to rest his forearms on his thighs. The chair was too small for his height. He’d pulled it up close enough to the couch that his clasped hands nearly brushed my knee. “What’s up? I mean, I love you guys and all, but I’m also kind of sick of you? So this better be good.”

  “Freaking epic,” Reese said.

  “Legendary,” added Keagan.

  “Is ‘legendary’ a one-up from ‘epic’?” San asked. “Because it seems like ‘epic’ ”—he flashed his hands—“is, you know, epic.”

  “Yeah,” Reese said, “and I was planning on binge-watching some early seasons of Game of Thrones.” She waved at the TV. “Not whatever this garbage is.”

  “Ha ha—you’re all so very funny,” Nari said. She made a show of sitting up and squaring her hips on the sagging couch cushion. “Okay. Prepare yourselves.”

  Keagan leaned forward for the remote on the coffee table and turned off the TV. The rest of us waited while she let the suspense build.

  “So,” she finally said. “You all know how Bells’s dad is a point-oh-one-percenter, and how as of Friday that’s basically screwed Bellamy out of MIT?”

  I froze.

  The others nodded.

  A few points of context: One, my mom and I are poor. I understand that “poor” is a loaded term with a range of connotations and interpretations. I don’t say “impoverished,” because my mom’s income, from two jobs totaling an average of sixty to sixty-five hours a week, sets us solidly above the Federal Poverty Level though still definitively within the lower class.

  Two, my parents conceived me as teenagers. My mom was seventeen and about to finish her junior year of high school. My father, Robert Foster, a senior, was preparing to attend Columbia in the fall. He left five months before I was born and, other than sending a monthly child-support check of a minimal amount, agreed upon in my infancy and never amended, has never had any contact with me. My mom dropped out of high school to raise me, eventually earning her GED and entering the workforce. Robert Foster went from Columbia for his undergraduate in finance to Yale, where he earned an MBA, to Wall Street, where he earned his first millions short trading high-risk stocks, to Silicon Valley, where he began Foster Innovations, a venture capital firm with primary interests in tech startups and luxury lifestyle brands.

  Three, after finding out I got accepted at MIT, my mom and I filed my financial aid paperwork, including requesting, through my mom’s and his lawyers, that Robert Foster fill out some forms of his own, which skewed my supposed familial contribution to MIT’s nearly $50,000 yearly tuition to one hundred percent. Which is fiscally prohibitive. Loans might’ve been an option, but my mom’s bulk of credit card debt and bad credit rating inflated our interest rates. And I refuse to risk a guaranteed debt of $70,000 after adding room and board, or more than a quarter million total, depending on changes in aid after the child support stops when I turn eighteen, plus living expenses, on the inevitably uncertain nature of my future. I also refused to beg for a handout from a man who clearly wanted nothing to do with me, and not only because the idea of asking Robert Foster for anything was debasing but because I…I’d done it right. I had done everything right, solved every step, worked for every correct answer, passed every test. Only to end up at a dead end of someone else’s making. Only to end up here:

  “Well.” Nari took a dramatic deep breath. “I have an idea.”

  BELLAMY

  Sunday, February 24

  33 Days

  “Hell yes!” Reese cheered once Nari finished outlining the fundamentals of her plan. “The adventure to win all adventures!”

  “Adventure?” Keagan was on his feet. Soon after Nari had started talking, he’d moved from the couch to pace the worn carpet between the hallway and the door. “This is a felony! Multiple felonies. Don’t encourage her, Reese.”

  “Don’t ‘encourage’ me?” Nari snapped. “Are you kidding? It’s a good idea. The only idea!”

  “Hey,” San said, hands raised, palms up and placating, “let’s just—”

  “It is so not the only idea.” Keagan scrubbed his head with his beanie, then pulled it off and threw it on the floor in agitation. “How about talking to the guy. Bellamy, he’s your dad. Why not just call him?”

  Call him.

  I felt it in my head, in my ears. It’s a chemical reaction. I know this. But it felt like heat and shrinking. It’d felt the same when Nari first suggested the idea on Friday, the same again when she’d volunteered to call him up herself before I talked her down and she, apparently, shifted focus. And it was equally intense now, equally repugnant. Calling Robert Foster, not only claiming him as my father, certifying myself as his daughter, but then asking him for anything, let alone an enormous sum of money, was something I physically did not want to do.

  “Again, Keag. Why?” Nari challenged. “She’s not the one who bailed!”

  “This is stealing, Narioka. Grand theft.”

  “Like he’ll even notice,” Reese said. “He’s not the victim here—Bellamy is.”

  “I’m not…”

  San glanced at me, but I was still trying to swallow and breathe properly, so I looked away. “It’s not about being a victim,” he said. “It’s about fixing a wrong.”

  Keagan’s eyebrows rose. “ ‘Fixing’?”

  “You think it’s right that Bells’s dad has helped them out so little?” San asked gently. “And that he’s the reason she can’t go to MIT now?”

  “No, dude. Of course not. But, come on! This?”

  “This” was Nari’s plan to steal my college tuition from Robert Foster using malware she’d code to skim a fraction of a percentage off transactions made by the various bank accounts of Foster Innovations. “I saw it on some nineties movie,” she’d said as she explained.

  “A movie,” Keag repeated, expression slack.

  “Yep.”

  “And how’d that work out in the end?”

  She’d shrugged. “A building burned down. Or one of the characters set it on fire. I don’t know. Can’t remember, doesn’t matter.” Because, she’d stressed, the idea was to do it all remotely. For her to infiltrate Foster’s online banking accounts from her system at home, route the stolen money into an account opened with a false identity, buy Bitcoin with those funds, then sell the Bitcoin for USD and deposit the balance into an account in my name. The fact that she was telling all of us, instead of doing it on h
er own or only telling me, was proof of our friendship.

  “Listen,” Nari said. “Can we just calm down? Keag?” They met eyes, communicating in that way of theirs, and he sat on the floor, cross-legged and fidgeting with his beanie in his lap. “I get it, okay? It’s illegal. It’s scary. But think about it. If it’s reparations? Is it really wrong?”

  I cleared my throat. It still felt thick. “Yes.”

  Nari turned to me, looking betrayed. I broke eye contact and leaned back into the couch. Still turned toward me, she said, “Jeremy and Evan Foster.”

  “Who?” Reese asked.

  “Jeremy and Evan Foster,” Nari repeated, still speaking directly at me. “Jeremy’s eight and Evan is ten. Their mom is Emily Foster, mid-thirties, beautiful. She and your dad met at Yale when he was getting his master’s and she was doing her undergrad in art history or English or some other M.R.S. degree. She does charity work now. Very cliché. The boys go to private school. Expensive, pre-pre-Ivy private school.”

  “What does any of that matter?” Keagan asked. He stared at the carpet, head down. Like San’s, his shaved scalp was paler than his face and neck.

  “It matters because he could give Bells everything she’s ever wanted in the world and then some, but he doesn’t. He knows she’s here, he knows she’s trying to go to MIT, yet he still doesn’t help. And now, because of him, she can’t afford to go.” She paused. When she spoke again, her tone was fervent. “But we can fix that.”

  We quieted. Someone crossed the living room in the apartment above mine with a heavy tread. I tried not to, but I pictured my half brothers. I wondered what they looked like, if they were short like me, had brown hair like mine. But they wouldn’t, would they? Because I looked like my mom, and maybe they looked like theirs.

  “I’ll call.”

  “Bells—”

  “I’ll call,” I said again, looking Nari in the eye, and reached for my phone on the coffee table.

  “You know his number?” Reese asked. Her voice, though a normal volume, sounded loud against the others’ quiet.

  “No. But the internet will.”

  For a dollar and his full name and zip code, finding the number for Robert Foster’s landline at his San Francisco home took less than a minute on one of those people-finder sites.

  I held myself as still as possible on the couch, staring at it, feeling my heart rate, plateaued at around one hundred ten beats per minute, in my chest. I’d never thought waiting could be so loud. The five of us breathing. Reese suppressing a cough. Keagan picking at a threadbare patch in the carpet. Santiago’s chair creaking as he shifted, even the dry sound of him rubbing his palms together nervously. Silence like this is never truly silent. It’s the absence of talking. It’s quiet. But it’s also the hum of our old refrigerator and the cars driving past on the road outside, the downstairs neighbor’s TV and someone slamming a door down the hall.

  Silence, true silence, the silence of a near-perfect vacuum, was the first thing I loved about space.

  When I first read about it, in a book about the basics of space my grandma gave me in the first grade, I felt my tiny world explode. Learning that the construct of my reality, what I understood of it and took, as a six-year-old, duly, for granted, was not the only construct, that the universe was so huge, so varied, so incredibly possible, made me feel infinite.

  This did not make me feel infinite.

  This made me feel minuscule.

  I tapped the number, clicked call, and lifted my phone to my ear as it rang.

  And rang.

  Sunday afternoon. What were the chances that he was even home? That if he was, he’d be the one to answer?

  Another ring. San, Keagan, Nari, and Reese were so quiet, they might’ve been holding their breath.

  Another, and my thoughts stalled, white noise.

  “Hello?” A man’s voice.

  I opened my mouth.

  “Hello?” he asked again, slightly annoyed.

  “Mr. Foster?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s—” I cleared my throat. “This is Bellamy Bishop?”

  No answer.

  “Lauren Bishop’s daughter?”

  A pause.

  Then:

  Click.

  He’d hung up on me.

  A breath caught in my throat, half inhale, half exhale. I brought the phone down from my ear. Held it in my lap. Waiting. For…him to call back? For him to have not hung up on me? I tried to talk myself through the processes of my nervous system, the names of the hormones rushing through my blood.

  “He hung up on you?” Reese asked, shrill.

  My head felt hollow.

  “Bells,” San was saying, soft and close, while Nari leaned forward to look at Keagan where he still sat on the floor and said, “See? Is that enough now? He deserves to pay.”

  The way she said it, almost righteous, almost validated, I—I swallowed. My spit tasted like bile.

  Keagan didn’t answer, didn’t look up at Nari or me. I knew I should’ve answered for him. No. The answer was no, it wasn’t enough. Not for this. Not for a felony. Not for me.

  But I couldn’t make my mouth and jaw and vocal cords work. Not when Santiago said, “Okay. We know the why. Time to tell us the rest of the how.”

  Not when Nari’s expression lifted.

  Not as I listened to her talk about code and accounts and firewalls and percentages, about timelines and security cracks and how she’d tried Friday night but hadn’t managed to root the system yet. Not as she talked about how deep she’d already gotten into his life, how she’d traced Foster Innovations’ bank statements back for six months and figured that by coding the malware to skim .01 percent, one cent of every one hundred dollars, off transactions over a million dollars to avoid detection, assuming FI did business comparable to the previous two fiscal quarters, that “We should hit two hundred fifty thousand within a year. And definitely have enough for Bells to make her first tuition payment by the deadline.”

  “A year?” Keagan asked. “That’s it? So FI makes how much in a year?”

  “Two-point-five billion,” Nari answered. “Which is a moderate assumption and doesn’t include transactions below the million-dollar—”

  “Seventy thousand.” When I finally managed to speak, I didn’t say no, stop, enough of this. I said, “Seventy thousand, not two hundred fifty. Just the first year’s tuition and room and board. After that I’ll be eighteen, the child support will stop, and I can try to reapply for aid.” My voice sounded separate from me, as though I were listening to it from the outside. A recording, or someone else using it to speak.

  “What about everything else?” Nari asked me, frowning. “Books? Fees? Life? What if aid doesn’t come through after that?”

  “Seventy,” I repeated. “That’s it.”

  My mom works nights at the twenty-four-hour Walmart, usually getting home around three unless she’s covering or switched a shift with someone. Most of the time I don’t wait up. It isn’t reasonable with high school and college coursework, summer internship applications, and my research project on the hypothetical physiological effects of simulated gravity on the human body during prolonged space travel. Some days I wouldn’t see her at all except that she wakes up every morning to have breakfast with me before either going back to bed or getting ready for her other job as a maid at the local Holiday Inn Express.

  That day, long after everyone left, I waited up.

  “Bells,” she said, closing the door, keys in one hand and purse over her shoulder. “Why aren’t you in bed?”

  I folded my legs up under me on the couch and picked at the fraying hems of my sweatpants. The pant legs were too long, and stepping on them with my heels for however long had worn holes in the cuffs. I could’ve told her then. I probably should have. At least abou
t calling my dad. But the sound of that click, of him realizing who I was and hanging up…Maybe it was cowardice, but instead of telling her, I said, “I want to talk about him. Robert Foster. It’s time.”

  She sat down next to me, still in her coat, and slipped off her shoes. “Three-sixteen a.m. on a school night is time?”

  “Metaphorically, it’s time. Or emotionally?”

  “Bellamy.”

  “I’ve been thinking I should call him. About college.” I heard the click in my memory again and felt embarrassed. Deeply embarrassed, ashamed. Which I knew, objectively, was wrong. The feeling, my reaction, was wrong. It shouldn’t have been my embarrassment. It wasn’t my shame. He’d hung up on me. He’d abandoned me. It wasn’t logical to blame myself. Yet. “Or you could?”

  She was quiet for so long I looked up. Her eyes were wet. “Oh, Bluebell. We can’t.”

  I swallowed. My tone was flat. “Of course we can. We already have, to get him to fill out the financial aid forms.”

  “No, that was through the lawyers. And who even knows if he—” She sighed. “You know I don’t mean we can’t literally, Blue.”

  “Then you mean I shouldn’t.”

  “I mean you aren’t allowed.”

  I watched her wipe her pinky fingers along her bottom eyelids, where her makeup had smeared. “How am I not allowed?”

  She looked away, her cheeks flushed. “Legally, Bellamy. He, we, wrote it into the child-support agreement. That you and he would have no contact, that he and I would have no contact except through the lawyers. And only when unavoidable.”

  “And me not getting funding because of his money is ‘avoidable’?”

  She didn’t answer, still wouldn’t meet my eye, and my embarrassment turned to anger. My future, forfeit for a phone call. Thanks to tangential wealth. Wealth that wasn’t and had never been mine. The irony of it was enough to make me sick.

  Maybe Nari was right. Maybe he did deserve it.

  “Why agree to that?” I asked.