say, that Angela, she was such a good girl, who would have thought it, all the time she was in the back yard, helping her mother out by sharpening that hatchet.”
I laughed. “You don’t know how easy you have it. There is
“11:45,” she said, checking her clock.
“Crap!” I yelped and tied my shoes.
“Go,” she said, “run and be free! Look both ways before crossing the road! Write if you get work! Don’t even stop for a hug! If you’re not out of here by the count of ten, there’s going to be
I shut her up by leaping onto the bed, landing on her and kissing her until she stopped trying to count. Satisfied with my victory, I pounded down the stairs, my Xbox under my arm.
Her mom was at the foot of the stairs. We’d only met a couple times. She looked like an older, taller version of Ange — Ange said her father was the short one — with contacts instead of glasses. She seemed to have tentatively classed me as a good guy, and I appreciated it.
“Good night, Mrs Carvelli,” I said.
“Good night, Mr Yallow,” she said. It was one of our little rituals, ever since I’d called her Mrs Carvelli when we first met.
I found myself standing awkwardly by the door.
“Yes?” she said.
“Um,” I said. “Thanks for having me over.”
“You’re always welcome in our home, young man,” she said.
“And thanks for Ange,” I said finally, hating how lame it sounded. But she smiled broadly and gave me a brief hug.
“You’re very welcome,” she said.
The whole bus ride home, I thought over the press-conference, thought about Ange naked and writhing with me on her bed, thought about her mother smiling and showing me the door.
My mom was waiting up for me. She asked me about the movie and I gave her the response I’d worked out in advance, cribbing from the review it had gotten in the
As I fell asleep, the press-conference came back. I was really proud of it. It had been so cool, to have all these big-shot journos show up in the game, to have them listen to me and to have them listen to all the people who believed in the same things as me. I dropped off with a smile on my lips.
I should have known better.
XNET LEADER: I COULD GET METAL ONTO AN AIRPLANE
DHS DOESN’T HAVE MY CONSENT TO GOVERN
XNET KIDS: USA OUT OF SAN FRANCISCO
Those were the
I’d blown it, somehow. The press had come to my press-conference and concluded that we were terrorists or terrorist dupes. The worst was the reporter on Fox News, who had apparently shown up anyway, and who devoted a ten-minute commentary to us, talking about our “criminal treason.” Her killer line, repeated on every news-outlet I found, was:
“They say they don’t have a name. I’ve got one for them. Let’s call these spoiled children Cal-Quaeda. They do the terrorists’ work on the home front. When — not if, but when — California gets attacked again, these brats will be as much to blame as the House of Saud.”
Leaders of the anti-war movement denounced us as fringe elements. One guy went on TV to say that he believed we had been fabricated by the DHS to discredit them.
The DHS had their own press-conference announcing that they would double the security in San Francisco. They held up an arphid cloner they’d found somewhere and demonstrated it in action, using it to stage a car-theft, and warned everyone to be on their alert for young people behaving suspiciously, especially those whose hands were out of sight.
They weren’t kidding. I finished my Kerouac paper and started in on a paper about the Summer of Love, the summer of 1967 when the anti-war movement and the hippies converged on San Francisco. The guys who founded Ben and Jerry’s — old hippies themselves — had founded a hippie museum in the Haight, and there were other archives and exhibits to see around town.
But it wasn’t easy getting around. By the end of the week, I was getting frisked an average of four times a day. Cops checked my ID and questioned me about why I was out in the street, carefully eyeballing the letter from Chavez saying that I was suspended.
I got lucky. No one arrested me. But the rest of the Xnet weren’t so lucky. Every night the DHS announced more arrests, “ringleaders” and “operatives” of Xnet, people I didn’t know and had never heard of, paraded on TV along with the arphid sniffers and other devices that had been in their pockets. They announced that the people were “naming names,” compromising the “Xnet network” and that more arrests were expected soon. The name “M1k3y” was often heard.
Dad loved this. He and I watched the news together, him gloating, me shrinking away, quietly freaking out. “You should see the stuff they’re going to use on these kids,” Dad said. “I’ve seen it in action. They’ll get a couple of these kids and check out their friends lists on IM and the speed-dials on their phones, look for names that come up over and over, look for patterns, bringing in more kids. They’re going to unravel them like an old sweater.”
I canceled Ange’s dinner at our place and started spending even more time there. Ange’s little sister Tina started to call me “the house-guest,” as in “is the house-guest eating dinner with me tonight?” I liked Tina. All she
