Holy fuck,” Tabs said.
You ever look over at someone watching a horror movie with you? The way they try to look but not look at the same time?
This wasn’t a movie. Not rotten tomatoes. Rotten potatoes.
Rotten story. Rotten life. Rotten me.
It poured out like vomit.
I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t come up for air.
We’re going to meet Mommy’s friend.
Define friend, Mom.
Define taking your six-year-old to a motel parking lot and selling her.
Put a name to it. Say what you did.
Meet my new mom and dad, Tabs. Yours are soulless dullards. Mine were soulless baby fuckers.
I know, your lips are zipped. Great. Mine were sewn together with black thread. Stitch one, slip two.
Don’t look away, Tabs. Do not. I’m the one who gets to do that. To look away. To bury it so deep it can’t hurt anymore. Who gets to look in the mirror and see Karen Greer. Alexa Kornbluth. Terri Charnow. Sarah Ludlow. Jenny Kristal. Anyone but me.
You asked. You did.
“I’m sorry,” Tabs said when I’d finished purging.
“About what?”
“Everything. What happened to you. It’s fucking horrible.”
“Some people think I am. Fucking horrible. I mean, when they find out I’m not their long-lost child.”
“I can see how they might get a little upset about that.”
“I mean, it’s different at first. Before they find out.”
“Define different.”
“Like I just made their decade. Like I’ve just given them their entire lives back.”
Why are you crying, Becky? It’s all right . . .
That’s just it. It is all right . . . finally . . .
“Is it like that now? Your new parents—they don’t suspect anything? They think you’re Jenny?”
I hesitated. Once a bunch of us gangstas had snuck into a water park shut down for the winter, all of us high on X, and I’d strolled out onto the top diving board—the kind hot-shit divers do backflips from in the Summer Olympics. The drained pool said, Jump, Jobeth, jump. I’d thought long and hard about it.
Jump, Jobeth . . . jump . . .
“I think they want me to think they think I’m Jenny.”
“Huh? Why would they want you to think they think you’re their daughter if they don’t think you’re their daughter? Jesus, Jo . . . Should I start calling you that now? . . . My head hurts just saying that.”
Good question.
How good a hacker are you, really?” I asked Tabs.
This was later on, after we’d both fallen asleep from (a) the two bottles of primo vodka and (b) plain emotional exhaustion, then woken up blurry-eyed and disoriented—at least I had, like waking up on my first morning in whichever new house I’d laid claim to, and still believing it was the one I’d just been evicted from.
Tabs stared at me with one eye open and said, “I need a sheepdog.”
“What?”
“Hair of the dog. Sheepdogs are the hairiest.”
I got up and took a pee. Tabs stumbled into the bathroom as I was finishing up and filled the vodka bottles with water. I heard her replacing them in the downstairs cabinet.
“They like to look at them more than drink them,” she said when she made it back upstairs.
Which is when I asked for that hacker self-evaluation.
Here’s my second confession of the day—just in case you’re wondering why I’d told Tabs everything. It wasn’t just because she’d figured out who I really was—or more to the point, wasn’t. Or because I needed a good purging—I did, but no.
Call it a tactical decision. Or maybe just a massive leap of faith.
I was on a mission, remember?
We’re friends . . .
Okay. A friend in need is a friend indeed.
“Where do you rank? Say, one to ten . . . ?” I asked her.
“Can’t put a number to it,” Tabs replied.
Che was gazing at me with that tilted black beret on his head as if he wanted me to sign up for the revolution.
“Try. Come on . . . one to ten?”
“Shit . . . eight.”
“Okay.”
“And three-quarters.”
“Great.”
“Make that seven-eighths. Eight and seven-eighths. This guy I know . . . he hacked into US Central Command. Not shitting you. He’s a nine, easy.”
“Eight and seven-eighths—that’s good enough.”
“Good enough for what?”
“Ever hack into a school?”
“A school?”
“Or a hospital?”
“Which one?”
“A school-hospital. More hospital, I think. Ever hack into one of those?”