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Anna needed a microwave, a suction cup, a thin plastic spudger, a heat-able gel pack, a small flashlight, and a smaller-than-smaller set of pentalobe screwdrivers. These were screwdrivers designed for a forest nymph should she ever decide to become a handyman, but they were necessary for the heist all the same.
The microwave was the easy part of the plan, since Asmi had a cheap, light one from home that her mom hand-delivered directly to Druskin Gate. Asmi even brought her own spice blends to the dining hall to “remix” (her word) all of the bland cafeteria fare into passable versions of biryani and other more enticing dishes. Then she would box up the leftovers and nuke them during late-night cramming sessions. One time Asmi hacked her way into making a fish curry than stank up the stairwell for two days. The offense was noted at length in The Shit Memoirs. Asmi made up for it by stealing a few sundries from the kitchen while she was doing her work-study job and then making mug cakes for all the other girls in the stairwell.
Burton’s courier, the mysterious Alyssa, smuggled in everything else Anna and Bamert needed. Anna stayed after in Nolan’s class every Saturday morning to sign into a VPN account she had created that let her go online incognito. Then, she studied web tutorials of how to crack open tablets and PortPhones over and over, making sure she wouldn’t miss a step when the time came to execute the plan for real. She must have watched hours of footage of dudes with pasty, greasy fingers handling and mishandling PortPhones. They were bad hands; incapable hands. Anna took pride in comparing that sorry parade of hands to her own nimble extremities. One time, she granted herself a break from heist study by checking in on Lara’s WorldGram. The first post was a photo of Lara, sitting in the middle of what appeared to be an empty apartment in Manhattan, with the following caption:
Oktoberfest was fucking nuts, but sometimes I also love the day after the party, when you can just be you. I miss roomie spots like this one.
Anna was convinced that the way “roomie” was spelled was no accident. She went back to feverishly binging DIY vids.
It was, naturally, against the rules to tamper with school-issued electronic devices. After all, it wasn’t as if Anna was alone in dying to engineer a way to port off campus and back. A lot of other great minds were behind a lot of dorm room doors, scheming to work similar magic.
Finally, everything was ready. With Asmi out at volleyball practice that Saturday afternoon, Anna wasted little time. She took out the dwarf screwdriver and unscrewed the bottom of her tablet. The second the screws came loose, they skittered off her desk and fell to the floor. Anna would have had better luck seeing microbes with the naked eye.
“Shit.”
She felt around the hardwood, never realizing until now just how dirty the floor of her own dorm room was. Sticky and dusty. She felt crumbs of unidentifiable foodstuffs, hardened grains of stale rice, long hairs of unknown origin and color. Just when it seemed like the whole plan was dead before she had even taken one lousy step out of Sewell, she felt two pinpricks of cold metal and grabbed the screws, placing them in a small cup to make sure they would never go rogue again.
Next, she heated up the gel pack in the microwave. She only had to nuke it for twenty seconds to keep it warm for half an hour. That was enough time for the gel pack to absorb the oven’s entire history of smells: dinners, popcorn, old tea, instant ramen, canned pasta, etc. She laid the gel pack over the glass touch screen to loosen the glue. Then, she attached a suction cup and jabbed the little spudger between the glass and the chrome casing. This was an oddly satisfying process. Her hands were busy and productive. They were happy.
It took a little English, and Anna began to freak out that the screen would suddenly come loose and go flying out the window, winding up in the beak of a pigeon that would then air mail it directly into Vick’s office. Instead, the screen lifted off with gentle ease. Phew. Now she could see the guts of the tablet: all hard black chips and tiny circuit board terminals.
She kept the screen lifted at a 90-degree angle as she carefully unscrewed the battery cover. Druskin was a luxurious school in many ways, but cheap and shoddy in others. The dreaded lack of lack conditioning could make even fall oppressive. The food was one step up from a hospital cafeteria. And the tablets were mass-produced Monarchs with a battery that was the same shape and thickness as discount Worm PortPhones.
Anna disconnected the battery from its cable clip, pocketed it, and then reassembled the tablet. When she was finished, it looked the same as it had before she cracked it, and was still roughly as useful.
Now came the hard part.
Vick left his door open at all hours on school days, offering his availability to any student on campus. No one ever took him up on it. Even the brownnosers knew to stay away. Every day, Anna would go to her little snail mail cubby in Goren to check for school alerts and postcards that Sandy delivered by hand to the guards at Druskin Gate. On her way back to Sewell, she could glance into Vick’s office and sometimes notice his PortPhone sitting out on the conference table, there for the taking.
The horrible indelibility of Anna’s visit on Vick’s office on her first night had a peculiar utility to it. She remembered, with high-definition clarity, a closet just off to the right of his office table, large enough to fit a person and also dark enough to hide them. She also remembered that Vick’s office was manned by his assistant, Mrs. Kursten, who smoked five packs a day and had the bullfrog voice to prove it. Indeed, Anna Huff had remembered a great many details of the dean’s office and was determined to take advantage of them.
On this Saturday morning, Kursten was out and Vick was working alone in the office, the door wide open. Goren Hall stood between a row of three boys’ dorms off Water Street and the rest of North Campus, so it got a lot of foot traffic from the Walton Hall and Korenjack Hall boys passing through on their way to eating and studying elsewhere. Otherwise, no kid ever hung around Goren for any reason.
Bamert, who lived on the opposite campus, had no business being there that Saturday. But that didn’t stop him from confidently striding up the stairs in a bright orange suit festooned with white Clemson tiger paws. He was whistling, a brilliant move to get attention that wouldn’t raise suspicion because honestly, no one would ever find it unusual for Paul Bamert to make himself as conspicuous as possible.
When Bamert got to the final stair, he tripped and spilled a quart of ice cold Coke all over the floor.
“CHRIST AND EGGS!” he cried out. “THIS IS A FUCKING PECKERHEAD OF A DAY, YES IT IS!” Unsure he had laid it on thick enough, he added a few more: “SHIT! PISS! ASS!”
That did the trick. Vick stormed out of his office and over to the scene of Bamert’s misdemeanor.
“What did you just say, young man?”
“Oh shit, Dean Vick! Oh, sweet ginger brown, I just said shit, did I not? FUCK!”
Vick swelled with rage. Bamert expected spikes to start sprouting out of the dean’s face. Vick was so purely livid that he didn’t notice Anna slip down the opposite staircase and into his office, snatching Vick’s phone from the table and quickly ducking into the adjacent closet.
She turned on the pen flashlight. Cracking open a tablet in the comfort of her room was one thing, but now she was quivering a little. She could hear Bamert carrying on with Vick from afar.
“I am so, so sorry, sir.”
“Do you think it’s appropriate to use such foul language? If you’re this casually profane outside of my office, I can’t even begin to imagine what kind of sewer talk you use around your peers. I oughtta put you up for Un-Druskinlike Conduct right this instant.”
Anna got the screws out and jammed them into her overalls pocket. She was getting more adept with the pentalobe screwdriver, handling it with the dexterity of a safecracker. She pressed the gel case, which she had microwaved just ten minutes earlier, against the screen and counted ten Mississippis to herself. Then she attached the suction cup and worked the spudger under the glass and pulled. It wouldn’t give.
Come on.
“You’re right sir, and I beg your pardon. I beg it genuinely, as I am already down on my knees here. It’s just...”
Do it, Bamert. Sell it.
“It’s been a very difficult week for me, Dean Vick. A difficult month, really. I get terribly lonely. I have trouble making friends.”
“Perhaps your comportment is the reason for your struggles,” Vick told him.
“I have little doubt of that,” Bamert said. “The worst part is that I have no one to talk to about it.”
The screen came free. Anna lifted it ninety degrees and started in on the battery cover with a tiny Phillips-head screwdriver.
“Would you want to get a cup of coffee with me, sir?”
“I don’t drink coffee,” Vick told Bamert.
“Nor do I. It was just the first liquid that came to mind. I didn’t wanna suggest Coke, lest I drudge up memories of my gauche outburst. Tea? Juice?”
“I could maybe get some tea. Let me just grab my phone.”
Shit. Anna bit down hard on the flashlight.
“You know what?” Bamert told Vick. “Forget it. It was a silly idea anyway. I’ve wasted enough of your time, sir.”
What the hell is he doing?!
The ensuing silence made Anna want to die. She finally got the cover off the phone and carefully unclipped the precious antihydrogen battery. Then, she swapped in the lithium tablet battery from her tablet and clipped it. According to Burton, she had to break one other component of the phone so that it would power on, but then get bricked shortly thereafter if it stayed on. The goal was to convince Vick his phone was broken, not that it had been tampered with.
“Actually,” Vick told Bamert. “I don’t need the phone. Let’s go get your tea now.”
Holy smokes, he did it.
Anna heard both of them clomp down the stairs to the Grill, the sounds of their footsteps blessedly fading away and leaving her with all the time she needed to finish the job. She screwed the battery cover back on, clipped off a single terminal off the memory card, and slowly lowered the touch screen down into the casing. She felt around her right-hand pocket for the tiny screws, but only found a hole instead.
Crap.
Suddenly, there were new footsteps growing louder and coming toward the office. A rhythm of mounting dread. Anna crouched down with the flashlight and searched frantically for the little bastard screws. The floorboards of the closet were so aged and warped that the screws could have easily fallen between the cracks and been lost forever, as surely as a climber disappearing down a crevasse.
The steps grew louder. Whoever was coming was coming nearer, and quickly.
Please God, let me find these screws.
“HEY!” she heard a voice cry out. That was it. She was dead.
But then, another voice. “What?”
“Hurry up, man! We gotta be there twenty minutes before practice!”
“Quit busting my balls. Bad enough when Willamy does it. Christ.”
The footsteps faded away. Anna had little time to process her relief, because the screws were still nowhere to be found. Then she reached into her left-hand pocket, and there they were. She had forgotten which pocket she had put them in the entire time.
You. Moron.
Once the pentalobe screws were in place, she pressed down hard on the POWER button and said a little prayer. The screen glowed a bright enough to make her flinch. The phone worked, at least as much as it needed to. She turned it off before it could brick, and then the closet went dark again. She cleaned the phone down for prints with a soft eyeglass wipe. Now to just quietly slip out of the closet, put the phone back onto the table, and get the hell out of—
CLOMP CLOMP CLOMP
Anna couldn’t leave the office, but she also couldn’t stay. Back in the closet she went, leaving the door cracked the exact way it was when she broke in. Her breathing was heavy and labored. She tried desperately to corral it so that it wouldn’t give her away. Stuck in that closet, she became all too aware of the wide variety of ambient sounds she could make: floppy shoes, heavy breathing, swallowing, sniffles, coughs, farts, sneezes. Her entire body was one big stupid booby trap.
She moved to the back of the closet and slid down into the corner behind a row of stiff blazers, then covered her mouth even though she had no intention of speaking. Vick walked into the office and grabbed his phone off the table. Minutes after he unlocked it, he was met with an endlessly spinning wheel.
“Ugh. Again?”
He cursed the phone, the lousy hypocrite, then sat down at his desk and picked up a landline.
“Mrs. Kursten? I’m aware it’s a Saturday, yes. My phone has frozen up again and I need a new one delivered to Druskin Gate tonight. No, not Monday. Tonight. It’s a ten-minute call and then you can have the rest of your day in Paris. Goodbye.” He slammed the phone down and began running through a pile of manila folders on his desk.
Come on, you son of a bitch. Leave!
But Vick wouldn’t. Maybe he knew Anna was in that closet. Maybe he knew she was there and was content to sit at his desk and leave her there with her fear for hours on end. That would’ve been a classic Vick move.
Instead, what happened next was even more torturous. Vick caught a whiff of something and took to it like a hound. Anna quickly took an inventory of her own musk: menthol dandruff shampoo, stinky old shoes, honeydew body wash, enough sweat to fill a fish tank, and more. But there was one more thing.
The gel packet.
Oh no, that gel packet smelled like a dorm room made from concentrate. That’s what Vick had latched onto. Vick rose from of his chair to hunt the scent down. Anna was only feet away from expulsion, and that was the nicest possible outcome.
Then a hard port wind blew in, and there was Emilia Kirsch, dead in the center of the office. She looked irritated.
“Have you gone through those profiles yet?” she asked Vick.
“Most. Not all,” he told her.
“I want them done tomorrow, no later.”
“I understand.”
“Any of the new ones stand out?”
“A couple.”
“Such as?”
Vick walked back over to his desk and pulled an envelope from the stack.
“The boy, Jamie Burton,” Vick said. “Polymath. Very talented. Also, he’s a strangely mature kid for his age.” Anna rolled her eyes at that.
“Any hang-ups about him?” Kirsch asked Vick.
“He spends too much time with Annie Huff and Paul Bamert.”
The name is ANNA, you bastard.
“Ugh, Paul Bamert,” Kirsch said. “Charles, why can’t any of my friends have normal children?”
“The boy is a mess, and everyone knows his track record is abysmal. I doubt he graduates.”
“And what about the Huff girl? Is she worth anything?”
“She’s clever but otherwise unremarkable.”
“She didn’t rat out my daughter to you though, I’ll give her that. How is she as an R&D subject?”
Vick’s mouth drew up a single corner into that grotesque half-smirk. Anna looked away, clutching her knees and trying not to scream out in rage.
“She fails,” Vick said. “And then she screams.”
“I keep telling you to go to Southeast Asia for lab rats, for crying out loud.”
“They’re too easy to break.”
“I’m a wealthy woman, Charles, but I am tired of doling out lunch money settlements on behalf of this school. That one Marshall girl, I had to shell out $500,000 after she walked out of your house lobotomized.”
“The Huff girl won’t give you any trouble.”
“She better not. I bet she only got in here as a pity case anyway. What’d her sister do, kill herself a month before applications were due?”
“Actually her tests scores were remarkable. Shockingly so. And Coach Willamy says she’s already one of the best—”
One of the best what? Divers? Why couldn’t he compliment you to your face and not to that pile of shit?
“Oh, who cares what that lump of chewed gristle says about her?” Kirsch sneered. “Our admissions office needs to stop taking in every stray dog with a sob story hanging from its collar.”
Anna turned lycanthropian, ready to break through her skin and burst out of the office closet door to devour everything in sight. Stealing Vick’s phone battery was a sordid little thrill, but it wasn’t enough. She could dash out into the center of that office, hold a samurai sword high in the air and let it catch a blinding glint of light before she brought the steel down on both of those fuckers.
“How’s Lara?” Vick asked Kirsch. Anna leaned forward.
“You don’t ever need to ask me about my daughter, thank you.”
“How’s business?”
“Charles, this company is solving far too many problems. Business cannot thrive if no one out there has any problems that require solving. Expanding access to Network Z and widening the porthole will disrupt things just enough to make consumers place even greater value in our security products.” Network Z! “Sold effectively, they could soon be as profitable as our porting products. Do you see how that works?”
“I do.”
“No, you don’t. You’re a common administrator with a head made of wet cement. That is why you help manage the players and why you are not a player yourself. Get through those reports and send me five names, including the Burton boy.”
She exited with a portclap that shook the closet door. Vick stood there with his head bowed and for a moment, Anna pitied him. He was never going to grow into anything beyond what he was now. This was his permanent station in life. He was a pawn and a coward and a loser: a man surrounded by genius but possessing none of his own, and she knew with ironclad certainty that he would always be that way.
That sympathy had a quick half-life, though. Anna had granted Vick the courtesy of seeing him as a human being, while Vick had never granted her any such favor. He belonged in hell and she was ready to kick him down there. She wasn’t afraid of him anymore. She didn’t dread his sour mug the way she had for the past month, because now she knew the truth: You’re better than him. You got his porting battery to prove it.
She could stay quiet in that closet for as long as she needed. She could have stopped breathing for hours and still outlasted him. It was actually quite cozy in there. Maybe she’d hide in there again sometime. Make it her home. Maybe she’d get that jackass to spill everything he knew about this poisonous school. The anger was cooling now, hardening into determination. You could have seen wisps of steam come off her body.
To pass the time as Vick continued poring over files, she practiced piano in her mind: Sonatina No. 1 in G Major, moving her fingers along an invisible piano in the dark, breaking into a private smile whenever the notes turned on the charm. She loved that piece right up to the day she sorted out how to play it. That’s when the magic disappeared from the music and it just became a rote series of keys to press. She didn’t want to become the kind of muso snob who was more impressed by a difficult piece of music than by a good one, and yet here she was, writing off Beethoven as kiddie stuff once she had mastered it.
Anna won second place in the junior division of Nationals playing that little scrap of his brilliance. The competition took place at Bingham High School, south of Salt Lake City. She sat on the floor of an angled hallway outside the school’s assembly hall all that afternoon, waiting for two hours to take the stage. The hallway didn’t even have a vending machine. While the other insufferable prodigies were getting in their respective turns, Anna went over the sheet music in her head so many times that when she was finally called up to perform, she didn’t hear the notes. It was an easy piece compared to what the other kids were playing, but that simplicity was what gave her the freedom to arrange it herself and to strike the keys with such careful timing and pressure that no one else could have played it similarly. Anyone else trying to replicate her performance of it would fail, and be left at a loss as to why they had. That was Anna’s musical gift: the ability to play music precisely as she heard it in her own mind.
Sarah was so, so proud of Anna that day. It was the soon-to-prove bittersweet accolade that would start Anna on her path to Druskin. Now, once more, she could hear the notes from the piece—each one sharp as a diamond—in her mind, providing an appropriate soundtrack to the sight of Vick laboring away at his pathetic little existence.
Two hours later, Vick had finally plowed through all the reports. He turned the lights off and left the office door open behind him. Anna waited ten more minutes, poked her head out of the closet, and then ran back to Sewell. She ran so fast she could barely feel her feet.