Double Digit Read online

  “Four, sometimes five. What? College is expensive. Haven’t you noticed?”

  Truthfully, I hadn’t. It hadn’t even been a point of discussion for my family when I was looking at schools. There was a silent assurance that anywhere I wanted to go would be fine. My parents pay the bills, I’m on a food plan that covers all my meals, and I get a small monthly allowance. Not only had I not noticed it was expensive—it all seemed free.

  I realized that I had become the worst kind of self-centered person. Everything was all about me, even down to the T-shirts. And I didn’t know anything about Bass. Not where he was from, nothing about his family, not even where he got that dog. It seemed almost too late to ask. All I could tell you about him is that he’s really smart, can smile without moving more than six facial muscles, and tends to express himself through his T-shirts. And he knew plenty about me.

  Everyone was excited about our “celebration” dinner. I wore the new replacement sweater my mom had sent and blew out my hair. Tiki gave me a whistle. “Well, look at you, with smooth hair and slightly different clothing. Is this just for us?”

  “It’s sad that a minimal amount of primping seems like an occasion.” My mom had also sent a navy blue dress for me to wear to the trial. It had absolutely no pattern and had pockets to hide my hands in if I got nervous. She’s thoughtful like that. The trial couldn’t last more than a few days, and she probably knew I would have no problem repeating the outfit.

  We all met in the hallway to walk to dinner. Bass nodded at my hair and said, “Interesting.”

  Tiki agreed. “Right?”

  “Can we just go?” I begged.

  The restaurant was dark and loud and festive. Bass was greeted with a hug by the beautiful French hostess and then got a kiss on both cheeks. Was this really necessary? You could walk away pregnant after a greeting like that. The rest of us got curt nods as we were taken to the mysterious corner booth.

  We shared mussels, roasted chicken, and Caesar salads. The waitress brought us appetizers that we did not order, with a wink to Bass. He thanked her warmly, and she stayed too long, waiting for more. I watched him talk with Clarke, nodding in approval but interjecting when her theories were getting too outlandish. He was never too light or too serious. He was a person in balance, like Danny with focus.

  “Star-ing!” Ella nudged me a little too hard in the ribs. “Digit, this is getting so embarrassing.”

  “Totally. I’ve been watching it too.” Scott was shoveling salad into his mouth but didn’t miss a beat. Why isn’t anyone whispering? This seems like an occasion for hushed tones.

  I don’t know how I knew, but I knew Bass heard. Something shifted in his jaw and in his shoulders when Ella said it. I guess I knew because I was still staring.

  We walked back from dinner, all laughs. Everyone was full and relaxed. The dorm was at a medium to low level of activity, but kids studying in the common room barely looked up when we walked through. Bass had been right about the one-shot intensive info session—it had gotten me out of everyone’s system. Clarke, Ella, and Scott turned into Scott’s room. “We’re going to work on our science project. Night.” Winks all around. I’m still not sure why Clementine had to be such a secret. I suspect the secrecy was part of this carefully cultivated hacker lifestyle (complete with fake glasses).

  We got to our end of the hall and stopped at my door. From a thousand miles away it would have looked like an end-of-date moment. Except that Tiki was standing there too. I searched my bag for my keys, and Bass stood waiting with his hands in his pockets. Tiki grabbed the keys from me and went inside and closed the door without saying a word, making it feel like an end-of-date moment. I’d stood here talking to him every day, finishing up our conversations about oil spills or whatever. But this was different—darn that hair dryer.

  I looked up at him and then quickly away before I said, “Can I just ask you . . . um, where are you from? Do you have siblings, and where’d you get Buddy?”

  Having gotten my questions out, I searched for a new spot to put my eyes. They settled on his left hand, which was rising out of his pocket, on track to come up and make contact with my face. My face went hot in anticipation. I’d just tell him I suddenly had a fever. Doesn’t that happen to people? They go out, they have a lovely time, and then bam! they’re hit with the bubonic plague or food poisoning?

  His hand paused at eye level and counted off one, two, three as he spoke. “Canada. Four. The pound.”

  “I didn’t know anything about you.”

  “There’s not that much to know. No one’s chasing me.” Yeah, except all the women who work in that restaurant.

  “Count your blessings,” I said, like I was someone’s grandmother now. Next time I’d be sure to leave him with “A stitch in time saves nine.”

  He didn’t seem to be making any move to leave. Neither did I. “You have a hard time looking directly at me.”

  I looked directly at him, just to prove him wrong. “See?” And then I immediately knew why I never looked directly at him. His eyes were stronger than mine, probably from doing all the work for the rest of his face all these years. I was locked in and feeling dizzy and oddly aware of my mouth. I bit down on my lip to ensure it was still closed.

  And then my phone rang. I reached into my pocket and answered it, still unable to move my eyes. “Hello?”

  “Hey. What are you doing?”

  Bass’s eyes smiled when he heard it was John.

  “Waiting?” I bit down harder on my lip.

  “For me?”

  “Sorta.”

  Bass leaned down and kissed me at the intersection of my cheek and the corner of my mouth, saying, too close to the phone, “Good night, Digit.”

  “Is that the RA?”

  Bass turned to walk back down the hall. The spell was broken, and I could move my eyes anywhere I wanted, but my stomach was still doing flips.

  “Digit? What’s going on?”

  I slumped down on the floor in the hallway and tried to get it together. “Hey, nothing. We all, a bunch of us, just went out for dinner. You know, a last hurrah before the slammer. But everyone’s gone now, perfect timing.”

  “This is torture.”

  “Yeah. Tell me about it.” I watched as Bass closed the door to his room. “You in New York?”

  “I’m back in D.C. I just wanted to make sure you were okay. I’ll be up there Monday morning.”

  When I hung up the phone, I sat for a while. The hallway was no longer threatening in any way. It felt like home, and I was happy to sit there all night, in that in-between space. That is, until the door to Bass’s room opened.

  I started to get up, maybe to take flight or maybe to run over there—I guess I was just going to let my boots decide when the time came. Bass walked out with Buddy on a leash behind him and, instead of walking toward me, just gave a quick wave and turned the other way to take the back stairs out. He doesn’t take the back stairs at night. No one does. The back door is always locked at this time of night, so he was going to have to go downstairs and then cross back to the front of the building to get out. That was maybe fifty extra steps just to avoid talking to me.

  As part of my new effort not to be so totally self-involved, I tried to put myself in his situation. What if I just tried to kiss someone, although at the absolute wrong moment, while they were on the phone with their old girlfriend who they were totally still hung up on? As hard as I tried, I just could not put myself in that situation. I couldn’t imagine kissing someone without a written invitation. It was a different sort of psyche. Sure, I’d think about it. News flash: I’m an overthinker. But unless it was a life-or-death situation, I wasn’t sure I had the courage to be a doer at all.

  I managed to get into my room and shut the door completely before Tiki could start Ooooh, girl-ing me. “Stop.”

  She was lying on her bed, smiling like she’d just heard a juicy secret. “Okay, fine. But there’s something up . . .”

  “No. Not
hing’s up. We’re friends. We have things in common—okay, everything in common. But that’s it. Trust me, no one’s hot for the jailbird.”

  SOME DAYS YOU’RE THE WINDSHIELD; OTHER DAYS YOU’RE THE BUG

  SUNDAY STARTED OUT NORMALLY ENOUGH. TIKI and I were in our room studying. Some might think this was a little unnecessary, since I was not likely to be in class for the rest of the semester. If they lived inside my head, though, they would know it was more than necessary. Unfortunately or fortunately (it’s hard to tell which—there’s a fine line there too, as it turns out), the hackers stopped by to show us the final programming changes to Clementine before the big robot fair.

  Everyone knew about Clementine but Bass. They’d mentioned their (wink, wink) science experiment about a hundred times in front of him, but either he was not interested or he was just playing along with the whole mystery thing. He never asked for any more information.

  Scott was so excited that I started to get excited for him. He placed Clementine on the floor with a big paper bag next to her.

  “I don’t have all day.” Tiki was not particularly interested in spending the day inside playing with a robot.

  Scott said, “Wait. Let’s show Bass. He won’t tell anyone. We haven’t said anything about the dog, right?”

  “He doesn’t need to see it. Come on, Scott, go ahead.” Now I wanted to get this moving as much as Tiki did.

  “He’s right. Go get him, Digit.” Why me?

  “Clarke, you can go get him if it’s so important.” Everyone looked at me to see why I was being so difficult. It would take me twelve seconds to walk down the hall, knock on his door, and get him. “Fine.” It actually took me closer to thirty seconds to get to his door. And another thirty to knock on it.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “Need something?”

  No words came out. Luckily for me, because the ones I had racing around in my head were not to be repeated. Even here.

  “I was just going to take Buddy out. Wanna come?” That sounded so normal. Maybe I’d just overreacted to the little demi-kiss. Maybe we could just go back to walking the dog and talking science and funny T-shirts.

  “Sure. But can you come down to my room for a sec first? Scott has something he’s dying to show you. It’s cool, I promise.”

  “Sure.” See? Everything was totally normal.

  Scott insisted we close the door before he started. “Now, Bass, you are sworn to secrecy.”

  “Me and everyone else on the hall—now get started or Buddy’s going to pee all over my room.”

  Scott placed Clementine on the floor next to the paper bag and pressed Go. Clementine released her little penguin arms, emptied the paper bag, and stacked its contents (ten Coke cans) into a perfect pyramid. Then she backed up and shot them down. We all cheered, because we were expected to. And because it was awesome.

  Ella took the cans and put them back in the bag so we could see it again, and we all stayed in my room to watch. This was unfortunate because about five minutes later Jonas Furnis walked in and locked the door behind him.

  POO POO OCCURS

  EVERYONE LOOKED UP, WITHOUT FEAR, BECAUSE they had no idea who he was. “Hello, Squire.” He was in a brown trench coat and a black skullcap, which protected his baldness from the Massachusetts chill.

  Bass got up and started to say something, but Jonas pulled a gun out of his pocket and told him to sit. “I will kill all of you. That’s not a threat—it’s why I came. I’ll do it fast now or fast a little later. It makes absolutely no difference to me.”

  “We need to talk. And I’ll get you out of here.” I tried to sound calm. “There’s a lot that you should know, amazing things. But these people have nothing to do with you or what you’re doing. Let them go. And we can talk . . .”

  “Digit, I’ve had plenty of time to talk to you. Do you really think you have any light to shed on any topic that would be of interest to me?” Yes. “You have shown me that you are a worthy opponent. And I see now that you are not going to cross over to Mother Earth’s side. As her Guardian, I declare you her enemy. The punishment for a disloyal squire is death.”

  Clarke looked like she was going to cry. Scott looked worse. I was scared, of course, but also a little confused. This didn’t seem like his style, just walking in here and killing me. Where was the sport in that?

  “First things first. May I have all of your laptops and cell phones in a pile right here?”

  We had two laptops and six cell phones between us. Jonas seemed satisfied but Scott blurted out, “No, I have another one!” and handed him his Blackberry.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Clarke smacked him in the arm. Scott covered his face.

  Bass was slowly inching closer to me. For what, I don’t know. Unless he’d popped in for the Sunday morning science experiment packing heat, he was useless to me.

  “Thank you, young idiot. Now this is very simple. No one leaves this room but me. Today is not my day to die. I have a spectacular explosive planted in this building that will flatten it completely in a matter of seconds. It’s set for one hour from now: You will be in nano-pieces and I can go on with my life.”

  He walked over to me and kissed me on the top of the head. The creepiest part is that he seemed to mean this. “You are the last person I wanted to have to kill. I truly believed that you’d been sent to help me. My disappointment is profound.”

  Both of Adam Ranks’s posters caught his eye. “Ah. I see you’re a collector. This one’s new. Pretty. Yes, now these will be destroyed as well in an hour, and then I’m off to California to finish the job with Mr. Ranks. We were sloppy letting him outlive his usefulness, weren’t we?”

  Bass had now maneuvered his body between Jonas’s and mine, which was a nice gesture, but it’s hard to stand between someone and a bomb.

  Jonas approached the windows. “Breathtaking day.” He attached a small device to the latch of each. There was a split second where his back was to us, but none of us had the presence of mind to jump him. We all just sat.

  “Now, trust me, no touching the windows or the door. You’ll be greeted with a most unpleasant kaboom.” He turned to leave.

  “Jonas!” I shouted.

  “Yes.”

  “Where’s the fun? I don’t even get to crack a password or anything?”

  “The timer’s already running on the bomb and on these devices. Only I know the password to disarm it. There’s no code to crack, just a password. But even if you thought you could guess it, you’re stuck in here and I have your phones. You’re right, it’s not very sporting, but I’ve had a rough few weeks. Sometimes you just need a quick victory.” He placed another small device on the doorknob before he left, saying, “Checkmate.”

  Clarke took the opportunity to smack Scott in the head. Ella sat down and started to cry. Tiki paced. Bass put his arm around me. “We’re not going to die in here. If I can stay calm, can you?” He took my hands. “Seriously, let’s think. We have an hour. We need to communicate. We need to clear everyone out of this building. We need a phone.” Everyone looked at poor Scott again.

  “Sorry!”

  Ella suggested we tape a sign to the window, but I was scared that even the tape touching it would blow us up. I had no idea how sensitive Jonas’s explosives were.

  “What if we try to wave someone down, just to let them know there’s trouble?” Bass walked to the window just as four police cars pulled up in front of the dorm. “The cops are here. How could they know . . . ?”

  I stood next to him in time to see Jonas Furnis crossing the quad, with his coat flowing behind him. He stopped and raised his arms like a bird. For a second I thought he was going to take off, the Guardian taking flight and leaving Mother Earth. I was half right. A shot had been fired, and with raised arms he fell forward.

  “He’s dead. They must have been following him.”

  “Thank God,” the hackers said. I felt no relief as I said it.

  “Exce
pt he was the only person alive who knew how to disarm the bomb that’s going to kill us in fifty-five minutes.”

  “Let’s take this in pieces.” Bass was speaking only to me. “Our first responsibility is to get a message out to clear the dorm.”

  Ella started shouting at the door, “Anyone out there? Don’t touch this door, but can you hear me?” We were pretty much half the hall, and everyone else was probably out or still asleep.

  Scott collapsed on Tiki’s bed, cradling Clementine in his arms and whispering to her. “It’s okay, don’t be scared. I’m not going to let that bad man’s bombs turn you into nano-pieces.”

  Ella put her head in her hands. “All that work. All those tiny little screws. Everywhere. What a waste.”

  Clarke chimed in, “You’re a total waste. You even used my old Droid . . .” They all looked at each other and then at Clementine. “Rip her apart, Scott. Or I’ll do it myself.”

  Apparently, Scott had used an old Android phone to work as Clementine’s communication system. He painstakingly opened her up and pulled it out. “It’s still charged. Three bars.”

  “Dial 911. Or no? Digit, who should we call?” Bass seemed to think I was the authority on these situations. And, looking around, I guess I was.

  “Let’s call 911 first.” I dialed and explained in as simple terms as I could what our situation was. I asked to be transferred to one of the police officers outside in the quad. They were putting police tape up around where Jonas Furnis’s body still lay.

  I got one of them immediately. “This is Digit Higgins. I’m in McKinsey dorm at MIT. Yes. Free Digit, that one. Yes. I can see the body from my room. That’s the guy. There’s a bomb in this building and it needs to be evacuated. Is there a bomb squad nearby? We don’t have time for that. I’m in my room with five friends, and the windows and door are booby-trapped. We can’t get out unless that bomb is disarmed. We need . . .”

  Bass took the phone from me. “This is the RA. Please evacuate this building. Then go to room 205. You will find a dog named Buddy there. He is reasonably friendly, yes. Walk him up and down the halls. He’ll find the bomb. We only have forty minutes left.”