Double Digit Read online

  I have to admit that halfway through the first song I was having fun. It was too loud to talk, so I was spared the “You’re name’s what?” conversation. And the many, many flaws in my dancing style were masked by the lights flashing on and off. All anyone saw of me was a series of freeze frames. I was a flip book. It is impossible to tell that someone has no rhythm in a flip book. Someone handed me a warm beer and I nodded thank you, still dancing and spilling half on the floor.

  There was a couple making out against my door, and I had the hardest time not staring at them. I mean, we just got here. How do people figure that stuff out so fast and so publicly? Meanwhile, the big guy was getting a little friendlier all the time. First just spinning me around by the hand, then putting his other hand around my waist, then breathing the breath of a beer-chugging dragon into my face. I had to move on. “Spin me,” I mouthed, with the enthusiasm of a dance-show contestant. As soon as he spun me out, I let go of his hand to gracefully sashay over to the next group.

  Okay, by “gracefully sashay,” I mean I completely slid across the floor and into the partially open door of another dorm room. (Note to self: When dancing on floors that are covered in spilled beer, opt for a rubber-soled shoe.) I saw the big guy laughing at a distance and then become quickly distracted by another strobe light–protected dancing girl.

  I was on the floor, a little sticky but safe. Two girls and a guy were behind me in the cramped room and somehow didn’t notice my entrance. They were huddled together, silent except for a faint buzzing sound. After a few seconds there was a crash, followed by their enthusiastic cheers. I got up and completely dusted myself off before they noticed me.

  “Who are you?” A heavily pierced girl in a camouflage T-shirt, plaid pajama bottoms, and combat boots made a face like maybe I hadn’t showered.

  “I’m Digit. I sort of fell into your door and—”

  “Digit?” Here we go.

  “Yeah, I’m good at math. What’s your name?” I extended my hand to end the questioning.

  The pierced girl said, “I’m Clarke. I mean, my name’s Isabella Clarke, but I’m not exactly an Isabella, am I?” I looked her over and had to agree. An Isabella wouldn’t have chosen the color Grim Reaper for her hair.

  The other girl stepped in. “Hi. I’m Manuella.” She was a Brazilian girl with long brown hair and severe black-rimmed glasses. “It’s hard to say, so people call me Ella.”

  The guy said, “My name’s Scott. Because that’s what my parents named me. What’s wrong with you people? Does everybody’s name have to come with a book report?” Scott’s clothing would have worked as a Steve Jobs Halloween costume: black mock turtleneck, blue jeans, wire-rimmed glasses.

  They made no effort to ingratiate themselves to me any further. They stood shoulder to shoulder, forming a wall against the rest of the room. I wondered what to do. Clarke nodded at the door, as if to give me a suggestion. Scott reached toward the desk for a small remote control and quickly hid it in his pocket. In doing so, he must have accidentally pressed something. A small stuffed penguin marched out from under the bed, and with a frenzied press of a button it stopped.

  Clarke let her hands fall at her sides. “You totally did that on purpose.”

  Scott was offended. “I did not.”

  “It’s a joke how you can’t keep a secret for five minutes. Fine. Show her.” Ella stepped aside and revealed a pile of six fallen beer cans.

  The vibe around me felt almost anticipatory, like I was supposed to have some big reaction. All I could think of was, “So you each had two beers?”

  “Wow, she is good at math.” Clarke rolled her eyes.

  “No, look.” Scott pressed a few more buttons, and two long arms grew out of the penguin’s sides. To my true amazement, it proceeded to stack the beer cans into a pyramid. A green light flashed on its head, it backed up, and then shot a dart from its chest to knock the cans down. Again with the cheering.

  “That’s amazing. Where did you get it?”

  Scott picked it up off the ground like it was a Chihuahua in a pink outfit. “I built her.”

  I was pretty impressed. I didn’t know anything about engineering and couldn’t even conceive of where you’d get started on a project like that. Like where would you even buy an On/Off switch? And how would you decide what kind of batteries to use? And what was it about this little penguin that made Scott call it a “her”? I decided not to ask any of these questions. I had a feeling I was in on some weird secret, but how could these three already have a secret?

  So instead, this stuff came out, God help me. “I don’t know anybody here besides Tiki. How come you guys seem to know each other so well? I mean, did you meet this morning and happen to find each other? Does that happen to everyone? Or am I just an outsider because I’m from California?”

  They responded, rapid-fire:

  Clarke: California?

  Me: Yep.

  Scott: You surf?

  Me: No.

  Ella: Obsessed with your car?

  Me: No, but I collect bumper stickers.

  Ella: Fine. Yoga?

  Me: No.

  Scott: Who’s Tiki? Another long-story name?

  Me: My roommate. I assume so.

  Clarke: Fake boobs?

  Me: Me? No. Probably not Tiki either.

  Clarke: His glasses are fake and so are Ella’s. Do you find that as hilarious as I do?

  Me: Yes.

  Lots of glancing at one another and then, “Okay.”

  Clarke sat down on one of the beds, and the other two sat on the bed across from her. I didn’t know where to put myself so I flopped onto the floor, crisscross applesauce, like when I was five. Talk about feeling looked down on.

  Clarke got up to shut the door. “So we met in a hackers’ chatroom about six months ago and realized we were all going to be freshmen at MIT. Scott showed Ella and me the prototype for Clementine here, and we bonded over the sheer genius of it. There’s a robotics competition in December, and no freshman team has ever won. I guess mainly because they haven’t been working together for long enough. But we have.” Nods, knowing glances.

  “You really can’t tell anyone,” said Ella.

  “What? That you guys had met before? Is that against the rules?”

  Scott tented his fingers under his chin in such a Steve Jobs way that I sort of thought he was making a joke. “Not that. But we did mess a bit with the school’s residential living system. Just to make sure that we’d all be in the same dorm.”

  “Actually, Ella and I are roommates, and we gave Scott the single across the hall. Lucky.”

  “So you’re hackers.” I was just trying to make sense of it, to straighten it out in my head. Was it harmless what they were doing? Were they criminals? Was it just super fun and a way to get the dorm-mates you wanted?

  Those were not the questions I should have been asking myself. But if I’d known what questions to be asking I probably wouldn’t have needed to ask them.

  I hung out with those guys for a long time. I collected so much data on who they were and how hackers operate that I couldn’t wait to be alone to process it all. They showed me some basic hacking techniques, just hacking into their own stuff. They were all so goodhearted, even Clarke with her sort of rough exterior. She whispered to me when I left, “You can hang with us, but do me a favor. No fake glasses.” I laughed thinking of how long I tried not to seem like a nerd when neo-nerd was a carefully cultivated look around here.

  I got back to my room by pretending to boogie down the hall. I waved my arms in the air, woot-woot, high-fived a few drunk people, and shoved that same kissing couple two inches to the left so I could reach my doorknob. I locked it behind me and threw myself on my bed. The first night of college had been a bit like drinking water from a fire hose. Overwhelming, but still refreshing.

  I turned out the lights, and the moon cast the sinister pattern of the old leaded windows on the wall over my bed. Each pane had four rows of three rectangles, w
hich minded their own business while a branch poked at them at irregular intervals. Stop poking me, I thought, and immediately missed my brother, Danny. He was three days away from starting his senior year and would surely sail through it with his patented mixture of fun, sweetness, and getting away with murder.

  Murder . . . which brought me to the kidnapped man’s 3-D artwork that threatened to pounce on me from across the room. With the music still booming on the other side of the wall, I decided to call John in L.A.

  “Hey. How was the first night?”

  “Interesting.”

  “How?”

  “I danced. I met a bunch of hackers. They swore me to secrecy over some robot they built. And then I danced home. It was actually kind of cool.” I felt better just talking to him.

  “That sounds pretty good. I miss you.”

  “Maybe I should come home. I could be in Malibu in eight hours, and we could go to the beach.” I heard a sigh.

  “Don’t tempt me. I thought about flying out there today and being that creepy boyfriend who shows up all the time. I don’t even know what to do with myself without you here. I was thinking earlier of stopping by to see Danny, but that just seemed pathetic.”

  “Seriously, classes don’t start for two days. I feel oriented already. Maybe I should come see you.”

  “I’ll be in New York next week. And I’ll be up to see you in two weeks. It’ll seem like nothing someday.” Grownups.

  THINK OR PERISH

  I WOKE UP AT TWO A.M., POSITIVE that someone was standing over my bed. The moon was still projecting a shadow on my wall, but no one was there. I kind of had to pee and weighed the creepiness of my room against the potential creepiness and stickiness of the dark hallway that led to the huge communal girls’ bathroom. I decided I was being ridiculous and that I wasn’t going to be able to hold it for four years, so I got out of bed and found my slippers. And my brand-new I’m-going-to-college bathrobe. All I needed was a big set of curlers to look exactly like my great-grandma Dorothy.

  I poked my head out of my room and looked both ways down the dark hallway. The smell of stale beer was intense. I looked left and right maybe six times—I’d crossed highways with less caution. It’s a hallway, Digit. I tiptoed into the darkness and moved toward the third door on the left, focusing on the reassuring light coming from under it. My heart was racing from I-don’t-know-what as I finally pushed the door all the way open to flood the hall with light.

  A guy was standing at the sink, in a towel, shaving. It took me a few beats to register: A guy is standing at the sink, in a towel, shaving. He turned to look at me. His sandy hair was wet and shaggy like he’d given it a once-over with the towel that was now wrapped around his waist, too low. Really, impossibly low. How do men keep towels up when they have no hips? Is there a special way to fasten it at the front? Maybe there’s Velcro . . . I’d feel so much better if I knew there was a little piece of Velcro holding that tiny little flap . . . because it could definitely slip any second now, and he’d just be standing there . . .

  “Hello?” He was saying something. And I was staring. I started shifting in my slippers from side to side. How long had I been staring at that most precarious spot where the top of his towel met the very, very bottom of his stomach? As my eyes lowered, I started to focus, as only I can, on the striped pattern of his towel. Every brand in America makes a striped towel, but this one had a break in the stripes so that every fifteen inches, the stripes stopped matching up. No, not every fifteen inches. Every fifteen, then six . . . I needed him to turn around to see the back. I couldn’t break myself away from trying to force those stripes to meet. “Is there something the matter with you?” the guy said. Uh, what was your first clue?

  “You’re going to have to take off that towel.” Oh my God. “No! Don’t take off that towel!” I closed my eyes and tried to picture a perfect circle. I knew I looked completely nuts, but if I was going to recover, I needed to snap out of it and try to explain. But I didn’t want to keep having to explain this, and certainly not to a mostly naked guy. “You know what’s weird?” I opened my eyes. “I think I was sleepwalking. Just woke up! Wow! Now I’m awake. And maybe in the men’s room? Hmm. I’ll just . . .” I started backing up, not sure why I wasn’t turning around to just get out of there. Maybe I was waiting for some acknowledgment that this happens all the time, that I was the third girl to walk in on him tonight. Why is he walking toward me?

  “I’m Bass.” He reached out a hand to me and, thankfully, secured his towel with the other. “I’m the RA on this floor. We’ll be meeting in the morning. Fully dressed.” Is it possible to have a little twinkle in your eye while standing half-naked and half-shaving-creamed in front of a total stranger? Unfathomable.

  “Okay.” I turned to go, managing to secure my eyes on the dirty floor where they should have been all along.

  “The girls’ bathroom is across the hall. It says ‘girls’ on the door.” Gee, thanks.

  I managed to get through the get-to-know-your-friendly-RA meeting without making any direct eye contact. I mean, isn’t it some sort of sexual assault seeing someone in a towel? Yeah, I walked in on him, but still. Now that he was fully dressed in jeans and a T-shirt that said NEVER DO ANYTHING YOU WOULDN’T WANT TO EXPLAIN TO THE PARAMEDICS, I could actually look at him. He had an unnerving way of smiling with his eyes while barely lifting the corners of his mouth. His eyes were blue and lit up with amusement at almost everything, and I found myself staring at his mouth to see if it would curl up enough to match them. When he laughed his mouth was forced all the way into action, but when he smiled it was mostly his eyes. Sometimes I wish I could just gloss over the details.

  A one-eared dog sat at his feet while he talked to us. “About your little party last night. This may come as a shocker, but there is no alcohol allowed in the dorms. If you thought maybe you were getting away with something, well, you were. I let that happen for a couple of reasons, and don’t expect a repeat. First of all, it was the first night, and I wanted you all to let loose and maybe get acquainted. I can see you accomplished that.” Laughter all around. The couple who had been making out against my door got a lot of looks. “And, second, because now you guys owe me. I am not allowed to keep a dog in here. And I don’t know how I’d be able to do it without you guys knowing. It’s only for a couple of weeks. His name’s Buddy, and he’s a rescue dog. I’ll find him a home pretty soon, but you guys have to keep it to yourselves. Okay?”

  I personally couldn’t have cared less if he had a dog in his room. What was cool was that we all suddenly had the sense of community that comes with a shared secret. Bass waited until all twelve of us had nodded in agreement.

  “You should also know that he can sniff out any illicit substances you might be keeping in your room, so as my first official act as your residential adviser, I advise you to get rid of it.” We all looked at each other, trying to scope out any potential potheads. Bass got up and started to leave the room. “Now you have twenty minutes to clean up that hallway before the janitors show up and we’re all busted. Mops and garbage bags are in the closet by the girls’ bathroom.” Putting his hand on my shoulder, he said, “This young lady should be able to show you where that is.”

  I’m not a huge blusher, and I’m not even that fair-skinned. But some kind of fiery redness shot out of my cheeks, and I had to completely bow my head to conceal it. Clarke’s natural tendency to be personally offended by absolutely everything saved me. “Uh, yeah, Bass, we’re all pretty smart. We can find the girls’ bathroom.”

  After twenty minutes of mopping, bagging, and stashing, I felt comfortable with all the kids on my hall. Even the big guy who I was sure was going to grope me last night seemed fun and harmless. His name was Kevin, and he was from Topeka. He would forever be known as Kevin from Kansas. That seemed to be the tricky part of the first few days, just avoiding a bad nickname. I was glad to have brought my own.

  I walked to the big freshman orientation breakfast with m
y new hacker pals and Tiki. Scott gave me a shove as we walked. “Um, sure you got a good-enough look at that RA, Digit?”

  Tiki laughed. “Yeah, there’s a little drool right . . . there, in the corner of your mouth. You may want to wipe that before your ‘boyfriend’ (please don’t get me started on air quotes) visits.”

  Everyone laughed in a good-natured, it’s-no-biggie sort of way. This alarmed me for two reasons: Was I really staring at him for so long that people noticed? Why were they acting like it didn’t matter if I did? I mean, didn’t girls in love not notice other guys?

  The orientation breakfast was pretty fun. I stayed with the kids from my hall mostly but met some new people too. No one really knew anybody, so even the introverts were forced to introduce themselves. The dean gave a speech about new beginnings, and we ate scrambled eggs and bacon from chafing dishes.

  When we got back to the dorm, it was surrounded by police cars. At first I thought something had happened to someone and was waiting for a stretcher to come out the front door. But the dorm would have been completely empty with all of the freshmen away at breakfast. We stood outside the yellow police tape and speculated about what might be going on.