Still Point

by Katie Kacvinsky

  “How did you get in here?”

  He opened up his arms. “Easy. I jumped from a plane onto your roof, disengaged the security grid in your basement, crawled into your house through an air vent, cut the security wires on your wall screens, crawled back outside, unlocked a sky window, slid through, and here I am.”

  I raised a single eyebrow.

  “I knocked on the door and your mom let me in. Crazy, right?”

  “You knew my dad was out of town,” I said.

  He nodded. “And your mom’s a pushover. I brought her a homemade apple pie so she couldn’t refuse me.”

  I closed my book and set it on my lap. “You baked an apple pie?”

  He walked around my room, looking at the wall screens. He shook his head. “Riley’s mom baked it. I’m crashing at their place right now. But I helped with the most important step,” he said, and turned to look at me. “The secret is, you brush egg whites and sprinkle cinnamon on top of the crust before you put it in the oven. It makes it crispy.”

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “A connoisseur of sensual delights.” He grinned and I felt heat flood my face and arms and chest. He was giving me that look again, a look that feels like a furnace snapping on inside me, blowing hot air into my blood.

  He walked around my room, taking in the murals slowly.

  “I never knew you were an artist,” he said.

  I looked down at the ground for a few seconds. No one had ever called me that.

  “Who taught you to do this?” he asked me.

  “My little friend called isolation.”

  He laughed. “That’s right. You’ve been grounded since when, birth?”

  “Isolation can be a good teacher,” I said, sticking up for my longtime friend. “In small doses.”

  “Why do you do it?” he asked, turning to me. I didn’t understand his question. “Some people play music, some people exercise. Why do you paint?”

  I’d never thought about it, but after what Jax had shown me that day, I had an answer. “I think it’s a form of therapy,” I said, and pointed around the room. “I’ve learned how to dream outside whatever walls are confining me. If I can’t physically escape, at least mentally I can.”

  He nodded. “You’re like the Mariana Trench.”

  “The what?” I asked.

  “It’s the deepest point in the ocean. Over thirty-five thousand feet deep. You could take Mount McKinley and fit it inside, and there would still be room underneath. That’s how deep the ocean gets. No one’s ever been down there. Even now, they still can’t get a human being that deep without the pressure killing them.”

  I smiled. I knew his point, that everything is limitless, even people. We can try to figure one another out, but we’ll never reach the bottom.

  “It’s just a way to clear my head,” I said.

  There was a bookshelf in my room, stacked with all the books my mom had given me over the years. Justin was reading the spines. Every year I reorganized the books, sometimes alphabetically, or by genre, or even by spine color. I faced my favorite covers out.

  I watched Justin and I liked the contrast he made—my room was soft, the dim yellow glow from the lamps and the murals and the light green bedspread and white carpeting, and Justin was dark and strong against it. Maybe that’s what I’d been looking for all along. A contrast. Somebody who stands out from my typical world. Somebody you notice for being different from everyone and everything.

  He sat down on the bed next to me. I studied his hand, so close to mine, on my bed. I wanted to pause this moment because I’d never thought it was possible.

  “Never thought I’d be sitting here, did you?” he asked, reading my mind.

  “Not without at least one gun pointed at your head.”

  He smiled and grabbed my hand. “I want you to come to Scott’s with me. There’s someone in town you should meet.”

  I looked at my hand, swallowed inside his. I thought back to my conversation with Clare on the train. I concentrated on his eyes as if I were staring into a foggy crystal ball, trying to see an image inside. “Have you realized we’ve never been on a date?”

  He pulled his eyebrows together. “That’s not possible. We’ve been hanging out for over a year.”

  “Usually fugitive style,” I reminded him.

  “True,” he said.

  “I’m not complaining,” I said. “I’m just contemplating.”

  Justin pressed his lips on my hand and grazed them over each knuckle. I wanted to shut the door for a night. Just shut out the world and be alone with him. I felt something closing between us, something checking out, and it scared me. I wanted him all to myself.

  He looked torn between what he could see I needed and what other people needed from him, and it made me feel selfish. I needed to support Justin. If I wanted my life to be expansive, and inspiring, and real, who was I to try to limit him, the person fighting harder for my life than anyone?

  I grabbed his hand and pulled him off the bed. “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  I sat next to Justin on the train, heading to Scott’s apartment.

  “Is this a meeting about the national vote?” I asked.

  “Scott’s in charge of organizing that,” he answered.

  “I think it’s stressing him out,” I noted.

  Justin nodded. “I can’t help out too much right now. Vaughn’s my top priority. If we can arrest him, we have a shot at bringing down DS.”

  “You don’t care about the protest?” I asked.

  He lifted his shoulders. “It’ll be great publicity. Like a giant advertisement for our cause.”

  I studied his calm profile. “You don’t think we’ll win, do you?”

  “No,” he answered without hesitating. “I don’t think we have a chance in hell.”

  My mouth dropped open. “Then why go to all the work to organize a riot?”

  “Because we don’t want to go down without a fight. These virtual schools have been around for more than fifty years, but at least there used to be other options. Digital school became a law ten years ago. It’s being voted on for the first time since then. If we don’t use our voices now, we might not have another chance. We can’t break the tower, but maybe we can bend it a little. Loosen some of its strength. Knock it down over time.”

  “That’s not good enough,” I said. “That’s giving up.”

  He smiled. “It’s called being realistic.” He leaned in and brushed his lips into my hair, but I pushed him away.

  “I came home to end the program for good,” I informed him. “Not to sign a life contract.”

  “I’m open to suggestions, Maddie.” He rested his hand on my leg, above my knee. My mind slipped back to a few nights before and what we were doing in the club. It seemed like months ago.

  “How many recruits do we have?” I asked.

  “Last time Scott checked, we have about five million supporters.”

  “That’s amazing,” I said.

  He tossed up his hands. “It’s a small start.”

  “Small? It’s five million people. Can we be positive for a second?”

  He laughed. “I know, but right now I’m looking on the practical side. There are more than four hundred million people in the U.S. That means about two percent of the people in this country support us. That’s a pretty small margin. If somebody told you that you had a two percent chance of surviving a disease, you wouldn’t feel all that optimistic.

  “One hundred million people are forced to go to digital school,” he continued. “And we can barely access them. Our biggest fans are still being held captive in detention centers. Most kids don’t even know we exist. That’s the problem.”

  “It’s like what you said last year,” I said. “You hit a brick wall.”

  “Exactly. I mean, getting out and recruiting people face-to-face is great, but it hardly makes a dent. Every time we add a recruit, we lose one. The real world shrinks a little more every day. Anytime a
site or message we try to send gets too big, it gets blocked online. And since most kids are only online—”

  “We’re screwed,” I finished for him, and he didn’t argue. “Which is why you recruited me.”

  “Originally, yes, that’s why we recruited you. We wanted your dad’s files. We thought if we used his connections, we could spread something viral and end DS.”

  “Is there anything we can do?” I asked.

  He nodded. “I think if people knew what Vaughn was doing, it would turn things around. That’s why I’m trying to track him down.”

  “Would having all my dad’s listservs still help, so you can start sending messages to everyone in DS? Or is it too late for that?”

  Justin shook his head. “Maddie, it isn’t worth it. I don’t want you to get caught again.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad.”

  He narrowed his eyes at me. “Why?”

  “It’s just one of the reasons I came home,” I said.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “How do you detach people from technology?” Clare wondered out loud, tapping the toes of her tennis shoes on the edge of the coffee table.

  We all sat in Scott’s living room. There were about a dozen people at his apartment, all Digital School Dropouts. Justin had organized the meeting so we could meet Shawn, who was in charge of recruiting rioters along the East Coast. There were four regions in the country. Justin led recruiting in the West, Shawn in the East, and two more regional heads managed the South and the Midwest. They met up once a month for meetings.

  Shawn was older than the rest of us, in his thirties, and he dressed professionally in a blue button-down dress shirt and dark brown khaki pants. He even wore dress shoes. Half of us wore rubber flip-flops. We considered pulling on a pair of socks dressing up.

  It was 11 p.m., and we were all wired on caffeine. Half-empty pizza boxes and empty soda bottles were scattered around the table.

  “No one’s succeeded at it before,” Scott said. “Technology always wins.”

  “Then take away the technology,” Gabe suggested.

  “We could spread a nationwide computer virus,” I offered. “It would be like a cyber black plague.”

  “It’s been done,” Shawn said. “It was more like a cyber sneeze. It was patched up too quickly.”

  “We tried destroying the DS signal. That went over well,” Justin said, and we shared a smile.

  “We could detonate a nuclear bomb high enough in the atmosphere to cause an electromagnetic blackout,” I offered.

  Molly rolled her eyes. “We want to encourage change, not an apocalypse,” she said.

  Clare nodded. “Hospitals would close. Millions of people would die. That might not be the right message to spread.”

  “And there’s the whole radiation side effect and getting-ahold-of-plutonium challenge,” Shawn added.

  “People are afraid of illness,” Gabe said. “Let’s release a study that shows computers cause blood clots in your brain that can lead to instant death.”

  “That hasn’t been proven. You can’t catch anything from a computer,” Scott said.

  “Justin, your thoughts here?” Clare asked.

  We all looked over at him, like he had all the answers, because we believed he did. He had hardly spoken the entire night. Unlike the rest of us, Justin had an amazing capacity to listen.

  “Showing people is a lot more inspiring than telling them,” he said. “Scare tactics are what got us into this mess. Just be honest. Show people they have options. People will see you living a different life, one that’s radically different, and they’ll wonder. They’ll ask questions. So be ready to have answers. They’re living a bunch of ones. Help show them that.”

  “‘Ones’?” Clare and I asked at the same time.

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s something my mom and dad used to make me sit down and figure out whenever I saw them. One to Ten, they called it. They told me that life is about the tens. That’s what we remember.”

  “What’s your rating curve?” Shawn asked.

  “Look at what you do in a single day, and rate how much of an impact it has. Let’s say you stream television shows on your wall screen all day. You catch up on seven seasons of your favorite show. What’s the reward?”

  “It’s a ten,” Scott said, “if it’s a good series.”

  “Okay,” Justin said. “But what’s the impact? What have you done?”

  “I’ve thoroughly entertained myself,” Riley said.

  “You, yeah, it’s all about you being entertained, but have you done anything for anyone else? What’s the impact?”

  “One,” Riley said with a frown.

  “Let’s say you game all day,” Justin continued.

  “Hey, don’t put down video games just because you suck at playing them,” Scott said.

  Justin smiled. “Okay, but what’s the impact? Have you made any difference in anyone’s lives?”

  “So, what’s your point?” Scott asked.

  “Look at it from another side. What are some of your highlights? Think about the last six months. What do you remember?”

  “Meeting you guys,” Gabe said.

  “Celebrating Maddie’s birthday,” Clare added.

  “Ruining a curve on a test by getting a perfect score,” Molly said. We all groaned.

  “Setting everyone in a detention center free.” I smiled.

  “Okay,” Justin said. “So, those are tens. Why?”

  We all listed reasons. We did something selfless. We put somebody first. We reached out to people. We connected to people. We challenged people.

  “You made an impact. I get that ones are fun, they’re easy, they’re relaxing. We all need to do ones once in a while. But when you look back on life, what’s going to make it fulfilling? A bunch of ones? Or tens? What do you want your life to add up to?” He shrugged. “My parents always made me think about this. When I was younger, we’d sit down and discuss our tens. It almost became a competition, and pretty soon, we hardly had any ones.”

  “Thanks for making me feel incredibly lazy,” Riley said.

  “Yeah, way to one-up all of us,” Clare said.

  Justin smiled. “All I’m saying is, let’s show people how to get back to tens.”

  I walked into an extra bedroom Scott used for an office and found Molly sitting behind a desk. Every wall screen was turned on, and I felt like I was standing inside a Jumbotron. She was going over some spreadsheets on a screen in front of her. I sat down on the couch next to her desk and curled my feet underneath me.

  “Do you know Jax Viviani?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Of course I know him,” she said. “He’s almost as famous as you for pissing off the government.” She looked over at me. “He created software that collected names of all the kids being released from detention centers. It intercepted the information when it was transferred through the government files. I don’t know how he did it—we haven’t been able to figure out the program coding.”

  “What do you think of him?” I asked.

  Her expression turned sour. “I don’t think of him. We don’t talk to him anymore. He’s a skater.”

  “A skater?”

  She turned her office chair to face me. “It’s what we call people who bail on us. We intercepted him a few years ago when the cops traced him. We don’t intercept people to do our one good deed for the day. We save people’s asses so that they’ll join our side. It’s our recruiting process.”

  “What happened with him?” I asked, intrigued.

  “Nothing. He hid in a safe house for a while. He came to a few meetings. And then he skated. I heard he does counseling, which I find funny,” Molly said. “What does he know about helping people? He never even graduated from high school.”

  I smiled to myself.

  “I’m trying to recruit him,” I said, and Molly arched her eyebrows in surprise. “I haven’t told Justin yet. I haven’t told anyone except Clare. I don’t want to get people�
�s hopes up until Jax actually gives me the software we need.”

  She laughed. “Don’t bother, Maddie. We’ve been trying for years. We even offered him money. He said if we bugged him one more time, he’d stop offering his apartment as a safe house.”

  Molly turned back to her desk and touched the wall screen. A video of Scott’s kitchen appeared. She started scanning every room in the apartment.

  “Where’s Scott?” she mumbled. “He’s supposed to bring me Shawn’s recruit list.” She focused on the living room and used her fingers to zoom in on Scott.

  “He needs to shave,” she observed. I looked at Scott’s patchy beard growing in around his chin.

  She turned up the volume, and we could hear conversations in the living room. The party was dwindling. Clare and Gabe sat on one couch, leaning into each other and talking, their feet tapping against each other. Scott was typing on his flipscreen. Justin and Shawn were talking on another couch.

  “Can they hear us?” I asked.

  She shook her head. She zoomed in on Shawn and Justin, and we picked up their conversation.

  “Where are you living these days?” Shawn asked him.

  “Here and there,” Justin said, and Shawn smiled.

  “I hear that’s a charming location.”

  “For some people,” Justin replied.

  “You ever consider settling?” Shawn asked.

  I used my fingers to zoom out, and the conversation faded.

  “Okay, turn it off,” I said. “This is spying.”

  “Duh,” Molly said. “Why do you think we have these screens? It’s great research.” She zoomed in on Justin and Shawn again, and the speakers picked up their conversation again.

  “So, what do you think?” Shawn asked him. “Are you in?”

  Justin’s usually calm face was tight. I couldn’t help myself. I leaned closer to the screen and listened.

  “Why out east?” Justin asked.

  “I’m trying to get all the regional heads together in one place,” Shawn said. “It’s getting tough to do this all from a distance. And if we actually get some publicity at the national vote, we need to group forces while the attention’s hot. Now’s the time to go two hundred percent.”