by Lisa Bunker
Zen glanced at Arli, who was shaking veir head slowly and doing a look that said, We are so totally screwed.
Zen was not so sure. She felt afraid of Lynx the human person, fuming there in the doorway, but in Cyberlandium she knew she owned him. The trick was, how to get this confrontation safely back to the virtual. To gain a few seconds while her mind worked, she answered the question. “Yes, that’s right.”
“What’s your name?”
“Zenobia.”
“And what are you doing here?”
“I came for a sleepover with Arli.”
Arli opened veir mouth to confirm the story, but Lynx got in first. “No, I mean, what are you doing . . . here?” He pointed to the computer.
Zen and Arli exchanged another look. Arli’s face said, Whatever you’re thinking of, don’t do it. Zen said mildly, “Would you like to see?”
“What are you, some kind of little script kiddie?”
This jab was all Zen needed to cement her decision. Time to show her strength. The fierce, hot joy rose up in her, and she tightened her mouth against the smile that wanted to bloom there. No need to humiliate. Don’t overplay it. Just demonstrate skill. She turned to the computer, reopened the Lukematon screen. Arli shrank back against the wall as Lynx stepped up behind her. Zen ignored the prickle of danger at the back of her neck and said in a calm, almost chatty voice, “I have admin access to Lukematon. See?” She panned around the warden’s office. Lynx’s guard still stood in front of the desk. “I can do anything you can do in the game,” she said. She opened the guard’s satchel. “What’s this? An Uzi?” she said. “You don’t need this.” She deleted the weapon.
“Hey!” barked Lynx. Arli squeaked. Zen felt her chair jiggle as the older boy’s hand gripped it, but she kept her eyes forward. “But that’s not all,” she said. “I can also do things you can’t do. Like the bunnies, for instance.” She repopulated the office with bunnies. “Or,” she said, keeping her voice carefully light—the moment of greatest danger, she sensed, was approaching, the tipping point where he would either accept her control or fight—“or, for example, I can change your avatar.” She opened a new panel, scrolled through choices, and replaced his veiny muscle-locked hulk with a skinny little sickly looking dude.
Lynx uttered a string of curse words, and the chair shook again, but when Zen glanced at him, she saw he had stepped back a pace. “That’s not real,” he said. “There’s no way a kid like you could do that.” His face still had anger in it, but also, now, the first shade of doubt.
Still holding back the smile, Zen shrugged and said, “Go look.”
Lynx stared at her, then, reluctantly, backed away and disappeared down the hall to his room.
As soon as he was gone, Arli hissed, “Are you crazy? He’s going to kill me!”
“What choice did we have? He caught us.”
“Oh, this is very, very bad.”
Zen shook her head. “No, listen,” she said. “He doesn’t understand yet how much I can do to him. You don’t either.” Arli still looked appalled. “Okay, for example, he hangs out on some of the boards, right?” Arli nodded. “Because I have admin access to a couple of them, too.” She turned to the computer again, opened another window, and did some rapid typing and clicking. The banner popped up for one of the more toxic gathering places of girl-gamer haters and racist meme-makers. More fierce typing. Lynx had been gone for a while. Probably still trying to change his avatar back. “Yep,” Zen said. “Here he is. EliteStormTrooper666. So, even more leverage. I can do anything to him here, too.”
Arli was finally starting to get a grip on veirself. “So, if he does anything to me . . .”
“I can make his online life hell.”
Down the hall, the music stopped. Zen minimized the new window. Footsteps. Lynx reentered the room. “Change it back,” he growled.
“No.”
Lynx made a fist and stepped forward. Arli quailed against the wall. Zen flinched, but held her ground. Time to close. She wished she and Arli had had a little more time to talk, to work out the details. But it was going to be all right. “I can erase you,” she said calmly. “In Lukematon. Any game. All games.” She swiveled, clicked. The new window she had just opened popped up. “But that’s not all,” she said. “This is you, right?”
Lynx had gone absolutely still, but his face answered the question.
“Thought so,” Zen said. “Here, too, I can erase you. Or make you say or do whatever I want.”
“I don’t believe you!”
“Want me to show you?” Zen said. She clicked twice. A dialog popped up. “What shall I have you say?” she asked. “How about if I have you do a post to the general list, confessing that you’re gay?”
“No! Don’t do that!” Now, for the first time, Lynx looked afraid.
Zen, seeing the change, said, “So, here’s how it’s going to go.” Improvising, but it felt important to follow through while he was feeling most vulnerable. “Number one: you’re going to write an email to the school, admitting it was you who did the hacks, and promising never to do it again.”
Lynx opened his mouth to speak, but Zen held up a finger, and he shut it again. Zen felt another pulse of pleasure. She worked to keep her voice steady. “Number two: if you ever do anything to hurt my friend Arli, I will make you pay for it.” Now Lynx was shaking his head, but his face had a hunted look. Zen said, “You’ve only seen a little of what I can do. Think about it. There’s only one way out of this.”
A long, ragged-breathing silence. Lynx looked back and forth between Arli and Zen. The two friends watched him struggle. His shoulders went up, like he was thinking of fighting again, but then they slumped, and his face changed, and his head jerked down and up once. “By Monday,” Zen said, still improvising. “Monday at noon.” Another tight, unwilling nod.
Lynx’s body language said he wanted to leave now. Before going, though, he cleared his throat and said, “Um . . . could you change me back?” He gestured at the computer. After a pause, he added, “Please?”
Zen nodded, closed the board window, and switched back to Lukematon. Click, click, click: his avatar went back to hulking bruiser. Lynx, watching over her shoulder, could not suppress a wordless sound of admiration. “And,” he said tentatively, “the gun?”
Zen’s answer was to take her hands away from the keyboard. The message was clear: Don’t forget. Don’t start thinking you can get out of this. I own you. After a second, he understood and fled.
FIFTY-FOUR
ARLI SAID, “THAT was incredible. You have such power. I am in awe.”
Glowing pink, Zen said, “Thank you.” But then her face clouded again, and she said, “Are you going to be all right?”
Arli’s eyes shifted toward Lynx’s room, back again. “I think so?” vo said. “He’s all angry and closed up most of the time, but I don’t think he’s all that dangerous. Yet. And anyway: what you did. He can’t get out of it. So, I feel safe. As safe as I ever do, anyway.”
Zen yawned. She glanced at the corner of the screen. It was after one a.m. “Good,” she said. “But I’m still going to text you in the morning.”
“Okay.” Arli yawned too. “It’s a pretty long walk back to your house,” vo said. “Do you want to stay?”
“I can’t. The Aunties would have a conniption.”
“Okay.” Then good-nights and good-byes, and a sleepy passage through dark, quiet streets, the climb back through the window, and—after carefully deleting the string of characters still waiting on her command line—Zen floated down into sweet unconsciousness in her own bed, humming with the pleasure of power exercised for good.
* * *
~
Voices in the kitchen woke her. The endless stream of company. The guest in the kitchen turned out to be Uncle Sprink again, there to join them for Sunday brunch.
Once the
meal was underway, he said to Zen, “What’s with the do-rag, sugar?” She stared at him for a moment, uncomprehending. Then she remembered and blushed. “I mean, it’s a look, and I do like the print of the fabric, but honestly, honey, it looks like you slept in it.”
Aunt Phil said, “Chickadee, you should show your uncle Sprink. Maybe he can help.”
For a second Zen felt aware only of the desire to flee. But then she made herself scan from face to face around the table. She saw three pairs of eyes without the least hint of meanness in any of them.
“I . . . Um, this is so embarrassing. . . . These kids at school, they were teasing me about my eyebrows. Someone made a gif.” Aunt Lucy said a sharp word under her breath. “The caterpillar thing, it really got to me. So I came home and found the tweezers in the bathroom and started pulling out eyebrow hairs, and then, I don’t know what happened, it got all weird, and I couldn’t figure out how to get it exactly even, and pretty soon . . . well . . . there wasn’t anything left.” Uncle Sprink was nodding.
Zen made her hand go up and pull off the bandana. Eyes. All the eyes. But, still, no meanness in them. Aunt Phil was doing the wrinkle-scrunchy empathy face she did. It was Uncle Sprink, though, who broke the silence. “Girlfriend, is that all?” he said cheerfully. “Sweetheart. Not to worry. I can so help you with that.”
“You can?”
“Well, sure, of course.” He tipped his head. “Let me guess, I bet you’d love to have this sorted out by tomorrow morning before school, right?”
“Yes,” said Zen ardently. “I would.”
“All right then. I don’t have my kit with me now, but how about if I come back this evening?”
The Aunties were nodding. “Okay?” Zen said. “Thank you?” She wasn’t sure what was being offered. Was it makeup? Did he really know about that?
Well, only one way to find out.
And that was all about eyebrows. It took Zen a minute or two more to get her composure back, but there was an abundance of warmth in the room, and soon she was joking and laughing again.
Are you there?
Yeah, I’m here.
Everything OK?
Yes, everything’s fine.
Good. I was worried.
I know. Thanks.
You’re welcome.
So, I have to ask:
How does he seem today?
Your brother.
It’s funny you should ask me that, because something really weird happened this morning.
?
Well, you remember, my dad’s gone for the weekend, so it’s just the two of us. And I was eating breakfast at around 10 a.m. and he came in, and at first I thought he wasn’t even going to look at me, let alone talk to me, but then he stopped and looked at me and his face was so different.
Different how?
Like, he’s so angry all the time, but now
he looked like how he used to be when we
were both a lot younger, and he said—I still
can’t believe this—he said:
You are so lucky.
Say what now?
Yeah.
And I just kind of gaped at him, and then I said, What do you mean? And he said, You’re only in middle school, and you’ve already figured it out.
So I said, Figured what out?
And he said, Who you are!
Vo ven veir and all that.
And I said, Wait, are you jealous of me?
And he said, I’m three years older than you, and I have no idea.
Big eyes wow face.
So is he going to write the email?
I don’t know. That was the end of the conversation. He went back into his room, and I haven’t seen him since.
That’s amazing.
Yeah.
I haven’t seen him, um, act like a human for a couple of years.
That’s a sad thing to say. About anyone.
I know, right? Sad a couple ways.
Like, I didn’t realize how used I’ve gotten to him just sort of being gone. Like he died, almost.
You there?
Yeah, sorry, thinking about what I just typed.
And the other part is, turns out he’s still alive in there, inside the hard shell he has made, and all I can think of is
Hello?
Long pauses
Yeah
All I can think of is
He must be so lonely.
If you say so.
But it was still awful what he did.
I’m not going to argue with you about that.
FIFTY-FIVE
BEFORE DINNER, IN the bathroom, Zen looked at her face in the mirror. Never easy or fun, but at least she could look again, now that Uncle Sprink was going to do . . . whatever he was going to do. And she had never had the chance to play with that before. So, just maybe this was going to be really good.
Dinner was quiet. The Aunties read at the table sometimes, and Zen had recently started doing the same. Another thing that had never happened in her old life, but nice. As long as you had a book that didn’t want to close all the time. And she was still learning to be careful about getting sauce blips on the pages.
Then the buzzer buzzed, and Uncle Sprink was there. He had a metal case with him, like a toolbox in its rugged construction and many latches. He opened it with a flourish to reveal dozens of bottles with different-colored stuff inside, intriguingly shaped canisters, flat boxes with clear plastic lids, and ranks and rows of brushes of many different shapes. They ranged from tiny pointed ones like a watercolor painter might use for fine details up to huge bushy ones like her dimly remembered great-grandpa had used to put shaving cream on his face.
Taking charge, Uncle Sprink turned on all the lights, then placed one of the dining table chairs in the middle of the kitchen floor and sat her in it. For himself he borrowed the office chair from her bedroom so he could roll around her. Aunt Lucy had some work to do and sat in the living room with her laptop. Aunt Phil stayed in the kitchen, drawing out the finishing of the dishes, and then took a seat with a cup of tea near at hand. When Zen glanced at her, she gave back a twinkling smile of encouragement.
Once Uncle Sprink had his supplies arrayed on the table, he sat face to face with Zen and said, “Okay, eyebrows. Hold this.” He handed her an oval hand-mirror. “I’ll do the first one, so you can see how, and then you do the second. Work for you?”
“Yes, s— Yes, thank you.”
It was strange, having his big stubbly man-face so close, but fine once she got used to it. What was stranger was that he was that close but so completely not looking at her. Or, not into her eyes, the way a person would who was talking to you. He stared instead with intense concentration at the place just above her eyes. She could hear his breath whistling minutely through his nose. He smelled nice, close up. Man smell, like her father, but with a touch of perfume, too. His eyes blinked to hers for a second, seeing her again. He smiled. “Okay?”
“Okay.”
“And, you know, honey, next time, when they grow out again, you can use scissors too. Trim and pluck both, to get the shape you want.”
Abashed that she hadn’t come up with this simple idea herself, Zen mumbled, “Oh. Right. Okay. Thanks.”
His eyes had gone above hers again. She watched in the mirror as, with a brown pencil, he sketched in an arched line over her eye. It ran along the upper edge of where the old eyebrow had been. The pencil point dug gently into her skin, with a waxy feel. It was an odd sensation, but it didn’t hurt at all.
Next he began to thicken and shape the line. He made it broadest where the peak was, just inside the center line of the eye. He drew del
icately. Not an outline colored in—individual hairlike lines. All of a sudden, she could see what he was doing taking shape. She gasped a little. He said, “That good? I’m flattered,” and Aunt Phil, watching, chuckled.
A few more judicious dabs with the pencil, and Zen had a new left eyebrow, higher, thinner, and archier than her old one. It was pretty. She marveled at how, underneath it, her eye had so much more room to be an eye.
“Okay, your turn, sweetheart,” he said, and the tutorial began.
It was harder than it looked—holding the mirror, managing the pencil, and especially figuring out how to deal with the backward-in-the-mirror thing. The pencil point kept going the opposite direction from what she wanted, until she had a collection of random marks around her target spot. It looked like a regular eyebrow that had been flattened by a teensy face tornado. She growled.
“No worries,” Uncle Sprink said. “We can erase it and start over.” He took a moist pad out of a screw-top jar and scrubbed with it, and the skin above her right eye was clear once more. “You know what?” he said. “You should practice doing this in the bathroom mirror. Easier, because you don’t have to hold it. Also, it’s where you’ll do this on your own.” Zen looked at him with dawning hope, and he said, “Well, of course, darling. I’ll leave the pencil. That was the point, right? To go to school tomorrow looking your best.”
