If This Goes On

by Cat Rambo

  “Is your new assignment closer to regular school hours?”

  He tossed his head back. “I’m not getting a new assignment. I quit!”

  I stopped in my tracks. He laughed and tugged me along. “Come on, Jadine. I’m old enough to. My cousin Stevie has a real paying job for me. I’ll be doing the same stuff but getting paid for it—and isn’t that what going to school was about? Teaching me to do stuff I’ll get paid for?”

  “But if you don’t graduate high school, you don’t get to vote!”

  He looked pityingly at me. “You don’t really think voting makes a difference.”

  “Well, no, but . . . But there’s other things. Like inter-state IDs, and, like . . . insurance companies charge way more if you haven’t graduated.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder but I was too worried to care. He said, “I get in at five in the morning and they don’t let me go until nine at night and I’m paying tuition for the privilege! You know what they do if you ask for a rest break? Full letter grade down. I’m not going to be one of those guys repeating twelfth grade because the school knows it can make them. Voting? So not worth it.”

  “But . . .” I realized my concerns were selfish. I didn’t want to stop seeing him.

  “Come on, you don’t want to be marked tardy.” He tugged at my hand.

  I could already see the school ahead. New Entrepreneurs Academy had been a public library once. It hunkered over Lee Road like a brooding crab. Twisted metal poked over the road like a cigar in its mouth. That was a pedestrian walkway, once, connecting to a demolished building across the street. My dad always went on and on about public libraries—how awesome they’d been when we had them. I wasn’t sure anything could be awesome in that building, which was always too cold or too hot and full of tattered furniture.

  Royden could tell I was upset. I wanted to tell him it wasn’t his fault and I was happy for him, but I wasn’t and I couldn’t. We walked together to the check-in desk. Mrs. Gora smiled tightly and passed me a thumb drive. “Good morning, Jadine.” She held on to the drive as I tried to take it.

  “You have four minutes to check in or you’re late. You’re making an annual report today for Swenson’s Tools. They want graphs and bullet points, no text blocks. Make it look like profits are going up to get a passing grade.”

  Mrs. Gora finally released me. I hurried to the nearest terminal to check in. It took a few minutes to load the log-in page, even when I used the free wi-fi.

  Teachers lived for marking you down. They got bonuses for it.

  I heard Mrs. Gora’s voice get all syrupy behind me. “Royden, sweetheart, aren’t you supposed to be at Beerhaus?”

  “No, ma’am, I quit yesterday. I’m just here to formally withdraw from school.”

  There was a super long pause so I turned around. Mrs. Gora looked devastated, but slowly her face got all smug. “Of course, Royden, congratulations. You need to file your time cards for the week, however.”

  “Don’t you usually do that?”

  “Only for enrolled students. And I see you don’t have any credit in the system. Did you bring fourteen dollars to log in to the student network?”

  His face crumpled. “I don’t have any money in my account right now.”

  “Then I guess you’ll have to stay until you do.”

  I jumped to my feet. “Royden, I can upload for you.”

  Mrs. Gora smirked at me. “You most certainly cannot. Time cards are private. He has to do it himself.”

  “Well, fine, but he can do it from my computer and it won’t cost him anything.”

  Royden looked at me like I was the prettiest girl in the world. “Is that for real?”

  “Yes. I use the free wi-fi password.”

  “There is no such thing as free wi-fi,” Mrs. Gora said, arms crossed.

  I had to run around the corner to point at the sign I’d first noticed months ago, tiny and faded paper near the ceiling on the stairwell. “Yes, there is. See? There’s this sign. It says ‘Free Wi-fi’ and gives the password. I’ve been using it for months.”

  Mrs. Gora raised the section of counter that let her walk out. She walked to the stairwell and craned her head. After a long second, she said, “That’s not what it says.”

  Was she for real? “Yes, it is. ‘Free Wi-Fi. Network name: ClePub, Password: Books.’ It’s right there.”

  “No, it isn’t. Stop lying. I’m writing you up for insubordination.”

  “Mrs. Gora, please, look at the sign. You can see the letters. Royden, you know how to read, right?”

  He kinda deflated and I felt horrible for asking. A lot of kids don’t know how to read in our school. You weren’t expected to know how if you weren’t in Documents.

  Mrs. Gora stomped back to her desk. “Your fine is getting larger the longer you aren’t working, young lady.”

  “But . . .”

  “Another word and you’ll get no credit for any of your work this week.”

  I sat down. I watched helplessly as Mrs. Gora gleefully fined Royden for not showing up at his assigned job and fined him for not filing paperwork on time and ended by sending him to a factory to clean its furnaces. He had no choice but to do as he was told until he could pay his fees. He looked so defeated.

  Mrs. Gora was triumphant. “Be sure you don’t get any demerits because leaving without filling out all the proper forms will result in a breach of contract.” She looped her arm through his and escorted him to the door. “The school will sue your parents for the sum total of your to-graduation tuition, plus emotional damages.” She ran her hands all up and down his arms and the last thing I saw as they got to the door was her give his butt a big squeeze.

  She came back to give me a cold look. “Swenson’s is waiting on their report. Don’t make me mark you down for insufficient self-starting.”

  “The sign says Free Wi-Fi,” I said. “You can’t make me lie.”

  “I’m disappointed, Jadine. You are one of our best pupils. You have a future. Don’t throw it away for a worthless boy.” She went back to her chair. “I’m giving you two weeks detention for damaging the academy’s bottom line by using a competitor’s broadband service. That comes with an automatic letter-grade deduction and requires fourteen paid invoices –marked satisfactory or better, mind you!—to undo the damage. I hope you’re happy.”

  My hands shook. I wished I had the guts to run home right then. Instead I opened up the annual report files and started trying to make Swenson’s Tools look like it wasn’t losing money.

  A custodian came by and climbed a ladder up to remove the sign. Shortly after that, the wi-fi signal ClePub vanished, too.

  The porch light came on and Dad threw open the door. “Where have you been?”

  “Detention,” I said, then threw myself into his arms, sobbing.

  He was tense and angry, but melted to hug me back.

  “Easy, easy,” he said, walking me back into the living room. “It’s okay. You’re a great kid. Everyone gets detention once in a while. Let’s get you something to eat. Easy.” His hand rubbed up and down my back like he was brushing all my problems off me.

  Dad always made me feel better, but this time I was guilty of high crimes against pretty boys. Sniffling, I told him what had happened while he reheated some soup for me.

  “I didn’t even help, and they took away the free wi-fi because of me. Now no one can use it.”

  Dad had this shut-down look, like he didn’t want to say anything.

  “What is it?”

  He shook his head. “That network . . . it wasn’t supposed to be there. Someone broke the law to put that there.”

  “Are you going to yell at me for using it?”

  He squeezed his eyes shut. “No, sweetie.” He put his big, baseball-mitt hand on mine. “It’s good you had it. You saved us a lot of money. It
’s, what? A dollar to upload your work? And paying that every day?”

  “It’s more like nine dollars, plus there’s a twenty-dollar fee if you go over five megabytes.” I shook my head. This wasn’t the time to discuss prices. “Dad! I have to help Royden!”

  He drew his hand back. “No, you don’t.” He went back to the stove and turned off the heat. He gave the soup one more stir and poured it into a bowl. “It’s hard enough to make your way in this world. You reach out to someone else and you end up falling with them.”

  “Jeez, Dad. I’m not Mom.”

  His face got stony like it did when he was really mad and I felt like crying. He set the soup in front of me and turned his back, putting things away.

  “It’s not about your mother. I’m not always talking about her. People, Jadine. So many people I knew and loved have ended up in prison for debt or worse, because they had to help someone.”

  “So I just turn my back? I let Royden suffer for the rest of his life? I start paying to upload my work?”

  Dad held on to the edge of the sink like he needed the support. “You’ll be no worse off than you could have been. We’ll make it work. It’s important you get your diploma.”

  I stood up, my shaking fists at my sides. “I’ll do this on my own if I have to. I’m not like you. I can’t just let the bad guys win.”

  He shook his head. He looked down at his thick hands. My dad has really big hands, fat fingers. I sometimes wondered if he hit his hands with hammers a lot when he was starting out as a construction worker.

  “When you graduate, when you’re safe. Then we can . . .” He turned to face me with this weird look on his face. “The bad guys win, Jaddy. I’m sorry. They won.”

  “You mean because they took Mom away, and now you’re not even brave enough to talk about it.”

  Steely-angry look was back. He threw down his dishtowel and I flinched, expecting I was grounded.

  Instead he said, “I can show you how wi-fi works.”

  Grandma had been a network technician, but I never dreamed she’d taught Dad anything. He opened a cabinet in the garage and showed me all kinds of pieces of wire and circuit boards. “This is a wi-fi router,” he said, holding up a tiny green wafer.

  “Does it work now? Do we have wi-fi?”

  “It needs power and an antenna.” He set it on the workbench and rummaged around. He opened a flashlight and pulled out its battery pack. Then he picked up an old potato chip can. “We used to use these for antennas all the time, back in the day.”

  He showed me where to connect everything and pulled out an ancient laptop, which I thought he only used to pay bills. “Annnd . . . there. See?”

  He turned the screen toward me. He’d opened the wireless settings and there was a connection called “DadNet.”

  “Why ‘DadNet’?” I asked.

  He looked embarrassed. “I set this up when you were little. Before your mom . . . it was going to be for you.”

  “Can anyone . . . just do that?”

  He looked at the laptop like it was his long lost best friend. “We used to. Kids a little older than you are probably still doing it. Look . . . there. Now we’re on ClePub. It’s a peer-to-peer underground network—each device carries a tiny bit of the load. It’s as fast as it can manage, which makes it just a little faster than the throttled live networks. The real heroes are the nodes that connect to Canada, and the Canadian nodes that let them. One tiny keyhole into the rest of the world.”

  Canada. I knew it was just on the other side of Lake Erie, but it was so . . . exotic and forbidden. He may as well have said it connected to fairyland.

  “Wait . . . why would you do that? Isn’t this illegal?” I didn’t want Dad being taken away, too. Not when we could afford to just pay the stupid broadband bill.

  “Here, look at this.” He got out his phone. He typed in “Is Pepsi good for your teeth?” in the search bar.

  “Pepsi Cola strengthens teeth through the power of carbonic acid, which cleans all food residue! If you have a toothache, try drinking an extra glass of Pepsi before bed!”

  “Everyone knows network searches are stupid, dad.”

  “DadNet allows other search engines,” he said. “Here.” He pointed the browser to “Gopher Hole” a site I’d never seen before. The search bar had a slightly different icon. “Type the question there.”

  “Harmful effects of Pepsi or Coca-Cola” was the article that came up. I read through it. “It says a glass of water is less harmful.”

  Dad nodded as I squinted, looking from my screen to his. “The pay networks control what results you see. Our area—our whole state—is primarily controlled by Pepsi, so the results show Pepsi is good for everything—even the things it would be worst at. That’s why we did it.”

  I looked around the mess of wires and computer parts on our dining room table. “How does this help Royden?”

  “It doesn’t.”

  “Dad!”

  He sighed. “I wanted you to see what we’re up against. These people . . . they own everything, and what you or I or this kid Royden want, it isn’t anything compared to what the corporation wants. It’s more profitable to keep Royden paying to work for them, so that’s what they do.” Dad’s jaw clenched. “It was more subtle in my day. They’d flunk you for failing some culture test.” He closed the laptop and stuck it back under the workbench. “Anyway, now you know. Don’t help other people. You’ll end up in prison like your mother.”

  I walked to school in the freezing pre-dawn cold. In my backpack I had the device Dad had showed me. All I had to do was find a place in the school to hide it, somewhere near one of the student workstations. Then I’d log in and test it. If it worked, I could give Royden the information outside of school hours, and he’d be able to upload his time cards for free.

  I felt like a secret agent. I also felt drunk from being up all night. I’d gotten up after Dad went to bed and stayed in the garage on DadNet until the sky got light. Canada had flying cars that ran on sunlight. For real!

  But what really got me were the pictures of people—old people who weren’t sick, people doing things that weren’t work, like playing hockey. My new plan was to save Royden, finish school, then sneak across the border if I had to swim all the way across Lake Erie.

  This early only the Labor Studies students were around, trudging in with tool boxes and hard hats. Mr. Halstrom was sitting on the front steps, checking off work assignments. He was the Labor Studies department head and also the smartest teacher at school. Sometimes he recommended books to me that I ended up loving and would never have found on my own. Like he knew what went on inside people’s heads.

  I tried to not look at him as I walked past. I was not suspicious. I was normal. I mean . . . Business Document kids came in early all the time. Right? I didn’t, but I was sure some did.

  I hurried up the steps as far from Mr. Halstrom as I could get. He looked right at me. “Big project today?”

  How stupid easy it would have been to say “yes.” So of course I stammered, failed to remember words, and said, “Morning!” I ran for it.

  My heart pounded in my chest. The school was quiet and smelled like . . . school. It was echo-y. Mrs. Gora wasn’t at her desk. I started looking for a drawer or something to put my wi-fi router in. The desks didn’t have drawers; they were just surfaces with these open shelves to put your books on.

  The school was helplessly barren of places to hide things. I suppose that was a design feature. No bombs or drugs or whatever.

  I could see where the wi-fi sign had been because the wall was slightly darker there. I dragged my chair over to the wall and felt along it. Maybe there was a door I couldn’t see. Something inside the wall?

  I heard the door open behind me and almost fell.

  “Hey.”

  It was Royden. I jumped down. “Help me
find a place to hide this.” I held up my backpack.

  Royden looked confused, but glanced around. “How about here?” He pointed to an old display case. Covered in dust, it held nothing but some pictures of students who graduated years ago and actually got good jobs or went on to universities.

  “There’s no place to hide anything there!”

  He grinned. He took hold of the corner of the case and lifted it. The bottom was hollow. Plenty of room. I scrambled to push my wi-fi router under, but it felt like it took forever to get it out of my bag and point the antenna toward the computer desks. I was afraid he’d drop it on me as I checked the wire connecting the battery pack.

  Royden set the case down—wow, he was strong—and brushed the fingermarks away. “What was that for?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  “Maybe later. I got to move if I’m gonna be at the factory before six.”

  I tugged him toward my workstation. “No. Wait. You won’t have to. I got the free wi-fi working.” I’d already started the station up to save time. There it was! DadNet! I logged in. “See? You’ll be able to upload your time cards for free—no paywall. And that’s not all. There’s a whole world we’ve been blocked from. Facts. Art. Even different kinds of soda-pop.”

  Royden backed away with his hands up. “This is breaking rules, Jadine. You want to get arrested?”

  “Who’s going to catch us? Mrs. Gora?”

  And I saw him realize that he was a part of this—he helped me hide it. He backed away. “I’m not spending my life on a work-farm.”

  “Come on, Royden. Don’t.”

  I opened an email and started writing. “See? Watch me do it. I’ll disconnect it and no one will know! You think Mrs. Gora knows how to scan for different wi-fi connections? She can barely . . .”

  “I can’t be part of this,” Royden said. He ran down the hall.

  I stared after him, already doing math in my head. How long until he snitched? How long until the response? I turned back to the computer and started writing. I wrote down everything, from the beginning, what I’d done and what I’d learned. In case this was my last chance to. So other kids could set up their own networks. Like my Dad did. Like he did before he gave up, before they got Mom.