Breaking and Entering

by Jeremy N. Smith

  “Well,” Rex said tonight. “Where to?”

  “The top of Building Thirty-seven has a nice little sign-in spot,” said Aziz. “I haven’t been there in years.”

  “What about Sloan?” asked Rpunzel, naming the MIT business school. “They just finished that new construction. We could be the first to hit it.”

  Splotz grinned enthusiastically. “Sounds good.”

  “Which one?” said Alex. He looked to Rex for the final decision, but Alien, who had largely kept quiet at previous meetings, responded first.

  “Couldn’t we do both?” she asked.

  The others looked at her with surprise. “You plan to lead?” Alex said.

  “Sure,” said Alien. The goal of the Coffeehouse Club, as with any hacking, was to find unexplored locations across campus, or new ways of experiencing old locales. Style was key: you built your reputation with the most elegant, ingenious, or daring feats. “If you can keep up with me,” she added.

  Cal and Zhu said nothing. Vanessa, though, nodded at her in support.

  “Why not?” Rex decided the matter. “Let’s go.”

  Building 37 housed the astrophysics department. The sign-in spot Aziz remembered was just beneath the roof on the fifth floor. “We can climb the elevator shaft,” he said.

  Alien didn’t understand. “How do we stop the elevator?” she asked.

  “We don’t have to,” said Aziz. “There’s a former freight elevator. Totally dead now, but they just walled up the shaft. It’s easy to get to from the basement.”

  “Makes sense,” Alien said, feigning confidence.

  Alex shrugged noncommittally. “Ladies first.”

  Aziz was right. Accessing the shaft was as simple as whipping out a Leatherman, removing a few flathead screws, and pushing aside a panel where the elevator had once opened in the basement. Once upon a time, the whole panel had been painted white. Now, though, the paint had peeled completely from the screws, which all turned easily—a clear sign that the panel had been opened and resealed countless times before now.

  Not recently, however. When Alien entered first, she broke a cobweb and felt musty air swirl around her from the dark, dank floor.

  “Cool,” she murmured. And spooky.

  “Here,” Aziz said, passing Alien a headlamp.

  Alien donned the light and looked up. Empty, the shaft appeared like a smooth square concrete tree trunk, extending to oblivion. No place to go, she told herself, but up.

  Alien pressed her back against the wall adjacent to the basement opening. The chill made her spine and shoulders stiffen. She tensed to stop her whole body from shaking, hoping no one would notice in the dark.

  Alien had never climbed an elevator shaft before. Yet she understood the basic mechanics from a recent sign-in trip to Walker Gym. Inside the walls of the gym was a defunct but perfectly preserved shower that had been bricked up rather than filled in, just like this elevator shaft. Visiting hackers made sure the shower always had a fresh bar of soap and rubber ducky. The only way into the shower was by climbing in from the top. The best way out was a kind of splayed crab walk.

  Recalling the process now, Alien raised her right leg and then her left, catching the opposite wall with the soles of her feet. She put her palm out against the side wall. Alien grunted. She pushed back with her legs until she was inching up by her buttocks on the wall she’d started with.

  Raise, catch, grunt, push: slowly but surely, she rose higher.

  The first floor, marked by a doormat-sized see-through metal grate connected to the support beams, was perhaps eight feet up. Alien reached it in a couple of minutes. Her hands, thighs, butt, and abs ached, but she didn’t want to rest any longer than necessary on the grate, not with everyone else waiting on her below.

  “How’s it going?” Rpunzel called.

  “Fine,” Alien called back.

  “Okay to start following?” said Rpunzel.

  “Yup,” Alien told her.

  In ten minutes, she made it to the third floor—almost twenty-five feet high. Two more stories to go. The others trailed a floor or two behind. Looking up again for guidance, however, Alien saw that the elevator shaft ended abruptly just above her. A new, even narrower passage—a chimney, it looked like, lined with red brick—replaced it.

  “Aziz!” Alien called.

  People shuffled below so that Aziz could face Alien and vice versa. “What is it?” he said.

  “Did you know that the elevator shaft only goes to the third floor?” Alien asked.

  “Really?” Aziz pondered this information a long moment. “My mistake,” he admitted.

  Alien swore.

  “We’re going to have to go around,” she heard Alex say.

  “No,” said Alien. She studied the chimney with her Maglite. It obviously wasn’t operating; they would have seen and felt smoke. And even if it was narrower than the elevator shaft, she could definitely fit inside. In fact, climbing up it might be easier, since she shouldn’t have to stretch her arms or legs as far.

  “Hold on,” she said, rising from the third-floor grate. “I’m going to try to chimney up.”

  A second later, she touched brick.

  Alien was up the last two stories in less than five minutes. The excitement of leading—and showing up Alex—made her fingers tingle. Holding her Maglite in her mouth, Alien uncapped her marker triumphantly and studied the ceiling sign-ins. She was forty feet above the floor now—and inches away from adding her own name to generations of other hackers.

  The Sharpie was oddly slippery, however. As Alien finally signed in, she saw something red dot her cartoon alien antennae.

  Is that . . . ?

  Alien swiveled her head. Inside the chimney, she saw, the bricks glittered like diamonds. There was broken glass embedded in the walls. She pocketed her marker and looked down at her palms.

  Her hands were bleeding.

  Alien scooted down as quickly as was possible without using her hands to support her. Rpunzel and Aziz waited on another small metal grate at the third level. When she reached them, they had their own flashlights shining upward, making their faces look like disembodied heads.

  “Well?” Aziz asked.

  Alien hesitated. She knew everyone up and down the shaft was listening. She didn’t want to alarm anyone. And her hands hurt only a little.

  “I signed in,” she said.

  The chamber filled with cheers.

  Aziz moved to start up the chimney himself.

  “Wait,” said Alien. “I wouldn’t.”

  “Why not?” said Aziz.

  Alien raised her palms.

  Alien washed up in the basement bathroom. Back outside, Rpunzel pointed the way to the new business school building. At the site, they divided into threes and fours—Rex, Zhu, and Sam; Aziz, Splotz, Alex, and Cal; and Vanessa, Rpunzel, and Alien—each group vying to make the first and most exhaustive exploration.

  After half an hour, Alien and her group were roaming the second floor.

  “Look,” Vanessa said. Alien and Rpunzel joined her. Vanessa’s Maglite illuminated an open broom closet, the back wall of which was two feet shorter than the ceiling. Hop over that wall and one entered an interstitial space—and from there, who knew?

  “Can you fit?” Vanessa asked Alien and Rpunzel. “I can’t.”

  Alien stepped forward to the incomplete wall and pulled herself up and over it. She could fit, she found; she just had to wriggle sideways. She stared up, flashed her Maglite, and saw the perfect sign-in spot at the tomb’s back wall.

  Just to the side, though, was a carefully painted sign that that said DANGER—NOT STRUCTURAL. Big red arrows pointed at the floor.

  It wasn’t fair. Too tall and you can’t get in here. Too short and you can’t sign in.

  If Alien really reached, though, maybe she could make it.

  She stretched out in a spread-eagle position, hands and feet along each wall, until she was able to hold her body, hovering, half an inch above the floo
r. Pain radiated from the pressure on her bruised palms. Sweating, Alien felt her grip immediately begin to loosen.

  Just a little further . . . , she decided, wriggling harder.

  Suddenly, her hands slipped, there was a loud cracking noise, the floor broke, and she fell.

  Alien could hear people call down after her. First Vanessa and Rpunzel. Then the others. As yet, however, she was too dazed to respond.

  Alien looked up and saw a hole in the ceiling. She peered down and saw the floor, eight feet below, covered with foam and plaster debris.

  She’d landed on a huge boxy cathode-ray tube monitor on top of a rolling cart in the middle of a classroom.

  “I’m okay!” she yelled. “I need help getting down, though.”

  The other hackers ran downstairs and into the room. They grabbed her by her legs and pulled her to the floor.

  It was sheer luck that this setup had been here to break her fall. What if she had slipped like that in the elevator shaft, with multiple stories to drop instead of one? She might have smashed her skull or snapped her spine. Alien pushed the thought from her mind.

  Cal looked worried. “Are you really all right?” he asked.

  Alien nodded. “Just surprised,” she said sheepishly.

  Alien expected someone to make fun of her. Immediately, though, the group closed ranks. “Sam and Zhu, keep lookout,” Rex said. “Alien, Cal, and Alex—figure out a way to sweep the floor. Everyone else, help me patch the ceiling.”

  For the next half hour, working with silent efficiency, they cleaned up what they could. Then, from a campus phone outside, Rex placed an anonymous call to FIXIT—the physical maintenance office.

  “You made it an exciting night,” Alex admitted to Alien.

  “We can’t end that way, though,” said Splotz.

  “Well, what do you propose?” Vanessa said.

  “We have to hang the point,” Splotz said. “Am I right?”

  Rpunzel rubbed her hands together in excitement. “Right!” she said.

  Soon everyone was running toward Building 66.

  Because Building 66 was triangular, its classrooms and offices narrowed to a sharp corner known on campus as “the point.” This meant wasted space inside the building, some people criticized. But if you were a hacker on the roof, the point also presented a spectacular sightseeing opportunity. Hanging the point, they called it, but Alien had yet to try it.

  “Ladies first,” Rpunzel said firmly when Alex tried to take the first spot. She gestured to Alien to begin.

  Stepping past her friends, Alien lay facedown, arms extended over the edge of the roof, and felt them grasp and push her forward by her feet. She was trusting them with her life—but then, hadn’t she already? Soon her hair, forehead, eyes, ears, and gaping mouth had crossed the lip of the building, and then, second by second, her neck, chest, waist, and legs, until she was dangling freely from the point, held back only by her ankles.

  Alien’s eyes widened. The blood in her body ran backward at the inversion; it felt like she was flipping underwater. Now, she saw, gasping happily, Ames Street and the MIT Media Lab lay before her, as on the roofs and domes—except this way, all MIT, and everyone in it, was upside down.

  It was eleven a.m. and already Alien had been up for three hours. First, eyes bleary, limbs aching from lack of sleep, she’d had to deep-clean her room. Then she’d had to dig out and wash enough old clothes to last three days: two button-down shirts; a pair of jeans; a pair of black leggings. Finally, she’d had to run to the secondhand boutique in Kendall Square, where she had found and bought a white wool winter cap big enough to cover her hair completely. Now, for the last half hour, she had been keeping watch out her dorm room window.

  They could arrive at any moment. And when they did, they would be relentless.

  Alien saw her mother first. She was pointing out fallen leaves in the East Campus courtyard to her father. Ah, yes. New England’s famous fall foliage. Just in time for parents’ weekend at MIT.

  Alien tugged down her new cap and ran out to meet them. As she moved, the clothes she’d worn every day of high school felt funny on her body now. Loose. Impractical. Boring. Chaste.

  If her parents had seen her just twelve hours earlier, one look would have been enough to tell them how dramatically the last two months had changed their daughter. With her first paycheck from the Coffeehouse, Alien had bought her own black combat pants. With her second, she’d swapped her canvas shoes for black boots. With her third and fourth, she’d added a camouflage jacket and a raft of tight T-shirts. Her favorite, in purple, said PSYCHO BITCH.

  Fortunately, Alien was able to keep the T-shirt out of view in the half hour her parents spent on Fifth East itself. “I can’t believe there’s not an elevator!” her father said, panting hard up five flights of stairs. The muck and grime of the hall itself, meanwhile, shocked her mother. “You’ll make yourself sick eating here,” she told Alien in the kitchen, unloading a big canvas bag with four dozen bagels, four loaves of rye bread, four pounds of corned beef, four containers of deli mustard, two quarts of macaroni salad, and two quarts of half-sour kosher pickles.

  “Elizabeth.” Her mother looked her in the eye. “These are not to share. The other kids will not appreciate. You freeze whatever’s left. Promise me.”

  “Let’s go out,” Alien said. There was no point explaining that she preferred the mess. On her suburban block at home, people scraped and paved, mowed and painted over everything that had preceded them. Choose the wrong kind of doormat and someone sent you an angry letter. On Fifth East, Alien looked the past in the eye with every mural; stolen shopping carts and other hackable objects accumulated; search under the couch for thirty seconds and she could probably pick up the perfectly preserved problem set of someone who was now or would soon be a Nobel Prize winner or millionaire entrepreneur.

  People argued, sure. Sometimes they hated one another. But they could all bond over wanting to live and work with as few external rules as possible.

  That’s the building where my physics class is, Alien imagined narrating to her parents. The best way to get to the roof is by jumping from the building next door.

  And that’s the biomedical lab. Last year, my friends found a tomb behind a utility shaft and set up a carpet, faux fireplace, and working Atari 2600 system.

  Watch your step here. I came up out of this street grate once. It may still be missing a couple of screws.

  Her mother interrupted her reverie. “And who’s this?” she asked.

  Alien turned from the cupboard. To her horror, she saw that Cal and his mother had entered the kitchen after them.

  “Cal, Mom,” Alien said, blushing. “Mom, Cal.”

  “I’m Mrs. Tessman,” her mother introduced herself.

  “Elise Daniels,” Cal’s mother replied.

  “It’s so nice to meet you,” Alien’s mother said in perfect innocence. “I’m so glad our children have become friends.”

  “Indeed,” Cal’s mother replied drily. She knew exactly who Alien was.

  The moment swelled. Then François’s speakers, two doors down, interceded. “COCKSUCKER! COCKSUCKER! COCKSUCKER!” they blasted.

  Alien had never been so grateful for profanity.

  Her mother looked disapproving. “Well . . . ,” she said. “We should probably get going. Maybe we’ll see you later.”

  “Yes . . . ,” Cal’s mother said. “Let’s talk more.”

  Alien quickly steered them apart.

  Her towel was missing. Alien stepped out of the shower, reached out to the rack, and clutched empty air. “Fuck!” she said, dripping wet.

  It had to be François. The last few weeks he’d made a game of stealing people’s towels from the bathroom when they were showering so that he could “catch” them naked out in the hallway and take their picture.

  Just to be sure, Alien tiptoed to the bathroom door, cracked it open the tiniest amount, and peeked outside.

  Yup. François sat on the flo
or just outside the bathroom, waiting for Alien. In his lap was her towel. In his hands was his stupid camera.

  François couldn’t see her yet. But he was already snickering.

  Alien looked down as a puddle of water formed on the floor beneath her. Already she was beginning to shiver. She considered her options: End this quickly but give François the satisfaction of seeing her naked. Try to wrap herself up in a shower curtain—or toilet paper. But others had already done that.

  Or—she turned around—try to sneak back to her room another way.

  It was a Tuesday evening in mid-November. Opening the window took Alien three hard pushes with her slippery fingers. Immediately, frigid air rushed in; she staggered back, rubbing down her hands and legs. It would be even colder outside, she knew. And the ledge, from this perspective, looked as narrow as a tightrope.

  Alien crawled out anyway, wet and naked, her knees slipping slightly on the window frame before her feet found purchase on the ledge, five stories above the pavement below. In the bathroom, she had reflexively crossed her legs and grasped her breasts to cover up. Outside, modesty was not an option. Alien felt air strike her body in the most intimate places, but forced her gaze forward. You can do this, she told herself. At least it was already dark. She had five hall windows to pass, she calculated, before she reached her own.

  The first window to cross was that of another female freshman, but not a hacker. The woman’s room was dark, Alien realized with relief.

  Alien crawled forward again, steadying herself with a hand to the exterior brick wall. She heard a car honking. Not at me, she prayed, already imagining the pointing onlookers.

  Below, a red van had been blocked by students rushing across the street. Hence the honking.