Middle Ground

by Katie Kacvinsky

  “You want to live here to be close to me?” I said for him.

  “Yes,” he said without hesitating. He watched me carefully. “This isn’t a fling, Maddie. What’s happening here—I don’t do crushes. I want to make this work. Because you’re worth it.” He took a few steps closer to me. “I figured since you told me you loved me a few weeks ago, you’d be okay with the idea.”

  I inhaled a breath of relief. “I’m sorry. I thought you were breaking up with me,” I confided. Justin walked up to me and we were both smiling. He ran his fingers under my chin and lifted my face.

  “You’re the one who’s nuts,” he informed me.

  He leaned down and kissed me, and I realized Justin’s decision would change everything. This move wouldn’t be temporary. He was moving more than his life. He was moving his heart. Putting it closer than down the road from me. He was putting it right in my hands. Right where I’d wanted it since the first day I met him.

  Chapter Six

  An open ZipShuttle came to a stop next to us and Justin pulled me inside. We scanned our fingerprints and fell onto the car seat. I broke away from his mouth long enough to mumble the address to Pat and Noah’s apartment, where I was crashing tonight, and then I was pulling at Justin’s jacket because it wouldn’t let me close enough to his skin. He pushed me back against the plastic seats and started to climb on top of me when a high-pitched ring interrupted us. Justin peeled his lips away from mine. We looked at the wall screen in the front of the car and a yellow light informed us we had a message waiting.

  “Are you on call tonight?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No, but we should take it.”

  He reluctantly slid off me and I sat up and adjusted my dress, which was nearly stretched off one shoulder. Justin touched the screen to accept the message. I froze when an image of my dad stared back at me. He sat behind his desk in his office, a place I knew too well. I swallowed and met his eyes. Even through the wall screen, he could use them like weapons.

  “Hello, Madeline,” he said, his voice steely and formal. The screen lit up the dark space around us in a white glow, exposing everything. I hadn’t spoken to my father in months. During that time, I convinced myself I was brave enough to stand up to him. Now I wasn’t so sure.

  “Dad,” I said, trying to compose myself after the shock of seeing him.

  He looked at his hands, clasped calmly in front of him. “Interesting prank you pulled tonight,” he said with a small smile.

  I looked at the clock on the corner of the wall screen. It was almost 1:00 a.m. “Do you ever sleep?” I asked him.

  He sighed. “I might sleep a little better if my daughter’s behavior weren’t lethal to my career.”

  “Dad—”

  He held up a hand to silence me. “What you did tonight was very foolish, especially considering your situation.”

  “No one can prove it was me,” I said. “I didn’t use my real identity on the computer. I’m not stupid.”

  He laughed at this. “No, you certainly are not stupid. That isn’t the problem. It would just please me if you’d focus your intellect on more law-abiding goals.” His eyes passed over me and concentrated on Justin for a few seconds. Disdain crossed my father’s face, like Justin was a kidnapper holding me hostage. Justin stared back at him with indifference. He could repel emotions as easily as my father could.

  “I’m not trying to fight you,” I told him.

  “Encouraging kids to drop out of digital school isn’t fighting me?”

  “DS is corrupt,” I said. “It’s gone too far. It trains people to be so plugged in, they’re addicted. By the time kids are done with school, they can’t unplug. Ever. You started a disease.”

  “You don’t understand what I’m trying to do.”

  “You’re blindfolding people,” I said.

  My dad took a deep breath. “People need to be controlled, Madeline. There need to be rules to maintain any kind of order in this world. I’m trying to make this country a peaceful place. I want you and Joe and everyone else’s children to be safe. That’s all I’m trying to do. I wish you could accept that.”

  “And while you’re so busy rescuing people you forget to listen to them. You forget they want choices, that they’re human.”

  “And you forget that you’re crushing your mother’s happiness. Do you forget that she’s worried sick about you? That you’re tearing your family apart?”

  “That’s not fair,” I said. “This isn’t all my fault.”

  My dad’s eyes fell on Justin again. “It’s interesting how trouble always finds you when you’re with certain people.” Justin’s hand squeezed mine tighter. He had never spoken a word to my father and he seemed determined to keep it that way. “I’m getting tired of bailing you out after you make mistakes, especially when you associate with people who drag you down to their level.”

  I tightened my lips. “If you’re so disgusted with my life, then just stay out of it,” I said, but I regretted the words as soon as they left my mouth. I didn’t want distance from my father. I wanted acceptance.

  My dad stared back at me. “I can’t do that. You’re my daughter.”

  His words stung because I didn’t feel like his daughter. I felt like he saw me as something he needed to fix, something that had come loose but with the right winding and tightening would lock safely into place again.

  “That doesn’t mean you own me.”

  “No, it means I love you,” he stated, but with no emotion. It made my jaw clench. He was using love to make me feel guilty. Love was just a chess piece to him.

  “This isn’t a rebellious streak I’m going through, Dad. You can’t fix me with threats and counseling and grounding me. This is who I am. Maybe we need to work together, not against each other all the time.”

  He stared at me. “Sometimes I think you don’t even regret what you did when you were fifteen,” he told me.

  “I don’t know if I should regret it,” I told him. “Maybe I did the right thing. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to prove.”

  My dad rubbed his forehead between his fingers. “I thought sending you to L.A. would give you a fresh start. I thought it would keep you away from the people who are trying to take advantage of you. I hoped you wouldn’t take your liberty for granted this time.”

  He said goodbye and switched off his connection. The wall screen turned a blank gray. I looked at Justin and his face was sympathetic. He leaned his forehead close to mine and pulled my hair back behind my shoulders.

  “It’s nice to know the family accepts me,” he said.

  “They’re not too accepting of me these days either,” I reminded him.

  “Your dad has a point,” he said.

  I frowned and asked him what he meant.

  “Maybe he’d agree to listen if you weren’t associating with me.” He grinned but it stopped before it got to his eyes. “You realize I’m number one on his shit list.”

  “You’re number two; I’m number one,” I said, and he smirked.

  “Sorry I tried to steal your number-one status,” he told me and the next thing I knew my body was shoved against Justin’s chest as the ZipShuttle brakes scraped against the tracks and the car screeched to a stop. Justin grabbed a handrail at the edge of the seat to keep us from slamming into the wall. In the beam of headlights we saw someone in a black hooded sweatshirt standing in front of the car. Every ZipShuttle had a heat sensor to detect animals or pedestrians on the tracks in order to stop the car, but I’d never seen it happen before.

  The hooded figure jumped off the tracks and ran to the side of the shuttle and banged on the door.

  Justin slid the door open and a boy fell through and yelled for us to go. The door beeped closed and Justin ordered another address while the boy collapsed into the seat across from us. I instinctively tightened up and pulled my legs away from him.

  His hood slid back far enough to reveal a kid, younger than me and Justin. He was breathing so hard his
eyes were pinched, and sweat dripped off his chin. He reached up and used his arm to wipe sweat off his forehead and that’s when I noticed a handcuff dangling around his left wrist, although his right hand was free.

  Justin leaned closer to him while the shuttle picked up speed and asked him what happened, but the boy was still panting for air and couldn’t speak. Justin took his phone out of his pocket and used it to scan the kid’s fingerprint. Once the boy realized what Justin was doing he jerked his hand away and tried to elbow Justin in the head. Justin grabbed his arms and pinned them down against the seat.

  “Nice swing,” he complimented him.

  “Go to hell,” the boy managed to say through his gasps.

  I raised my eyebrows and quietly watched him, impressed he had the nerve to be so defiant. But staring at him, I understood how he felt, because I’d been in his shoes—running, handcuffed, trusting no one but the space inside my own skin. When you’re helpless it forces you to be callous. It’s a natural shield. His hard eyes looked back at me and I could see a mixture of desperation and anger. I noticed the gold emblem of the LAPD on his handcuffs.

  Within seconds, Scott’s face appeared on the ZipShuttle screen. While Justin was better at hands-on work, Scott handled the technical side of fighting digital school. Computer systems have dozens of languages and Scott was fluent in all of them. He was surrounded by a row of computer monitors and he yawned lazily at our image. His feet, clad in white socks, were propped up on the desk.

  “Background check?” he asked, and Justin nodded. He threw a few potato chips in his mouth and mumbled, “I thought you were off tonight?” Scott’s eyes trailed down a long list on one of his monitors. “His name’s Jeremy Stevens.”

  Jeremy looked up.

  “He was arrested in Ventura two hours ago for committing, uh-oh, code two twenty-seven.”

  “What is that?” I asked. Assault? Attempted murder? Rape?

  “He was trying to break into the DS grading system,” Scott said.

  Jeremy stared at Scott with surprise. The hood slid all the way off his head and sweat dripped from his short blond hair down the side of his face. He creased his eyebrows and surveyed my dress and heels, Justin’s casual clothes, and Scott’s face on the wall screen.

  “Who are you guys?” he asked as his breathing settled.

  Scott chuckled at something else on his screen. “Looks like he was trying to alter some test scores. Most of the classes he was failing were in computer science,” Scott said. “Go figure. You usually have to understand the system in order to break into it.” He laughed again.

  “Screw you. Sorry I’m not some cyber nerd,” Jeremy retorted.

  “We prefer to be called cyber gods,” Scott clarified.

  I looked at Jeremy. “They were going to put you in a detention center for that?” I asked.

  “It was his third offense,” Scott added.

  Jeremy rested his head on the back of the car seat. “I hate digital school.” He groaned. We all smiled at him. At least he was in good company.

  “Looks like you were smart enough to get away on your own,” Justin noted.

  “More like paranoid enough,” he said, but before he could explain, we heard car tires screech around the corner, and police lights flashed behind us. I bolted straight up in my seat but Justin didn’t flinch, as if he’d been expecting it. I frowned down at my shoes. I wasn’t dressed for sprinting from the cops tonight. Justin must have read my mind.

  “We won’t have to run,” he assured me. He looked up at Scott. “I need a car.”

  “I’m on it,” Scott said.

  “And will you call an ambulance?”

  I looked from Scott to Justin and wondered why we’d need one.

  “Let me know how it turns out,” Scott said.

  He threw another handful of chips in his mouth and the screen snapped off. Justin dimmed the interior lights of the shuttle, but the police car was so close behind us the blue and red lights illuminated the space like we were back on the dance floor in Club Nino. Jeremy looked down at his lap, and failure hung over his face. He told us to stop the car.

  “I’ll turn myself in,” he said.

  Justin looked insulted. “We have a no-surrender-to-the-cops policy,” he told him. He squatted next to the exit door of the ZipShuttle. There was a red emergency latch along the side with white letters that read PULL ONLY WHEN ZIPSHUTTLE IS IMMOBILE.

  “Hold on,” he said to us, and pointed at handrails next to our seats. I curled my fingers around the metal handle and looked back at the cop car. The headlights were inches away, and a blinding glare filled the car. Blue and red beams orbited inside of the shuttle, and sirens screamed so loud my ears vibrated at the high decibels.

  Justin checked to make sure Jeremy and I were ready. He pulled the lever down and I braced myself. The force of the car stopping so suddenly threw me out of my seat and knocked me to the floor, but I managed to hang on to the handrail. A crash shook the car as the shuttle derailed. We ground off the track, sending up sparks around us as the iron burned hot against the pavement. Metal bent with a wrench, and a dark object flew and smashed against the side of the train’s window.

  The screeching and shaking stopped but I was afraid to lift up my head from where I had it pressed into my arms, dreading that the shadow that had collided with the train was a body. I heard movement across from me and a warm hand squeezed my shoulder.

  “You all right?” Justin asked me. I slowly peered up and nodded; Jeremy was already out of his seat, poised to run. I let go of my grip, amazed my fingers didn’t leave indentions in the metal. Justin kicked the door open and told us to get out.

  We jumped down to the street and I gasped at the totaled cop car behind us. I’d never seen an accident before. The ground was littered with glass and shreds of plastic, and the front end of the cop car was smashed and had disappeared underneath the rear of the ZipShuttle. The front window had been busted out and there were two white airbags filling up the space. The lights were still rotating, but the siren’s sound was out. The ZipShuttle wasn’t as badly smashed, but the back headlights were knocked out and the bumper was crumpled and folded underneath the car.

  “We need to move,” Justin told me. He grabbed my arm to lead me down the street. I pointed behind us at the cops.

  “Shouldn’t we check on them?” I asked.

  “They’ll be all right,” he assured me. “That’s what the ambulance is for.” I could hear faint sirens in the distance. Before I could argue, a red sports car pulled around the corner and stopped inches from us. Justin opened the front passenger door, and the driver handed him something that looked like a switchblade. Justin grabbed Jeremy’s wrist and aimed a red laser at the lock to free the handcuffs. He used the same laser to unlock the bracelet that was tracking Jeremy and threw it on the ground, then smashed it with his foot.

  “You’re lucky they didn’t use a skin tracker on you. That’s what they’re starting to do these days,” Justin said.

  “A skin tracker?” Jeremy said.

  “They embed it in your skin, like a tattoo. It lasts for a couple of days. We can’t intercept people if they have them.” He tossed the cuffs down next to the smashed bracelet. He was so unaffected by the accident it was disturbing.

  “We were going forty miles an hour,” Justin said, not looking at me but sensing my thoughts. “That’s a ZipShuttle’s top speed. Those airbags are designed to withstand blows at sixty. I’ve been in accidents worse than that, so trust me, they’ll be okay.”

  I scrambled into the back seat and Jeremy climbed in next to me. The driver whistled when he saw the collision and the road full of debris. His dark eyes had the same detached look as Justin’s, as if he’d seen this hundreds of times.

  I looked back, and sure enough, I saw two policemen pushing free from the airbags. The hood of the cop car had flown off, and I assumed that was the shadow I’d seen smash against the window.

  “Beautiful crash,” he said. �
��I give it a ten.”

  Justin typed something on his phone. “Works every time,” he said. “Cops haven’t learned it’s rude to ride someone’s tail.” He introduced the driver, Matt, to Jeremy and me.

  Matt asked where we wanted to go.

  “How about some food?” Justin offered.

  “There’s only one restaurant that’s open right now,” Matt said. “It’s a pizza place called the Cliff, over by the river. Amazing thin-crust.”

  Justin said, “Deep-dish trumps thin-crust any—”

  “Wait a second,” Jeremy interrupted, and he leaned forward between the front seats. “Are you seriously discussing pizza crust right now? After what just happened?”

  “This is a pretty typical night for Justin,” I told Jeremy.

  “I might still have cops after me,” Jeremy said. “Shouldn’t we be running for the border?”

  “They won’t find you,” Justin said. “Your tracker runs on a wireless signal that I passed on to Scott, and he’ll program it into a train, or a shuttle. It will buy us time to eat and then Matt will help you out from there.”

  Jeremy sat back in his seat, and his eyes passed over all of us. “Who the hell are you guys?” he demanded, and I started laughing. I had nearly been arrested twice. I should have been scared. I should have at least felt guilty for crashing a cop car. Instead, I was soaring. Rebelling had that effect on me; it was like a drug I was becoming addicted to. I liked the high.

  “I’m Justin Solvi,” Justin told him and grinned over his shoulder.

  Jeremy nodded. “I’ve heard of you. The founder of the DS Dropouts. The Godfather of anti-DS. You have a lot of fans.”

  “I’m not the Godfather,” Justin said. “But there’s definitely a family history.”

  “I’m Maddie Freeman,” I said, and Jeremy did a double take.

  “Wait, Kevin Freeman’s daughter?” he asked. “I thought you looked familiar. My little brother thinks you’re hot. He has a digital poster of you up in his room.”

  “What?” I said. “They have posters of me?”