Antoine and Shirelle had kept talking while I stared at the carts, but eventually they followed my stare. I looked at them and they looked back at me.
“Those’d be easy.” Antoine sounded dismissive.
“So?” Shirelle said. “You want to make something hard, or something useful?”
I put my hand on his shoulder. “Antoine, you make those, you’ll be making something that everyone will see, every day, for years and years to come.”
His eyes glinted. “Yeah. Yeah.” He looked at the sky for a minute. “I bet there’s all kinds of ways we can improve ’em, too. Bet there’s designs for better ones like crazy, too, from the refugee camps. I know I saw ’em in a news clip or something. That’s amazing.” He grinned and he was as handsome as he’d been when I was a freshman and he was captain of the senior swim team. I told myself that the flipflops in my stomach were hunger, not crushing.
* * *
It was only five minutes before final bell when the school went on lockdown. We all groaned as our homeroom teacher, Mr. Pztikian, sprinted to the classroom door and swung down the bar, slapping the button that polarized the classroom windows, including the little one in the door itself, plunging the room into darkness. The groan made Pztikian glare at us with his finger on his lips. Rule one in lockdowns: no words.
Rule two: silently build a shelter of bullet-absorbing furniture and then hunker down. Nearly everything in the classroom was made of waxed cardboard and wasn’t about to stop any artillery, not even crossbows—yeah, some fools actually went on school shootings armed with crossbows—but the room had once been a science lab and there was one big workbench running the length of the wall, made of steel and concrete, with long-plugged hookups for burners along its length. Previous lockdown drills had established that this was our designated shelter, so we shuffled behind it.
It’s not that we weren’t worried about getting shot, but we also knew that lockdowns were, nine times out of ten, hoaxes. Some fool sent a text that said “Gunna be at school later” and it got autocorrected to “guns be at school later” and that tripped Burbank SWAT’s paranoid Fusion Center security AI, and then we all had to hide behind the lab-bench for half an hour while the toy soldier squad did a sweep of the school.
We hunkered down and texted each other—the school deactivated its network filters during lockdowns so we could text status updates to the cops or our last words to our loved ones—and made dumb jokes. Our messages were interrupted every 30 seconds by reminders to stay silent and vigilant, broadcast on the school’s administrative emergency channel by the school safety office. On top of that, there were actual status updates: OFFICERS EN ROUTE. OFFICERS ON SITE. NORTH WING SWEEP COMPLETE. SOUTH WING SWEEP COMPLETE. PORTABLES SWEEP COMPLETE. More of this. Then: ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR ALL CLEAR followed by an announcement out of every phone speaker in the room. Only phones that ran the school safety app would work on school property so we all ran it, but dang it was some creepy shit.
I left the classroom thinking about my homework and whether I was supposed to pick up Teesha from band practice and I was so lost in my thoughts that I didn’t notice the guy in the suit until he put a hand on my shoulder as I was heading for my locker.
“Lenae Walker?” Just the way he said it gave him away as a cop. I felt my heart rate triple.
“Yes?”
“Please come with me.” He steered me to the administrative office. The secretary on the front desk pointedly didn’t stare at me as he led me into one of the VP’s offices. The first thing I noticed was my backpack, on the desk, surrounded by its contents, and next to it, Shirelle’s bag and its contents, too. That was when I noticed Shirelle, sitting on a low sofa. The cop indicated the spot next to her with a tilt of his head and I sat. The late-afternoon sun slanting through the window caught the huge fart of dusty air that escaped from its cushions when I settled in. Shirelle coughed a little and caught my eye. She looked scared. Really scared.
The cop pulled the vice principal’s chair out from behind the desk and sat down on it in front of us. He didn’t say anything. He was young, I saw, not much older than us, and still had some acne on one cheek. White dude. Not my type, but good looking, except that he was a cop and he was playing mind games with us.
“Are we being detained?” Somewhere in my bag was a Black Lives Matter bust-card and while I’d forgotten almost everything written on it, I remembered that this was the first question I should ask.
“You are here at the request of your school administration.” Oh. Even when there wasn’t a fresh lockdown, the administration had plenty of powers to search us, ask us all kinds of nosy questions. And after a lockdown? Forget it.
“Are we entitled to lawyers?” Shirelle’s voice was a squeak, but I was proud of her. She remembered the second line from the bust-card.
“You are not.” The cop looked smackably smug.
I didn’t say anything. That was definitely the third line of the bust-card. Keep your damned mouth shut.
He didn’t say anything either. Well, I wasn’t going to be the first one to speak. The silence went on so long I started to worry that I was going to bust out laughing, because it was damned silly, the three of us sitting there in total silence, playing foolish head-games. I could tell Shirelle was on the verge of giggling, too, that psychic thing you get with your best girl-friends. Don’t giggle don’t do it I thought at her. I was sure she was doing the same for me, and you know what it’s like when someone tells you not to laugh when you’re about to laugh, and that makes it a thousand times worse?
I swear we’d have burst something if the cop didn’t finally speak. “What do you know about Steelbridge, girls?” At first, it was just the girls I noticed, because seriously who the hell was this kid to be calling me a girl? Then I tried to figure out what Steelbridge was, because the name did ring a bell.
“My cousin Antoine is a sheet-metal worker there.” Oh, that Steelbridge. I was surprised at first, but Shirelle wasn’t telling them anything they couldn’t learn with one pass through her social media.
He did the silence thing again. Someone needed to teach that boy a second interrogation technique. Now that we knew what this was about and what he was trying for, the hardest thing about these silences was fighting the giggles.
“What else do you know about Steelbridge?” He was terrible at his job. Maybe too terrible. Could he be trying to lull us into a false sense of security about his cluelessness? If so, he was being pretty obvious about it. Maybe it was a double-bluff then, but nah, he didn’t seem smart enough for that. So maybe: triple bluff?
OK, maybe I was getting nervous, too.
“I don’t see what this has to do with school. Didn’t you say this came from the school administration? What do they have to do with some company in Encino?” Oops. Well, it was in Encino, but the fact that I knew it was more than I wanted to say. Lenae, you are not as smart as you think you are.
“We requested that they put us in touch with you two.” He was pretending that he hadn’t noticed me saying ‘Encino.’ Badly. He’d jumped like I’d stung him. “We’re worried about you.” He sucked at being fatherly.
More staring games.
“We’re worried about you.”
You said that.
“We’re worried that there may be some illegal activities coming up at this factory. Labor trouble. Felonies. Jail time. I hear you two are good students. I don’t think you want that kind of trouble. Not so close to graduating.”
“Was that whole lockdown just so you could get a look inside our backpacks?” When Shirelle sounded it, I stared at her in disbelief, but the cop blushed like a stoplight. Shit. “That’s crazy. How can that even be legal?”
The cop actually rocked back in his chair. “You two are too smart to be in this kind of trouble. I wouldn’t want to see you throwing away your lives. I had a look at your grades. You could go to a good university.” He gave us what must have been his most significant look. “It’s better than goin
g to prison for twenty years.”
The way he was talking and looking at us made me think that he wasn’t as confident as he should be. I wondered why. “How long after a lockdown does the school have to allow students to talk to their lawyers?”
He squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed at them with his forefinger and thumb. “Everything you do from now on will be logged. You’re in the investigation. Remember that.”
He stood up and left the office. I guess I knew the answer about the lawyer thing now.
Toodle-ooh. Shirelle only mouthed the words, but it still nearly set off my giggles and I glared at her. It had been old and corny for almost as long as Bye, Felicia, but it was also something both our mothers would smack us for saying, and that made it damned funny just then. Once the door clicked shut behind Detective No-Name, Shirelle jumped up and started throwing things in her bag, quick as she could, and I did the same after a second. I took the hint of her not saying anything and worked silently.
Outside the school, I let my feet autopilot me to the Uber Van stop, but she dragged me away, toward downtown. There was a row of automats: Korean tacos, pizza, poke bowls, all serving scop, all places I never went. She pulled me into a rice pudding place with two hundred flavors and no customers. She bought a large one and when the window opened with the rice pudding steaming on its little tray, she plopped her phone in it, then snapped her fingers at me. I passed her my phone, not quite believing I was doing it, and watched as she dropped it into the rice pudding as well, then closed the door.
“All right, they’re safe now.” They were the first words either of us had spoken since the cop had left.
“Shirelle, why is my phone in a bowl of rice pudding?”
She eyerolled me. “The vending machines are shielded, to keep identity thieves from putting in skimmers. Once our phones were inside it, they couldn’t get any network service, no matter what.”
I shook my head. “How do you know that?”
“I just do, OK? I know people.”
I snorted. She knew the same people I knew, plus or minus five percent. My guess was that she’d read this online somewhere, one of those hashtag resistance sites. “OK, then why is my phone in the pudding?”
“Because, dummy, if the pudding is left on the release bed, the machine thinks you forgot it and it chimes you a few times, see?” It was chiming us and flashing a light. “But if there’s anything on the food-bed, it starts taking pictures and analyzing them and sending them to the bomb squad, just in case. So we put the phones in the pudding and then we get ’em back and wipe ’em down when we’re done.”
“But Shirelle, it’s pudding.”
She shrugged. “Waterproof is pudding-proof.”
“What if someone comes in for rice pudding?”
She gave me a look. “Girl, no one eats rice pudding. That shit is gross.”
I didn’t tell her that it was my favorite dessert. My stomach was all in knots anyway. “How d’you know all this?”
She shrugged. “Looked it up, back when you first started talking about Communist parties.”
I started talking about Communist parties? Maybe I did. Maybe it was me that started it. I’d always been fascinated by them, that was for sure. “Why?”
“Because, Lenae, for a smart girl, you are sometimes hella dumb. If you were going to go and get into trouble, I wanted to know what kind, and what I could do to take the edge off it.”
That stole the words right out of my mouth. Shirelle had done that before, taken my crazy plans and turned them into careful schemes, but I hadn’t been thinking of the Communist party as my plan. Hadn’t she told me about Antoine and the factory? “You want to do this as much as I do.”
She made a face, and I knew I was right. “That cop, though.”
“You think he has anything?”
“I think he wants something. He pulled a phony lockdown just so he could search our bags. To me, that says they’re worried, but don’t have enough to do something about it.”
“Shirelle, since when are you such a tactician?”
“Since I figured out that you were going to get us both busted if I didn’t start paying attention. Lenae, Communist parties are dumb: they only work when you tell a lot of people about them, and the more people you tell, the more likely it is that you’ll get busted.”
It was true. I shrugged. “Everything is like that, Shir. Everything. If it’s good, it’s scary. That’s why we do it. If there wasn’t any risk from having a Communist party, it wouldn’t be exciting.”
“But you could still sneak in at night and make the trolleys, give ’em to the homeless people. Why you have to have a party?”
I didn’t know, but I felt like the answer was on the tip of my tongue. I shrugged again. “I don’t know, Shirelle. I didn’t invent them.”
“Naw, you didn’t. That fool went to jail.”
* * *
Once Teesha was snoring, I got out my burner, a phone I’d made in shop class, following a recipe I’d found on a darknet google. It had been freshman year and all the kids were doing it, and I hadn’t used mine in years. It powered up and complained that it couldn’t find its update server and warned that it had been years since it had been patched, and that I shouldn’t let it near the net. That was good advice, but I couldn’t take it. Instead, I gave it a connection through my regular phone, using the app that Shirelle had sideloaded for me using her fingernails, after we’d cleaned off the rice pudding. That app was designed to let you tunnel your leaky, abandoned smart appliances through it, to keep them from being exposed to the public internet, and Shirelle said that no one could listen in on its connections. I hoped she was right. I pointed the burner at a site that Shirelle said she’d researched and waited while the burner downloaded new versions of all its software.
Once it had rebooted, I was able to connect it straight to the net—my stomach fluttered when I did it, though—and send Shirelle a message at her old anonymous account, a long garbage string like you saw on the cards that drug dealers left in public bathrooms. Shirelle had explained it to me: it was an address in the blockchain that had a public key in it. Download the key, encrypt with it, and post your message back to the blockchain. Everyone could see it, but only the private key holder could decrypt it. Course, those messages lived in the blockchain forever, so your secret squirrel ever got hacked for her private key, every message sent this way would be visible to everyone in the world, for all time. Like they said in the crime shows, “Crypto giveth and crypto taketh away.”
> I figured it out
It took her less than a minute to reply. She was waiting to hear from me.
> That you?
> It’s me
> What did you give me for my 15th birfday?
I rolled my eyes. She was such a secret squirrel.
> Nothin. We had a fight and you didn’t invite me
> Yah. OK you ask me something
> Shut up
> Come on its good hygiene
I thought about all these messages being encrypted and stashed in the blockchain, which I didn’t really understand but always pictured as this huge anthill with trillions of little bugs crawling all around on it. In ten thousand years, would someone figure out how to break the code and read this?
> Who did you crush on in freshman year
> Fuck you
> Come on, it was YOUR idea
> Ale Martinez but he was fine in freshman year
Alejandro had become a candybilly in junior year, wearing these crazy outfits that looked like a kindergartner dressed up like a cowboy, and he’d started missing a lot of classes, showing up late and hungover or still high and stupid. I hadn’t seen him in a year or more. I knew Shirelle still crushed on him, though. She was one hundred percent smart women foolish choices.
> I figured it out
> Wat
> Why it has to be a party
> This should be good
I checked to make sure Teesha was still
asleep.
> Cuz it feels like there’s no alternative. Like no matter what we do the same things gone happen, we’re gonna end up like your cuz, if we’re lucky. Get a job that lasts awhile before the company runs off and takes our last paychecks too. Its all so BIG and we’re so lil. But put us all together and you can see it. There’s other people out there feel the same as you. A connection you get it?
> You woke me up to tell me that?
> Shut up.
> ok ok, yeah. I hear you. That’s a reason maybe even a good one. But it does make everything a zillion times more dangerous
> You wanna live forever?
> Shut up
Teesha opened one eye. “Put down your phone already, I’m trying to sleep here.”
> Got to go
* * *
Antoine just happened to be at Shirelle’s house the next afternoon when we took our homework there and we just happened to leave our phones inside and went into the back yard to sit under the sun-shade with our notebooks and scratch paper.
“The Wobblies say they can fool the cops into thinking the whole thing’s scheduled for the next night.”
Shirelle looked as skeptical as I felt. “How are they gonna do that?”
He looked around. “You don’t want to know.”
Shirelle thumped her hand on the table. “Yes we do. It’s our asses on the line too, in case you haven’t noticed.”
He sighed and looked around dramatically. He wasn’t much of a spy. Shirelle had a better poker-face. “I can’t talk about it, seriously. But not everyone who becomes a cop believes in the system, all right? Some of them just need a job, and also a way to look themselves in the mirror.”
The cops were infiltrated by Wobblies? That would be pretty weird, if it was true. But maybe it was true. The world was pretty weird.
“What happens when we tell everyone at school to show up on the right date? It’s not like they’ve got the tightest game in the world. They’re kids. Cops’ll find out for sure.” Shirelle said it but I was thinking it, too.
Antoine made a face. “Yeah. Thing is, we got to be tight about this. We got the same problem, but not with school kids, but all the other people we want to show up. These Wobblies, they said, maybe we just don’t tell anyone about it in advance, instead we invite them over for dinner or whatnot, out for drinks, and then we just drag ’em along, make ’em bag their phones. Surprise!” He made a face.