The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(40)
After his dad left, Nick had started running this scam on his mother. He’d say, “Mom, can you give me more than one snack for lunch tomorrow? I swear, I’m always starving. Guess I’m still growing!” Then he’d shrug and give her this big, sweet, Leave It to Beaver grin that always made her smile. She’d pack not two but three fruit snacks or bags of chips in the next day’s lunch, and at school he’d sell all three to kids who’d left their lunches at home or didn’t want to eat the nasty so-called health food they sold at the Valley Middle School Snack Bar. It’s not like he was stealing. It was his food to start with.
He’d had a long career since then. When he was done with lunches, he started selling papers on the Internet. But that turned out to be too much work, so instead he started selling grade changes at school. For a fee, he’d hack into the online grading system—shockingly easy to do, people were so dumb about their passwords—and bump up a test score, adjust a project grade, mark a few blown-off homeworks as done. This year, he’d started selling fake IDs. Occasionally he threw parties at empty mansions that were on the market around Marin, hauling in kegs and charging every kid a fifty-dollar cover. Last year, he’d found a supplier in the city and started providing weed and pills outside the Miller Avenue 7-Eleven. Periodically he went to Silk Road online and bought bulk portions of Molly, a popular product to retail at parties. And then there was the SAT. In Marin County it was easy to make money—kids there didn’t have allowances, they had bank accounts. And sometimes he did shit just because, to take a teacher down a notch or to shake up the dull day-to-day. The Photoshop of Abigail and Mr. Ellison had been like this.
After Nick’s dad left, his mom had started working overtime to keep up with the mortgage. She left for work before he got up in the morning and came home after dark. Amy left for San Diego State. Nick took care of himself.
—
On Saturday morning in the city, in the fog that shrouded St. Antony’s School, Nick waited to become Dave Chu.
He held the SAT admission ticket and ID and hoisted Dave’s backpack on his shoulder. Inside were all these perfectly organized supplies his parents had probably packed for him—everything that the SAT website, playing on the last desperate hopes of low scorers, claimed would help—granola bars, a watch, a banana.
He was almost to the sign-in table when a girl from his school, Elisabeth Avarine, stepped into line behind him. What was she doing there? She wore tight black pants and flip-flops and an oversized UC Berkeley sweatshirt. Her face was bare, pillow-wrinkled, and her hair tied up, with blond wisps floating down. But she was still Shakespearean, a Juliet—O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright—and he saw why every guy wanted her. If she wanted him, he wouldn’t turn her down. But this was impossible to imagine, because Elisabeth Avarine didn’t exist in his dimension. She was like a hologram, shimmering, silent. At certain angles she seemed to disappear. Nick was more interested in someone he could touch.
“?’Sup,” he said, nodding.
Elisabeth gave him a small smile but then looked at the ground.
He wasn’t offended. She always froze when teachers called her out in class, never spoke except in this whisper that wasn’t a voice at all.
“Next!”
It was his turn to check in. He realized Elisabeth would hear him (presumably she could hear, even if she couldn’t talk). She’d hear the lady ask his name and hear him say, “Dave Chu.” But he couldn’t turn back now. He would have to have faith.
Stepping up, he handed the ID and admission ticket to the lady behind the card table. She wore thick plastic glasses that magnified her eyes and made them swim in her face as she peered at the ID, at Nick, at the ID again. Nick held an easy smile, wiggled his toes in his sneakers, and steadied his breath while the lady stared at him, the ID, him, her eyes narrowing and widening, and he wondered if she’d bother to think this through, if she’d make herself ask the obvious question: Is this Chinese boy really you?
He waited for it. Almost welcomed it. It would be a new challenge to overcome—the scams had become almost too easy lately—but the lady just squinted again and asked him, “David Alexander Chu?”
“Yeah,” Nick said. “I go by Dave, though.”
Elisabeth made no noise behind him. The lady frowned; he could see her deciding whether to pursue this.
One thing Nick’s career had taught him was that most people would rather go along than question—even when something terrible happened, a mass shooting, a suicide, and the news reporters swooped in to interview the bystanders, it was always, “I didn’t know, he was nothing like this, of course there were no red flags, we couldn’t see it coming.” What these people meant, what they should have said, was that it had been easier not to look.
The lady sighed and pointed the way.
He glanced back as Elisabeth stepped up to the table and flashed her own ticket and ID. The lady at the table asked her something. Elisabeth shook her head. The lady said something else and Elisabeth nodded, shifting from foot to foot, keeping her gaze on the table. Her eyes flickered up to meet his, unreadable.
—
In the classroom, Nick felt an uncommon flash of fear—was the proctor watching as he wrote Dave’s name and address on the lines provided, penciled in the bubbles underneath?
Nick set down his pencil and stretched. Elisabeth had taken the seat behind his, and he turned toward her as casually as he could, searching her face for some affirmation—a nod, a mouthed Don’t worry, anything—but she ignored him, hunching over her Scantron form, and with the heat of the proctor’s gaze on his neck he turned forward again, squinting thoughtfully at a poster of mitosis and meiosis. His leg trembled under the desk and he stilled it, consoled by the fact that the shaking leg was as Dave Chuian a gesture as he could have possibly invented, easily explained by the anxiety of an inept test-taker facing down the Scantron, that firing squad of small, blank circles.