Burn Before Reading(13)
Mystified, I head to my room. I pass Fitz’s messy room, where he types away on his extensive computer system. Fast food containers litter every surface, his clothes flung around like a tornado got into his closet. The only neatly kept thing in his room is his computer. He has four monitors hooked up on a sleek black iron desk, and then two more monitors hooked up to the wall above those. His chair is massive and winged and he rolls around from keyboard to keyboard, typing on this or that. Sometimes he has a competitive game like Call of Duty going that he yells obscenities at, but not today. Today he just types, hundreds of lines of white text on a black screen that’s basically gibberish to anyone but him.
“The chef isn’t here,” I knock on his open door and say.
“Unless he’s cracked the code on how to make an invisibility potion,” Fitz offers without looking up from his monitors.
“Which he hasn’t.”
“You never know,” Fitz shrugs. “Maybe Harry Potter really is real.”
“It’s not.”
“Stop killing my hopes and dreams. Oh, wait, that’s your favorite hobby. My bad.”
I know when Fitz is too angry to drop the whole ‘verbal battle’ thing. It’s pointless to talk to him until he’s had a good ten minutes to cool off, so I head to my room.
Burn’s room is before mine, the open door revealing just how bare the walls are and how plain the furnishing is. Burn might be the most reckless of us, but he’s also strangely the most modest – everything from the curtains to the bedspread is a plain gray. A personal gym crowds one corner of his room, complete with a weight press, an elliptical, and a treadmill. Out of the three of us he’s the one who’s home the least – always hiking or running, so he doesn’t keep much inside his room other than his clothes. In the rare moments of downtime he chooses to spend in the house, he likes to whittle little bits of wood. Mom taught him to do it when he was a kid. He’s good at it, too; wooden animals with detailed fur and claws line the windows of his room.
I walk into my room and lock my door behind me. I prefer privacy more than Burn and Fitz do. I’m not as Spartan as Burn, and I’m not as messy as Fitz. Somewhere in the middle. My bed is covered in a plaid blanket, my computer decent but nothing as high tech as Fitz’s. I keep a few free weights and medicine balls in the corner for stretching before and after swim practice. The only decorations on my wall are swords – my grandfather’s old World War II decorative Navy sword, my mom’s gold-leafed machete she got as a gift from a Mexican official, and an elegant katana from a traditional Japanese weaponsmith – Dad got me that one as a bribe. He knew how much I treasured my swords, and the katana was his attempt to win me over. I despise him, but I can’t despise something as beautiful and well-crafted as the katana, so I keep it with the rest of my collection.
I throw my riding gloves and jacket on the bed, and settle at my computer. Sometimes Fitz and I play games together, but I know he’s too pissed for that right now. I flip boredly between Facebook and Twitter, nothing new or exciting going on. I don’t keep social media accounts for my own vanity or connection with others – it’s solely for my red carding. Social media provides clues into a person’s life as easily as a nutcracker pierced chestnuts. All it takes is a little digging into the Lakecrest network to find everything I need to know about whether something someone did was real or not. Pictures, tweets, timestamps, all of it was evidence I collected and kept in my arsenal. Fitz always offered to help, but I refused, knowing his help was the sort that’d land both of us in jail if he wasn’t careful. He likes to think he’s the best hacker around, and don’t get me wrong, he’s good. But I know better than anyone he’s suffering from big fish in a little pond syndrome. He’s good, but there’s always people out there who are better.
So I refuse his help. I refuse anyone’s help. I do all my own research, all my own digging. Burn likes to call it my ‘stalking’. I can’t fault him there – it is pretty much stalking. But I’ve worked hard to make Lakecrest a better place. I’m not going to stop now.
Fitz asked me ‘why’ once. Why I tried so hard to make the school better. I wasn’t sure. I’m still unsure. After Mark – I suppress the flinch that runs through me – I had nothing left. I was at the bottom, with no light in sight. I needed to do something, anything. It started out small; taking on the ruthless teasing and taunting upperclassmen did to underclassmen. And then it branched out to stopping fights, getting the drug dealers kicked out. It was a small irony that Fitz managed to get drugs even though I’d kicked out most of his dealers. His saving grace was he never complained that I was making it harder for him to fuel his habit; a habit Burn and I hate to acknowledge, but hate trying to interfere with even more. It’s hard to tell your little brother to stop popping pills when Burn seeks adrenaline highs and I mercilessly cut down anyone who messes with Lakecrest’s integrity. We all have our vices. Fitz’s is sloth, Burn’s is gluttony, and mine is wrath. Part of the reason we manage to get along at all is the fact we don’t call each other out on them.
The Lakecrest twitter scene suddenly starts moving again. People can’t stop commenting on Beatrix’s book dropping accident in the parking lot, or the way she and Eric smiled at each other. Some people even tag me, asking me why I haven’t gotten Eric kicked out yet. I scoff. As if it was that simple. The red cards are warnings, nothing more. If he keeps fucking up, that’s when I’ll boot him. But not until then. Until then it’s up to everyone else to watch him closely, and provide me the clues and information I need to remove him. That’s all I can do. I’m no vigilante, no matter how vividly I remember Beatrix’s smile at Eric. All I can do now is stalk his online presence, waiting and watching for any indicator that he’s about to do something disgusting again.