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Why?

“Everyone else has already seen it but me, Mom. Pleeeeeasseee?”

You know why.

To sell him pot. I sighed.

“See? Jessie doesn’t want to see it, either,” my mother said, pointing to me. Allie looked at me like I’d betrayed her.

“No—I’ll watch whatever you two decide on,” I said, waving my fork between them.

My mom gave me a look for not taking the adult side. There was absolutely no winning tonight.

Have fun doing that then

I texted back to Darius slowly.

Always do

He texted back, cavalier.

“Maybe I can pick this time, and you all can pick next time?” Allie suggested.

“Maybe the person paying should get to pick all the times,” my mother said, a little stern. Allie folded in on herself a little, and I tried to think of something to defuse them both when I got a string of curse words in my phone—from Darius.

Shit shit shit shit shit.

I was texting backWhat????when his next message came through.

The cops are here.

Oh my God.

If they search my car, Jessie?—

I pushed my chair away from the table and ran to the back of the trailer.

I slid into my mother’s room and reached under her bed for the laptop—it was where I’d left it. I grabbed it and ran for the bathroom and locked the door.

“Jessie?” Allie was already outside. “Are you okay?”

I sat on the toilet and opened the laptop. “Yeah! Just—upset to my stomach is all!” I reached over to run the water in the sink as the laptop booted. “Come on, come on, come on.”

It turned on—Ifeltit connect—and then I fell into the lightning place like I was on a water-slide of light. Our net joined the router joined the cable joined the fiber, in bigger and bigger rings, becoming bigger than myself, feeling myself peel into ten, a hundred, a thousand different directions, fractals of connectivity, matching the marks on my back, spreading outwards searching for something, anything, that’d attract all the police in town.

Redson’s Bank. Where Sarah’s Dad worked.

I assaulted it. Everything on the inside was under lock and key—under shining walls I couldn’t get through—but it was nothing to flip all the external warning switches electronically. I simultaneously hit the theft alarm, the fire alarm, and emailed an anonymous bomb threat. I instantly heard-felt-saw the call to action go out to all the local police.

“Jessica?” My mother’s voice came through the door. “What’s going on?”

I closed the laptop and flushed the toilet as I opened up the cabinet under the sink and shoved the laptop back behind the extra rolls of toilet paper.

“I’m fine!” I promised as I stood, turning off the faucet and unlocking the door. My mother looked me up and down.

“You had better not be pregnant.”

The rest of dinner was incredibly awkward. I didn’t know what was going on with Darius and I didn’t dare text him, I didn’t want his phone lighting up in an officer’s hand. I’d done what I could—and I was pretty sure that everything I had done was illegal. Sure enough, I saw a ‘mysterious system error’ being reported on the evening news, alongside a video of people running out of the bank building, drenched by sprinklers. Then my mother changed the channel and Allie got her wish, the latest Spongebob came on. I lay down on the floor in front of the TV and tried to pretend that everything was okay and that I wasn’t scared.