Page 14 of The Revenge Game

He’d glanced at the Pride sticker on my folder, and his lips had curled into a sneer.

“That must be why you’re so good with computers. All that time alone in your room practicing being handy.” The innuendo dripped from his words like poison.

And that was it. The moment when everything began.

Because Justin’s comment seemed to give everyone explicit permission to make me their metaphorical punching bag for the remainder of high school.

Besides the occasional trip or shove, the bullying wasn’t particularly physical. But I soon learned words can leave bruises that last longer than any punch.

All my classmates called me Handy Andy. It got to the point where some of the teachers slipped up and also called me that by accident.

Then there were the countless jokes linking my sexuality and hand jobs. They’d mime inappropriate gestures whenever I raised my hand in class. The elaborate mocking in the cafeteria if I happened to pick up a banana or hot dog for lunch. The way they’d target anyone friendly to me had the net result of turning me into a social pariah.

Every time they saw me, Conner and Tad would make a beeline toward me, with Justin trailing behind.

Justin wasn’t usually the one to initiate the torment, but he had this way of delivering carefully crafted comments with surgical precision, each one finding the exact spot that would hurt most. “Careful, everyone. Handy Andy’s getting excited,” he’d say with that practiced smirk when I’d raise my hand in class.

I’d once shared a solution in computer science, only to have Justin drawl, “English, please, some of us don’t speak virgin,” causing laughter to ripple across the room.

Once, I’d worn my NASA sweatshirt from space camp to school. Justin spotted it from across the cafeteria and loudly wondered if my space mission was to find someone willing to touch me.

I still remember once, when I was a sophomore, Connor had deliberately bumped his shoulder into me after Chemistry,causing me to drop the armful of stuff I was carrying. Justin had waited for his friends to leave before he’d bent down and scooped up my battered copy ofSnow Crashwith its carefully preserved Neal Stephenson autograph, smoothing out the crumpled cover before handing it back to me without looking me in the eyes.

Somehow, the flashes of humanity Justin occasionally showed made it worse. He knew how wrong it was, and he knew that at any time, a simple comment from him would stop my torment, yet he still continued.

These memories are fresh in my mind, so as soon as Adam has retreated to his desk, I log into my computer and examine DTL Enterprises’ system’s security settings.

Yeah, not great.

It’s like they’ve installed a high-tech alarm but left all the windows wide open.

The code flows easily, muscle memory taking over. That old spark shoots through me, the pure satisfaction of solving a problem through elegant programming. It reminds me of the early days of NovaCore, before board meetings and profit margins replaced the simple joy of building something that works.

It only takes me ten minutes of coding to create a backdoor into the system that’s as invisible as I tried to be in high school.

Although this time, I’m choosing to be invisible.

Because the revenge game is about to begin.

Chapter Five

Justin

There’s a particular art to selling sports equipment to middle-aged English men.

You’ve got to let them reminisce about that game-winning try they scored twenty years ago, nod in the right places, and pretend you haven’t heard the same kind of story from twenty other ex-rugby players who now work in procurement.

Today, I’m currently in the conference room of United Sports, listening to the head of purchasing, Brad, tell me about the time he almost got selected for the England under-twenty-one squad.

“Three defenders in front of me, pitch like a bloody swamp, and I somehow managed to plow my way to the try line.”

“That’s incredible. Must have been quite a moment.”

My accent seems to jolt Brad into realizing his audience isn’t someone who was raised on warm beer and Match of the Day.

“Of course, you wouldn’t have played rugby growing up in the States, would you?”

“I played gridiron,” I say because when I arrived in the UK, I quickly learned to not refer to American football as football unless I wanted to start an international incident about what the word “football” actually means. It turns out that using theterm soccer in England is a cultural crime that ranks somewhere between queue jumping and putting milk in your cup before the tea.