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It was 1997 in San Francisco, and society was teetering on a precipice, though no one realized it yet. Underemployed college grads sat in Mission cafés, grumbling about their McJobs, oblivious to the opportunities that the world was about to fling their way. Pale-faced bankers scurried along Market Street, unaware of just how stupidly rich their ilk were about to become. San Francisco was sleepy and provincial, a town of tattoos and fixed-gear bicycles, techno clubs and plates of cheap spaghetti and wrinkled society mavens who dressed like their dogs. San Francisco was a city that was still easy to overlook.

No one could see what was coming. How much everything, everything, was about to change. Even the ones who did—the manic-eyed prognosticators, those Panglossian optimists, clustered on the grass down in South Park—didn’t quite understand the monster they were unleashing from its chain.

Did my father? I think he did, though even his imagination couldn’t fathom the distance that all this was going to go. He just knew that something cataclysmic was in the wind. He’d caught a whiff of disaster. And he believed he was the only one to stopit.

Meanwhile, I was ready to jump right into the abyss.

—

By the time I disembarked at the Greyhound bus depot on Mission Street on Friday afternoon, I had exactly thirteen dollars left in my pocket and I smelled like a cheese sandwich that had been left too long in the sun. I hadn’t slept since Las Vegas. Instead, I’d simmered with paranoia, afraid to close my eyes, my thoughts a toxic stew of fear and self-recrimination.

I stepped off the bus into a cold fog that frosted my insubstantial sweatshirt with a delicate layer of damp. My hair, greasy and limp from the long bus ride, whipped in a frenzy around my face. I had thrown my old parka in a trash bin in Idaho, figuring I wouldn’t need one in sunny California. But there was no sun here. There were no palm trees, or sandy beaches, or convertibles driven by girls in bikini tops. Just a gray marine layer that clung to the tops of the stoney-faced skyscrapers and a piercing wind that sent empty Big Gulp cups skittering along the gutters.

Apparently I looked as overwhelmed as I felt, because one of the other passengers from the bus—a woman with a pet-carrier and leopard-print bifocals—stopped to stare at me. “Honey, you need directions or something?”

“I’m trying to get to Atherton.”

Inside the pet-carrier, a cat was mewling plaintively. The woman jiggled the carrier and frowned. “You’re still a long way from there.”

“Can I walk?”

“It’s a forty-five minute drive, so no, I wouldn’t advise that.”

“How do I get there, then?”

She shushed her cat and then looked at me again. “Without a car? Hmmm. Get yourself down to the train station, if you don’t want to walk you can take the Muni, just catch the 30 over on Third. Caltrain will get you to Atherton in an hour or so, make sure you don’t take the express or you’ll end up in San Jose. You’ll probably need to call a taxi once you land in Atherton; it’s not very walkable down there in the suburbs and the bus system is spotty.”

She smiled at me as I stared blankly back at her, frantically trying to parse the foreign language she had just spoken. “How much will all that cost?” I asked, even though this was hardly my biggest concern, not compared with the fact that I couldn’t fathom navigating three or four new transportation systems when I’d only just barely managed one.

“Five or six dollars, not including the taxi. So maybe fifteen or twenty, total.”

I considered the handful of bills in my pocket, and thought I might cry—to have made it so far and yet to be seemingly nowhere near where I needed to be. “Do you happen to have some money I could borrow?”

“ Borrow? ” Her laugh was a bark. The cat mewled in response. The woman adjusted her glasses and took a closer look at me. “Is someone actually expecting you in Atherton?”

I nodded, but apparently the expression on my face had given me away because the woman leaned in closer and lowered her voice. “Look, honey, it’s dangerous for girls like you to be hanging around a bus station. There are predators here.” She cast her eyes around us, as if she were looking out for a panther or a shark. “Pimps, you know. Looking for vulnerable girls, who need money and don’t know any better.”

I nodded soberly, wondering what a pimp was. It wasn’t acne-related, presumably.

“There’s a shelter for homeless youth over on Market Street, near the Castro,” she continued. “They’ll help you figure out how to get you in touch with whoever you’re trying to find in Atherton.”

“I’m not homeless,” I objected. Except that I was, wasn’t I? I thought of the Montana cabin, reduced to ashes. It felt like I had arrived at the end of the earth and now had nowhere to go back to, even if I wanted to try.

“Well, good luck.” She patted me on the shoulder and scurried off, the cat thumping against her thigh.

After she left, I stood there on the street for ten minutes, watching the traffic whiz past. I felt more lost than I had since I’d left Montana. I thought of Desi, prepared to panhandle for her dinner— she doesn’t have to do that anymore, I realized glumly—but couldn’t imagine doing that myself. And even if I did manage to scrape together enough money for all those trains and taxis and Munis and whatnot, even if I did manage to make my way to some obscure address in Atherton—did I really want to meet my mother looking like this ? I hadn’t showered in days, my face was sticky with grease and dried sweat, and my clothes were stained with cheese dust and bus station coffee.

The homeless shelter—maybe that was my best option. A shower and some logistical assistance, maybe they’d even give me some money. But I wasn’t prepared to talk to yet more strangers, to spin my lies for people whose entire job was to identify people’s problems. Maybe not feds, but still: authorities. Surely they’d sniff me out. Besides, I hadn’t seen a newspaper or watched the news since I boarded the bus back in Idaho. What if they had better photos of me now, and the homeless shelter recognized me and turned mein?

I had one last option, even if it felt like the most desperate choice.

A twenty-something Black kid in a leather jacket was walking past me, headphones clamped over his ears and a messenger bag slung over his shoulder. I lurched forward and tapped his arm. He stopped in his tracks and turned to regard me suspiciously. He slowly slipped his headphones off and tilted his head, waiting.

“Yeah?”

“Can you tell me where Signal is?”

“Signal? No idea what you’re talking about.”

“It’s a website.”

He frowned. “I don’t know anything about the internet, sorry. I use those stupid AOL discs as beer coasters. Is this some kind of test? Am I on Candid Camera ?”

“What? No, I don’t even own a camera. Signal is a business. I want to go to their office.”

“Gotcha.” The boy smiled at me, revealing dimples, as I realized (with a delight that now embarrasses me) that this was the first time I’d actually had a conversation with a Black person. “Sorry, still can’t help you. But the address is probably in the phone book.”

“OK, can you tell me how to find a bookstore, then?”

He gave me a funny look, probably wondering if I was still trying to pull one over on him. “Bookstores don’t sell phone books,” he said slowly. “You can usually find one attached to a pay phone. Pretty sure there’s a phone about three blocks up, on First and Market. It’s in the financial district so the phone book might not have been stolen yet.”

—

Perhaps you are wondering, at this point, how well I had been navigating my new existence in the Great Big World, considering that my knowledge of how to function was based on nineteenth-century Russian fiction, television sitcoms, extensive newspaper consumption, and aggressively chaperoned visits to small-town Montana.

The answer: not well.

There had been, most egregiously, the loss of my duffel bag. But even before I na?vely let a grifter walk away with all my money, an incriminating stolen hard drive, and my father’s personal paperwork, I had already made dozens of rookie mistakes. To wit:

- Asking the clerk at the motel where I spent my first night if he was going to give me the key to my room, just moments after he’d handed me the key card; and then staring, in disbelief, at the square of plastic that he insisted was a room key. Then spending five minutes struggling to understand exactly how it opened the room, once I got to my door.

- Trying to buy my first bra at the Kmart in Boise, and the saleswoman looking baffled when I told her I didn’t know what size I wore, but it was probably a medium.

- Getting lost on my way to that same Kmart, to which I was navigating using oral instructions given to me by the hotel clerk, because he’d told me to “turn left when you see the Subway”; and so I’d driven for a half hour, looking for a subway entrance, before someone at a gas station finally told me there was no subway system in Boise, but there was a fast-food sandwich chain by that name.

Everything I understood was outweighed by three things I didn’t. And so even this boy’s simple directions felt like an inscrutable puzzle to me (why, for example, would anyone steal a phone book?). I wandered around downtown San Francisco for what felt like hours, baffled by streets that didn’t connect in parallel lines. So overwhelmed by awe—at the skyscrapers that loomed overhead, the businessmen with their overcoats flapping like sails in the wind, the cable cars that clanged by with tourists hanging off them like monkeys—I kept forgetting the task at hand. Eventually, I stumbled across a pay phone with a phone book still dangling from its metal cord, and looked up the address to Signal, an address that of course meant absolutely nothing to me. By the time I finally screwed up the courage to ask for directions from yet one more passerby and made my way to a dingy beige commercial building a half-hour walk from downtown, it was almost five, and growing dark. My entire body throbbed with exhaustion and hunger.

There were no signs in the elevator, so I pushed all the buttons and peered out at each floor. The first one opened on a cavernous room full of Chinese and Latina women, their heads bent over sewing machines. The air was thick with fabric dust and the cacophony of the machines echoed off the soaped-over windows. Not my destination, presumably. The next floor was more of the same, and I began to wonder if I’d written down the address incorrectly. But when the elevator slid open one last time, I was relieved to find myself face-to-face with a giant, neon-yellow logo that read SIGNAL .

I wandered down the hall and found myself in a room similar to the ones below, except that this one was full of young people who were huddled over keyboards instead of buttons and zippers; and rather than the rattle of sewing machines, rock music echoed off the walls. Pink cable wires snaked along the ceiling and down the room’s concrete support pillars, like a venous system pumping life into the computer monitors that sat on every flat surface. The desks—not proper desks so much as repurposed doors propped up on trestle legs—were cluttered with junk: printouts and computer manuals, Star Wars action figures and stacks of CDs, empty Odwalla bottles and breakfast cereal boxes. An inflatable Oscar Mayer wiener hung overhead, like an absurdist dirigible.

The average age in the room was only a few years older than me. There had to be a hundred twenty-somethings, maybe more, jammed into the space, all of them thrumming with intention. I had never been in an office before, but based on what I’d seen in the Business section of The Wall Street Journal —images of men in suits taking conference calls and being served coffee by be-skirted secretaries—Isensed this scene was not typical. The energy in the room was jittery, irreverent, more like what I imagined a house party to be than a place of serious business. I itched with a curious desire to be part of whatever this was, even though it wasn’t quite clear from where I stood what anyone was actually doing. It looked…fun?

Once upon a time, the world economy was built on concrete things, objects with longevity that could be held in your hand. But that day I was witnessing the beginning of the era of ephemerality, a whole new kind of existence based on little more than zeros and ones, ideas and information. The kids in this room were igniting the fire that was about to immolate everything that had come before. They were revolutionaries who couldn’t anticipate the scale of their victory, or the devastation it would leave in its wake.

There was no receptionist standing guard at the entrance. So I walked over to the closest desk, where a girl with short platinum hair and a butterfly tattoo on the back of her neck was flying her fingers across the keyboard, impossibly fast. She looked up, saw me staring at her hands, and stopped abruptly.

“I gotta get this debugged before six or we’ll have to push launch, and we’re already three days late,” she said, accusingly.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m looking for Lionel?”

She was already back to her work, clacking at her keys. “Lionel Sung? Yeah. Back corner, the desk under the Bart Simpson pinata,” she said, and jerked her chin toward the wall of windows.

“Bart Simpson?”

She looked at me like I was an idiot. “Hello? The cartoon?”

“Right.” I looked around the room until I saw something that seemed to fit the bill, and I headed toward it. I had to maneuver my way through the maze of desks, tripping over bicycles parked in the pathways, edging around a woman doing yoga on the carpet. No one seemed to notice me as I stumbled apologetically past their desks.

When I’d imagined Lionel, I’d envisioned someone who looked like a younger Mulder (I was short on other comparison points): floppy-haired, furrow-browed, tall and cerebrally masculine. But the boy who was working in the corner was slight and pale, with neatly combed black hair; smudgy thick-framed glasses slid down a nose that was peppered with freckles. Unlike the rest of the kids in the room, attired in sweats and jeans, he wore a white button-down shirt tucked neatly into khakis, and a skinny black tie that had fallen askew. He looked up to see me standing by his desk and blinked a few times, his eyes needing a moment to adjust to a view that wasn’t a screen.

“You’re Asian,” I blurted.

He let out a startled cough. “And you’re rude.”

“Why is that rude?”

He spun in his chair, studying me. “Did Janus put you up to this? OK, I’ll play. I’m half Asian, actually. Dad is Chinese, Mom is Irish. That answer your question?”

“Interesting. You’re not how I imagined you.”

“I’m sorry, do I know you?”

“I’m Jane.” I smiled hopefully.

He smiled back, blankly polite. “Are you…the new college intern?”

“Jane, from the internet,” I said.

“Jane…from the internet…” he repeated, clearly churning through a mental Rolodex. I suddenly wondered just how many girls Lionel had been talking to in chat rooms. Probably I wasn’t the only one; maybe there were a dozen other Janes out there. How stupid of me to imagine that he’d remember someone he’d spent all of an hour or two chatting with, months ago. How stupid of me to imagine that he would be my savior.

“Jane with the dead wolf,” I tried, one last time.

His eyes lit up with recognition. I watched as his face subsequently convulsed through a parade of emotions: delight, and then shock, ending in a twist of confusion. “Holy shit,” he said, his voice gone husky. “ Holy shit. Jane, from Montana? WolfGirl96?”

“Actually,” I offered, “my real name is Esme.”

“Esme? You mean, after all that grief you gave me about being a serial killer, you were the one who was trolling me ?” He’d spun his chair fully around and was now looking me up and down. “Huh,” he said. “For some reason I envisioned you as some kind of farmer girl, in overalls and hiking boots. You look so…normal.”

“See, I’m not how you imagined me, either,” I said. “But not Asian.”

He laughed. “Touché. So, Esme. What the hell are you doing here? Are you visiting with your dad?”

“Not exactly. You could say that I ran away.”

The smile wobbled. “Oh shit. Really? I mean, that’s good, right? The way he was treating you—leaving you alone in the woods—Ididn’t like that. It was weird. But wait—why are you here ?” He shifted in his chair, gripping his armrests with a death vise. “Um. Wait. Did you come all the way here because of…me?”

“You mean, am I a stalker?”

He coughed. His eyes darted behind me and around the room, as if seeking assistance. “I mean, no offense, I’m flattered; but you’re seventeen, which makes you a minor, and…”

“Eighteen, actually. And no, I’m in San Francisco because of my mom, not because of you. Although technically speaking, yes, I’m here—as in, here in this office—for you. Not in a creepy way, though. Promise. It’s just”—a piteous inflection had slipped into my voice—“you said you would help me, if I needed it. Remember?”

He slowly unclenched his fingers, releasing the chair. “I do. I did.”

“Yeah, well, I need it.” Phlegm was clogging my throat. I realized that I was on the verge of tears.

He rolled his chair a hair closer as his eyes crinkled with concern. “Hey. Hey! Don’t cry, OK? I’ll help you, of course I’ll help. What do you need?”

I wobbled in my shoes. I was so lightheaded that I thought I might pass out onto his lap. “For starters, a place to sleep tonight? And I’ll explain the rest over a meal. It’s kind of a long story.”

“Not a problem,” he said. “Want to go grab a burger? I’m buying.”

“Good, because I can’t,” I replied.