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36.

I slept off my very first hangover on Lionel’s futon bed, the two of us curled like spoons. The dust in his crocheted blanket made me sneeze. When I woke up, the afternoon had already tiptoed away and evening was settling into its place. Every part of my body felt like it had been put through a blender and rearranged in an alarmingly unfamiliar way.

Lionel was propped up on his elbow, looking at me. When I smiled at him, he turned a guilty pink.

“Were you watching me sleep?”

“I was afraid if I moved I’d wake you up.” He touched a finger to the part in my hair. “You dye your hair? You’re actually blond?”

Suddenly wide-awake, I put my palm over my head, although it was too late to conceal the fact that I had waited too long to touch up my roots. A lazy mistake. “No one takes blondes seriously.”

“Oh. Well, I guess you do seem more like a brunette to me.” He sat up and stretched. “You hungry?”

“I don’t know if I can eat anything. My mouth feels like I chewed on walnut shells.”

“Same. We could walk down to the store and get ice cream?”

I didn’t really want to get out of his bed. I wanted to kiss him again and see what that felt like when I was sober, but I’d lost my grasp on the previous night’s boldness. In the thinning light, I was crushingly insecure: What if he thought the whole interlude had been a regrettable mistake? I had no experience whatsoever in reading body language. And so, reluctantly, I crawled out from under the blanket and grabbed my sweatshirt. The fabric smelled like bonfire and had stains across the front that looked suspiciously like spilled Zima. I studied it with dismay.

“Here, you can wear this, it’s clean.” He handed me a scarlet hoodie with Stanford across the chest. When I pulled it over my head, it smelled like him—faintly spicy, almost cinnamon—even though I’d never seen him in it. He was wearing his plaid pajama pants and a pilled gray sweater, and without his usual uniform of shirt and tie he looked so much more vulnerable tome.

Together we walked into the evening, hollowed out and shy. The closest market was six blocks away and we walked in near silence, our bodies bumping against each other occasionally, unsure how much space we were supposed to be sharing. When a bus pulled up to the curb next to me, a little too close for comfort, Lionel grabbed my hand and tugged me back. After the bus passed, he didn’t letgo.

“Can I ask you a question?” I asked.

“I have a feeling you’re going to ask anyway, so go for it.”

“Have you ever had a girlfriend?”

“Not really,” he said. Then he seemed to reconsider. “Sorry, let me amend that. The answer is no. No I have not.”

He didn’t ask me the reciprocal question, but I assumed that was because the answer was already obvious. I gripped his hand back and we continued to walk in silence.

“Brianna invited everyone over on Monday to watch the Signal docuseries. It’s airing on TV,” Lionel finally said.

“Are you going to go?”

“I guess so, though I don’t have high hopes. They treated us like a bunch of circus freaks. I don’t think they understood the fundamentally flipped nature of this whole medium.”

“What do you mean?”

“That online, the misfits are the cool kids.”

I squeezed his hand, warm against my palm. “Hey, speak for yourself, misfit.”

“I mean, look at us, and our freakish childhoods. Brianna, a lesbian growing up in conservative Tennessee? Janus, a kid prodigy at the stand-up bass who spent his childhood being dragged around to international competitions? And me, an obese sixteeen-year-old college student at Stanford. And you, homeschooled out in the woods of Montana. That applies to most everyone who works at Signal: We all grew up weird in some way, the kids who stood on the edges of things and just watched the other people who seemed to have life all figured out. And then the internet comes along, and it’s for us —the freaks, not the normals; the kids who got into computers because we had nothing else to hang on to—and we are suddenly the ones in charge. It’s our world. Our rules. We get to build it the way we want it to be. And it’s going to be so, so much better than the way the rest of the world is. We’re going to create utopia for people like us.”

This was the longest string of words I’d ever heard him say. His speech made me feel strange and teary. “I thought you weren’t an optimist.”

He shrugged. “Maybe it’s still the Ecstasy talking.”

“Well, you should have said all these things to the documentary team.”

He shook his head. “They still wouldn’t get it.”

And they wouldn’t; nobody outside our bubble ever really would. And by the time they did, that moment in time would have passed entirely. We had no idea, Lionel and I, how fast everything was about to be wrenched from our grasp. How na?ve we were, to believe that we could build the world’s coolest toy and keep it all for ourselves. We should have known that the playground bullies—the alpha dogs and the mean girls—would come sniffing around and claim it for themselves. That they would see the ugly potential within our utopia, and exploit that in ways we hadn’t imagined. That for every nerd victory—the online communities for lonely LGBTQ kids, the social media networks that fueled the Arab Spring, the fringe artists finally able to connect with an audience—there would be a far greater number of tech bros undermining everything we loved in their pursuit of a unicorn IPO. Art and movies and music, small businesses and local bookstores, courteous civil discourse itself. All would be eroded until they were shells of what they’d been.

But that was still decades away.

At the store we bought two pints of Ben and it was just as nice as it had been the night before, maybe even better, because I knew it was him kissing me this time, and not just the intoxicants.