loved anything.
In a certain way Simon… shamed me, I’m forced to say; something about him gave the lie to what I was then. I wanted to be popular, I wanted to be very conventionally well thought of. I wanted a girlfriend and a car and a good college. I would have traded places with a lot of people. I was his friend, but I transparently didn’t want to be like him. I could never have stood it, being him. I was, I think, a contemptible little climber, waiting for something better to come along. If I could have, I would have been a lot more like Darren, charismatic and loud, always at the center. It’s fair to say that I was more a failed Darren than I was anything else.
Simon told me later about the walks he’d go on, through the baseball field to the trees bordering the ratty “Nature Woods.” He found himself on the shore of what they stupidly called the Lake, really just a large pond.
He stood on the beach, just a thin strip of sand and pine needles, letting the water lap at his sandals.
He needed Realms to save him, I think, more than the rest of us did. This was his summer, the summer of his life. For most of us—me, certainly—computer camp was a logical stopover, a little bit of college prep; a résumé builder; for Simon it was a last resort.
The day Simon lost it, at first I didn’t understand what I was seeing. Fights weren’t a part of KidBits; there wasn’t even much roughhousing. People were laughing. Simon self-evidently wasn’t a boxer—he clawed—and Darren’s advantage in reach only increased the farcical look of the contest.
Darren’s expression was somewhere between angry and amused, part of him still hoping to pass it off as a play fight, to bring Simon in and wrestle him out of it. But Simon was serious; there was blood on Darren’s forearms, and at some point he got a fingernail into Darren’s cheekbone that left a scar I could see fifteen years later. In the end Darren was left holding his oldest friend at arm’s length until four counselors could pull him away. Simon was panting, his pudgy face red and smeared, his shirt hanging half off. He’d torn it trying to get at Darren. Simon was escorted from the camp and put on a bus.
But the fight itself was forgotten an hour later, when word got out of something a lot more serious. Simon had managed to release a computer virus onto the KidBits servers; it erased a fair amount of data, mostly personal e-mail, as well as the grades database. A lot of people ended up getting free As because of it. But it wasn’t terribly sophisticated—in fact, it was an uncharacteristically clumsy piece of execution. There was no doubt as to where it came from.
It wasn’t anything more than juvenile mischief, but this was the heyday of teen hacker paranoia, of experts testifying soberly that one unsupervised kid could set off a nuclear war, and of federal agents breaking down the doors of unsocialized fourteen-year-olds. Once Simon was tagged as a computer criminal there was nothing even Darren could do to keep him from being prosecuted. He ended up with a hundred hours of community service and was lucky to get it; but his scholarship was revoked. Simon wouldn’t be going to college, then or ever.
It was a deep unsolved mystery, one Darren would never shed any light on. Was it about a girl? Was there a love triangle? That was the most popular theory, one with endless variants. Or was it creative differences, or just old business from the antediluvian past? All I could think of was how Simon could have explained it to his mother, whose vague ideas about the dangers of hacking, of computers as the gateway to cloudily imagined supercrime, would only be confirmed.
And the more I thought about it, the more serious it seemed, and I couldn’t help thinking Simon knew it. Simon and his mother had had early experience of downward mobility when his father left. Some part of him knew that his sullen refusal to engage in school was turning into more than just an adolescent funk, that it was self-dooming. But this was it for him, a clean break with the future. What was Simon thinking, on the long bus ride home? How would he save her now?
Five days afterward, at ten thirty on the last night of