Turtles All the Way Down, Page 5

  I think about her all the time. My stomach flips when I see her. But is it love, or just something we don't have a word for?

  The next one stopped me cold:

  "The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another."

  --WILLIAM JAMES

  I don't know what superpower William James enjoyed, but I can no more choose my thoughts than choose my name.

  The way he talked about thoughts was the way I experienced them--not as a choice but as a destiny. Not a catalog of my consciousness, but a refutation of it.

  When I was little, I used to tell Mom about my invasives, and she would always say, "Just don't think about that stuff, Aza." But Davis got it. You can't choose. That's the problem.

  The other interesting thing about Davis's online presence was that everything ceased the day his father went missing. He'd posted on the blog almost every day for more than two years, and then on the afternoon after his dad disappeared, he wrote:

  "Sleep tight, ya morons."

  --J. D. SALINGER

  I think this is good-bye, my friends, although, then again: No one ever says good-bye unless they want to see you again.

  It made sense. People had probably started snooping around--I mean, if I could find his secret blog, I imagine the cops could, too. But I wondered whether Davis had really quit the internet entirely, or whether he'd just decamped to some farther shore.

  I couldn't pick his trail back up, though. Instead, I got stuck searching his usernames and variants of them, and ended up meeting a lot of people who weren't my Davis Pickett--the fifty-three-year-old Dave Pickett who was a truck driver in Wisconsin; the Davis Pickett who'd died of ALS after years of posting short blog entries written with the help of eye-tracking software; a Twitter user named dallgoodman whose blog was nothing but vitriolic threats directed at members of Congress. I found a reddit account that commented on Butler basketball and so probably belonged to Davis, but that, too, had been silent since Pickett Sr.'s disappearance.

  "I'm very close," Daisy said suddenly. "Very, very close. If only I were as good at life as I am at the internet." I looked up, returning to the sensorial plane of Applebee's. Daisy was tapping at her phone with one hand while holding her cup of water with the other. Everything was loud and bright. At the bar, people were shouting about some sports occurrence. "What've you got?" she asked me as she put down her water.

  "Um, Davis had a girlfriend, but they broke up last November-ish. He has a blog, but hasn't updated anything since his dad disappeared. I don't know. In the blog, he seems . . . sweet, I guess."

  "Well, I'm glad you've used your internet detective skills to determine that Davis is sweet. Holmesy, I love you, but find some info on the case."

  So I did. The Indianapolis Star wrote about Russell Pickett a lot because his company was one of Indiana's biggest employers, but also because he was constantly getting sued. He had some huge real estate deal downtown that devolved into multiple lawsuits; his former executive assistant and Pickett Engineering's chief marketing officer had both sued him for sexual harassment; he'd been sued by a gardener on his estate for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act; the list went on and on.

  In all those articles, the same lawyer was quoted--Simon Morris. Morris's website described his company as "a boutique law firm focusing on the comprehensive needs of high-net-worth individuals."

  "Can I get a charge off your computer BTW?" She actually said the letters B-T-W, which I wanted to point out required more syllables than just saying "by the way," but she was clearly locked into something. Without ever taking her eyes from her phone, Daisy reached into her purse, pulled out a USB cable, and handed it to me. I plugged it into my laptop, and she just mumbled, "That's better, thanks; I'm really close here."

  I noticed Holly had come with my to-go order. I cracked the plastic container and grabbed a couple fries before returning to my investigation of Pickett. I stumbled onto a website called Glassdoor, where current and former employees could review the company anonymously. Observations about Russell Pickett himself included:

  "The CEO is skeezy as hell."

  "Russell Pickett is a straight-up megalomaniac."

  "I'm not saying Pickett executives make you break the law, but we do frequently hear executives start sentences with 'I'm not saying you should break the law, but . . .'"

  So that's the kind of guy Pickett was. And although he'd gotten around all the lawsuits by settling them, the criminal investigation wouldn't go away. From what I could gather, the company had bribed a bunch of state officials in exchange for contracts to build a better sewer overflow system in Indianapolis.

  Fifteen years ago, the government had set aside all this money to clean up the White River by building more sewage retention pools and expanding this tunnel system that runs underneath downtown, diverting a creek called Pogue's Run. The idea was that within a decade, the sewers would stop dumping into the river every time it rained. Pickett Engineering had gotten the initial contract, but they'd never finished the work, and it had gone way over budget, so the government pulled the contract from Pickett's company and allowed anyone to bid on finishing the project.

  And then, even though they'd done a terrible job the first time, Pickett Engineering won the new contract--apparently by bribing state officials. Two of Pickett's executives had already been arrested and were believed to be cooperating with the police. Pickett himself hadn't yet been charged, although an editorial in the paper from three days before his disappearance criticized the authorities: "The Indianapolis Star Has Enough Evidence to Indict Russell Pickett; Why Don't the Authorities?"

  "Annnnddd it's happening. Okay. Hold on. Hold on. Just waiting for the zip to download, yes, and opening, and . . . oh, hell yes." Daisy finally looked up at me and smiled. Her front teeth were a little crooked, turning toward each other, and she was self-conscious about it, so she rarely smiled all the way. But now I could even see her gums. "Can I do the thing, like, at the end of Scooby-Doo and tell you how I did it?"

  I nodded.

  "So the first article about Pickett's disappearance refers to a police report obtained by the Indianapolis Star. That story was written by Sandra Oliveros, with additional reporting by this dude Adam Bitterley, which is a bummer of a last name, but anyway, he's clearly the junior guy on the story, and a quick google shows him to be a recent IU grad.

  "So I made up an email address that looks almost exactly like Sandra Oliveros's and emailed Bitterley an order to send me a copy of the police report. And he replied, like, 'I can't; I don't have it on my home computer,' so I told him to go the hell into the office and email it to me, and he was like, 'It's Friday night,' and I was, like, 'I know it's Friday night, but the news doesn't stop breaking on the weekend; do your job, or I'll find someone else who will do it.' And then he went to the fucking office and emailed me scans of the fucking police report."

  "Jesus."

  "Welcome to the future, Holmesy. It's not about hacking computers anymore; it's about hacking human souls. The file is in your email." Sometimes I wondered if Daisy was my friend only because she needed a witness.

  As the file downloaded, I glanced away from my screen, through the slits of the blinds to the parking lot outside. A streetlight was shining right at us, which made everything around it look pitch-black.

  I was trying to shake off a thought, but as I opened the police report and began scanning through it, the thought grew.

  "What?" Daisy asked.

  "Nothing," I said, and tried again to swallow the thought. But I couldn't. "Just, won't he get in trouble? Like, when he goes into work on Monday, won't he ask his boss why she needed that file, and then won't she be, like, 'What file,' and then won't he get in trouble? Like, he could get fired."

  Daisy just rolled her eyes, but I was in the spiral now, and I started to worry that Mr. Bitterley would figure out how to track down Daisy, that he would have her arrested, and maybe me, too, since I was probably an acco
mplice. We were just playing a silly game, but people go to prison all the time for lesser crimes. I imagined a news story--girl hackers obsessed with billionaire boy.

  "He'll find us," I said after a while.

  "Who?" she asked.

  "The guy," I said. "Bitterley."

  "No, he won't; I'm on public Wi-Fi in an Applebee's using an IP address that locates me in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. And if he does find me, I'll say you had no idea what I was doing, and I'll go to prison for you, and in thanks for my refusal to snitch, you'll get my face tattooed on your bicep. It'll be great."

  "Daisy, be serious."

  "I am being serious. Your skinny little bicep needs a tattoo of my face. Also, he's not going to get fired. He's not going to find us. At most, he will learn an important lesson about phishing in a way that's minimally harmful to his life and the company he works for. Calm down, all right? I gotta get back to this very important argument I'm having with a stranger on the internet about whether Chewbacca is a person."

  Holly came by with the check, an unsubtle reminder that we'd overstayed our welcome. I put down the debit card Mom had given me--Daisy never had any money and my mom let me charge twenty-five dollars a week as long as I kept straight As. Beneath the table, I rubbed my thumb against the callus of my finger. I told myself that Daisy was probably right, that everything would probably be fine. Probably.

  Daisy didn't look up from her phone, but said, "Seriously, Holmesy. I won't let anything happen. I promise."

  "You can't control it, that's the thing," I said. "Life is not something you wield, you know?"

  "Hell yes, it is," she mumbled, still sunk into her phone. "Ugh, God, now this guy is saying I write bestiality."

  "Wait, what?"

  "Because in my fic, Chewbacca and Rey were in love. He's saying it is--and I am quoting--'criminal' because it's interspecies romance. Not sex, even--I keep it rated Teen for the kids out there--just love."

  "But Chewbacca isn't human," I said.

  "It's not a question of whether Chewie was human, Holmesy; it's a question of whether he was a person." She was almost shouting. She took Star Wars stuff quite seriously. "And he was obviously a person. Like, what even makes you a person? He had a body and a soul and feelings, and he spoke a language, and he was an adult, and if he and Rey were in hot, hairy, communicative love, then let's just thank God that two consenting, sentient adults found each other in a dark and broken galaxy."

  So often, nothing could deliver me from fear, but then sometimes, just listening to Daisy did the trick. She'd straightened something inside me, and I no longer felt like I was in a whirlpool or walking an ever-tightening spiral. I didn't need similes. I was located in my self again. "So he's a person because he's sentient?"

  "Nobody complains about male humans hooking up with female Twi'leks! Because of course men can choose whatever they want to bone. But a human woman falling in love with a Wookiee, God forbid. I mean, I know I'm just feeding the trolls here, Holmesy, but I can't stand for it."

  "I just mean, like, a baby isn't sentient, but a baby is still a person."

  "Nobody is saying anything about babies, Holmesy. This is about one adult person who happened to be human falling in love with another adult person who happened to be a Wookiee."

  "Can Rey even speak Wookiee?"

  "You know, it's a little annoying that you don't read my fanfic, but what's really annoying is that you don't read any Chewie fanfic. If you did, you'd know that Wookiee was not a language, it was a species. There were at least three Wookiee languages. Rey learned Shyriiwook from Wookiees who came to Jakku, but she didn't usually speak it because Wookiees mostly understood Basic."

  I was laughing. "And why are you using the past tense?"

  "Because all of this happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Holmesy. You always use the past tense when talking about Star Wars. Duh."

  "Wait, can humans speak Shyri--the Wookiee language?"

  Daisy did a very passable Chewbacca impersonation in response, then translated herself. "That was me asking if you're gonna eat your fries." I passed the to-go carton across the table to her, and she took a handful, then made another Chewbacca noise with her mouth half full.

  "What did that mean?" I asked her.

  "It's been over twenty-four hours; time to text Davis."

  "Wookiees have texting?"

  "Had texting," she corrected me.

  SEVEN

  MONDAY MORNING, I drove Mom to school because her car was in the shop. I could feel the burning in my middle finger from the hand sanitizer I'd applied just before leaving, and so I was pressing the Band-Aid into my middle finger, simultaneously worsening and relieving the pain. I hadn't texted Davis over the weekend. I kept thinking about it, but the night at Applebee's passed, and then I'd started to feel nervous about it, like maybe it had been too long, and Daisy wasn't around to bully me into it because she was working all weekend.

  Mom must've noticed the Band-Aid pressing, because she said, "You have an appointment with Dr. Singh tomorrow, don't you?"

  "Yeah."

  "What are your thoughts on the med situation?"

  "It's okay, I guess," which wasn't quite the whole truth. For one thing, I wasn't convinced the circular white pill was doing anything when I did take it, and for another, I was not taking it quite as often as I was technically supposed to. Partly, I kept forgetting, but also there was something else I couldn't quite identify, some way-down fear that taking a pill to become myself was wrong.

  "You there?" Mom asked.

  "Yeah," I said. Enough of me--but only just enough--was still located inside Harold to hear her voice, to follow the well-worn path to school.

  "Just be honest with Dr. Singh, okay? There's no need to suffer." Which I'd argue is just a fundamental misunderstanding of the human predicament, but okay.

  --

  I parked in the student parking lot, parted ways with Mom, and then lined up to walk through the metal detectors. Once declared weapon-free, I joined the flow of bodies filling the hallways like blood cells in a vein.

  I made it to my locker a few minutes early and took a second to look up the reporter Daisy had phished, Adam Bitterley. He'd shared a link that morning to a new story he'd written about a school board voting to ban some book, so I guessed he hadn't been fired. Daisy was right--nothing happened.

  I was about to head toward class when Mychal jogged up to my locker and pulled me over to a bench. "How's it going, Aza?"

  "Good," I said. I was thinking about how part of your self can be in a place while at the same time the most important parts are in a different place, a place that can't be accessed via your senses. Like, how I'd driven all the way to school without really being inside the car. I was trying to look at Mychal, trying to hear the clamor of the hallway, but I wasn't there, not really, not deep down.

  "Um," he said. "So, listen, I don't want to mess up our friend group, because it's really great, but, this is awkward, but do you think, and seriously you can say no . . ." He trailed off, but I could see where he was going.

  "I don't really think I can date anyone right now," I said. "I'm, like--"

  He cut in. "Well, now it's super awkward. I was gonna ask if you think Daisy would go out with me, or if that's crazy. I mean, you're great, Aza . . ."

  I knew Mychal well enough not to actually die of mortification, but only just. "Yes," I said. "Yes. That is a great idea. But you should just talk to her about it, not me. But yes. By all means, ask her out. I am embarrassed. This has been an embarrassment. You should ask out Daisy. I am going to stand up and exit the conversation now with whatever self-respect I still have."

  "I'm really sorry," he said as I stood up and backed away. "I mean, you're beautiful, Aza. It's not that."

  "No," I said. "No. Say nothing more. It's definitely my bad. I'm just . . . I'm gonna go now. Do ask out Daisy." Mercifully, a beep rang out from above, allowing me to scamper off to biology class. Our teacher was late, so everyo
ne was talking. I hunched down in my seat and immediately texted Daisy.

  Me: I thought Mychal was asking me out so I tried to let him down easy but he was not asking me out. He was asking me if I would ask you out FOR HIM. Humiliation level--all-time high. But you should say yes. He's cute.

  Her: Oh God. Panic. He looks like a giant baby.

  Me: What?

  Her: He looks like a giant baby. Molly Krauss said that once and I've never been able to unsee it. I can't hook up with a giant baby.

  Me: Because of the shaved head?

  Her: Because of the everything Holmesy. Because he looks exactly like a giant baby.

  Me: He really doesn't.

  Her: Next time you see him look at him and tell me he does not look like a giant baby. He looks exactly like if Drake and Beyonce had a giant baby.

  Me: That would be a hot giant baby.

  Her: I'm saving that text in case I ever need to blackmail you. btw HAVE YOU LOOKED AT THE POLICE REPORT?

  Me: Not really, have you?

  Her: Yes, even though I had to close yesterday AND Saturday AND I had this calc stuff that is like reading Sanskrit AND I had to wear the Chuckie costume like twelve separate times. I didn't find any clues, but I did read the whole thing. Even though it's super boring. I really am the unsung hero of this investigation.

  Me: I think you are fairly sung. I'll read it today I gotta go Ms. Park is looking at me weird.

  --

  Throughout bio, each time Ms. Park turned to the blackboard, I read the missing persons report from my phone.

  The report went on only for a few pages, and over the course of the school day, I was able to read all of it. The mp (missing person) was fifty-three, male, gray haired, blue eyed, with a tattoo reading Nolite te bastardes carborundorum ("Don't let the bastards get you down," apparently) on his left shoulder blade, three small surgical scars in his abdomen from a gallbladder removal, six feet in height, approximately 220 pounds, last seen wearing his standard sleeping attire: a horizontally striped navy-and-white nightshirt and light-blue boxer shorts. He was discovered missing at 5:35 A.M. when the police raided his house in connection with a corruption investigation.