Smacking Back (A YA Short Story), Page 2

her friend. Everyone waves back, even Mrs. Morales, the teacher on cafeteria duty, who is standing by the door. Not one of them looks at me. Not one of them notices. Brian’s thumb is digging into the back of my arm.

  We are out of the cafeteria doors and into the hall in moments. There is almost no one around, just a few stragglers headed for the lunch room, a kid rummaging through his locker. He looks up as we pass, but his eyes are on York, not me. We pass a bulletin screen on the wall. Its pixels swirl into an image of York's avatar with the words “York Westaford for Prom Queen.” The image winks at me as Zan and Brian push me past it, into the side hall. There are no lockers here. The hallway just dead ends into a janitor’s closet. York opens the door and the boys shove me in.

  The closet is dark and crammed with cleaning supplies. We are pressed so close that I can smell Brian’s sweat mixed with the stinging scent of bleach. The broom beside me rains down dust but I'm too tense to even sneeze. I push my back against the wall, bracing myself.

  "You do it," York says to Brian. He doesn't need any more prompting than that. He grasps the thick silver ring on his right hand and slides it down his beefy ring finger. It telescopes as it goes until it fits snugly on his fingertip. He takes my face in his hands to hold me still. His breath in my face is hot and panting. He slides his finger up behind my ear, pushing my glasses away from my netport, and my eye screens disconnect. His fiery hair winks out as his avatar disappears, and I'm left staring at Brian's real face. His finger probes behind my ear, finding the net port and pushing the cold metal of the ring inside.

  I gasp. The pressure in my head is building like a balloon about to pop. I can feel his net probe pushing deeper, deeper, and my defenses stretching like saran wrap pulled to the breaking point, until something snaps and the connection is made, and I feel my mind pouring out into his, gushing like water through a hole in a dam, my thoughts and memories spilling out of me. I'm hemorrhaging information, but it's not what they want. Brian is rummaging through my mind, searching for the brain file. It's like he’s going through a file cabinet with a fire hose. I can hear my own breathing, ragged and choked. Brian's hand on my jaw is the only thing holding me up now. If he let go of me I would collapse.

  Brian keeps his right hand connected to my net port, but he lowers his left. The part of me that is still aware of what’s going on in the broom closet sees York take his hand, her ring probe connecting to his. Zan takes her other hand, linking up, ready to receive the goods.

  And I'm ready to deliver them.

  Brian finds the brain file marked “Lord of the Flies”. I feel him slide inside it and rip it open.

  But of course the book is not there. My research spills out first, history accounts from olden paper news clips about nerdy kids who snapped and went on shooting sprees at school. Stories about the first pandemic and the spread of viruses, and even more olden stories: Typhoid Mary, patient X, blankets laced with smallpox, the story of the Trojan horse – every metaphor I could think of. Fair warning. They could pull out now.

  York's blue eyes are filled with annoyance, then confusion. The chaser lights on her necklace start spinning faster and faster until her necklace is almost a continuous stream of light. I can feel her backpedal, trying to disconnect, but the information is coming too fast and furious now – not news clips and bits of history any more, but memories, my personal memories of every other time they have Smacked me. I am leaking images, emptying brain file after brain file: Zan snatching my glasses and tossing them off the fire escape, York and her friends spraying perfume in my eyes as the laugh about how much I stink, Brian bragging to his friends about how he brain-scanned the little technic and scored an A on a project he never did. I let them feel it all and then some. I'm overwhelming them. Brian is trying desperately to disconnect his ring from my net port, but he can’t get it out. York is swooning with info overload, and I'm still spewing data. It feels good in an awful way, like throwing up when you’re really sick, the kind of horrible that you hope will make everything better. I'm almost empty.

  Then suddenly something’s coming back at me. There's a data loop. Someone else's brain files are streaming into my mind.

  It’s Zan. I can see him clearly – not the way he looks now, but the Zan of two years ago, back when he was Imp. He is shorter and skinnier than I remember him being. He looks exposed without his avatar armor, hidden only by the green hair that flops in his face and the scrawl of tattoos on his arms. He is slumped against his locker, cradling his right hand. His thumb is bleeding and I know without being told exactly what happened: He's been glued. Someone put adhesive in the thumb pad of his lock, so that when he went to give his thumb print to open his locker, he got stuck. I can tell from the look on his face that this isn't the first time. He looks like he might cry. Instead, he bangs his bleeding hand over and over again on the locked door, leaving bloody thumb prints all over the whitewashed metal.

  I can hear the late-bell ringing. Beside him the last few stragglers are slipping into class. Some of them make fun of him as they pass. I can clearly hear York’s laugh.

  Back in the dark closet, I reach out my hand and grab Zan’s wrist, pulling his hand away from York’s, severing their connection. He stumbles back a step into the brooms and mops and his thoughts evaporate from my brain just as the virus I designed surfs out on the last of my memories, into York and Brian. I reach out and wrench Brian’s fingers away from my netport and Brian and York fall onto the floor, still grasping each other’s hands. There is no light in York's necklace now. I’ve shorted it out completely.

  For a minute, everything is quiet.

  "Oh God," says Zan, "are they dead?"

  I shake my head. "Virus," I say. "They'll be back online in a few weeks." I can see York's chest rise and fall so I know she's breathing. I adjust my glasses to reconnect to the net and the three of them are instantly shielded by their avatars. York's angel wings are crumpled. Her halo is askew. Brian’s hair fire is out. Both their avatars have been damaged, so they keep flickering in out of existence. One minute York looks like a fallen angel and the next like an ordinary teenage girl.

  Except of course York isn’t ordinary. She's the head cheerleader, the future prom queen, the most popular girl in school.

  And I crashed her brain.

  The thought should make me happy. After all, there is no question in my mind that York deserved it. And doesn’t this make me a sort of folk hero? A geeky technic vigilante, out to avenge the wrongs done to frail-faced losers everywhere. I wait for the elation, but all I feel is dizzy. The closet spins a half step to the left, and I stumble. Zan reaches out to catch hold of my arm. I look at him and notice that he's disabled his avatar. It's probably just because it was damaged, but still, it's nice. I can see every one of his scars.

  "Why did you disconnect me?" he asks.

  I shrug. "I saw the way you were before."

  He ducks his head, embarrassed. "You think I’m frail.”

  I shake my head. "But I do want to know why you're their friend."

  He thinks about it for a long moment. "I guess I couldn't beat them," he says.

  I nod. That's honest. Neither of us finishes the thought: If you can’t beat them, join them. I want to hate Zan for giving in like that, but I can’t hate him completely. Would I have done the same thing if I had the choice, the option of being perfect, enough money to buy the illusion? I can’t say for sure I wouldn't join them. Looking at York and Brian slumped on the floor, I can’t say for sure that I haven't joined them already.

  "So," I say, "I guess you’re going to turn me in."

  Zan shakes his head. "We deserved it. An eye for an eye and all that."

  An eye for an eye. A mind for a mind. My head feels hollow, scraped out from the inside. The neuronet is pelting me with information, desperately trying to fill the void. It’s news clips mostly, stories about kids like me who got too fed up to take it anymore. The data’s still glitchie so the dates are missing, but it doesn't even matte
r. It could be 2035 or 2014 or 1982. It’s all the same. I step over York's unconscious body and for a second the net is confused and switches our avatars and it looks like I'm York. Like I’m the fallen angel. Like it's me lying on the floor.

  "I beat you," I whisper, but it looks like I'm talking to myself.

  Suggested Questions to Think About and Discuss

  1. This story imagines a future where our minds are connected directly to something like the internet. Do you think this will actually happen? When? What would you like about it? What would you hate?

  2. Smacking Back is about cyber bullying as it might look in the future. What does cyber bullying look like today? Have you or anyone you know ever been affected by bullying online?

  3. The characters in Smacking Back have avatars that let them look however they want. Would you choose to have an avatar if you could? Why or why not? If you would, what would it look like?

  4. Cassie chooses to fight back against the people who bully her. Do you think she made the right choice? What would you have done in her situation?

  5. In the story, the teacher on lunchroom duty seems oblivious to the fact that Cassie is being bullied. In your experience, are teachers aware of bullying at school? What could