I stood and began to pace, lifting my hair a third time only to drop it back down again almost immediately. I could feel the tears at the back of my throat. But I didn’t want to cry, not in front of him.
“I graduated the top of my class, a year earlier than everyone else I’d first come there with. I got a good job with a good income. I was doing all right for myself. But I still couldn’t deal with people. My coworkers all talked about me behind my back, called me names that I wouldn’t repeat in polite company. It was just like high school.”
It was all playing out in my mind again, the humiliation that refused to let me go.
“Arabelle was at MIT the same time I was. We had a few classes together, exchanged notes a few times. Turned out she got a job in Chicago, too, not far from where I was. She suggested we get an apartment together to save some money. She was already into hacking, already heavy into joining others in breaking into the systems that were supposed to be unhackable. She talked about it sometimes, but never really encouraged me to do it until I told her how miserable I was at my job.”
“It’s the best rush you’ll ever experience, Ricki. Even better than the best orgasm in the fucking world!”
That was how she described breaking into a federal computer. How was I supposed to resist that?
“You already know most of this,” I said.
“Not the details.”
“There aren’t many. I began hacking with her, working jobs together in the living room of our little efficiency apartment. We could afford better, but I think we both liked the coziness of it, the poor student aspect. And we loved working side by side, seeing which of us could find the back door fastest.”
I smiled, thinking of all those competitions. I usually won.
“We figured out she was under investigation about five months before the FBI came knocking on the door.” I looked at him, remembering the hatred I once harbored for him. GrayMan58. I should have put it together quicker; I should have known before I invited him into my bed. By then, it was too late. The hatred had already turned into something else. “She knew when she talked to the agent on the message boards. She thought it was funny that he thought he was being so clever.”
David stared at the floor as if he didn’t know I knew, but he was a smart man. He must have put it all together by now.
“When her arrest became eminent, she gave me the code of Friend or Foe and told me to go public with it. Told me it was my golden ticket. So I did. I got out and I went public and I never looked back.”
“And Arabelle?”
“She came to me after the launch of our third site, Buddy to Buddy, and asked to be cut in. She said I owed her. But I figured that most of Friend or Foe belonged to me because the two platforms we were producing were entirely my code. She had nothing to do with them. So I sent her away. Told her I’d given her what she was owed in paying for her lawyers.”
He looked up sharply, his eyes moving over my face.
“Shocked?”
He shrugged.
“She was my best friend. The only friend I had left at that point. I did it for her; I went public for her. But the money, the fame, the popularity—I’d never had that. It all went to my head and made me ruthless. Made me someone I’m not proud of now.”
“And Arabelle?”
I turned away, going to the windows to look down on those groups of people that had so fascinated me these last months.
“I didn’t hear from her again. I expected her to sue, or to try to prove in some way that the code was hers. But she never did.”
“I heard she couldn’t afford to sue.”
“She could have. I made sure she had the same assets she’d had when she went to jail. She was no better or no worse off than before.”
“Then why didn’t she sue?”
“I don’t know.”
But I did. We were friends. She counted me as her friend. And she’d always said she would not purposely cut a friend.
That was my place.
Silence fell between us for a long little bit. Tears were biting at the back of my throat, itching the back of my eyes. I’d built a multi-billion-dollar corporation, given the world’s youth a half a dozen places to find lovers, to find friends, to share every minutiae of their lives. I was the queen of social media. Yet, I turned my back on the one true friend I ever had.
“I learned four months ago that she killed herself. Took an overdose of prescription pain pills more than a year ago. She didn’t leave a note so no one knows why she did it, not even her husband.” I bit my lip. “They were only married six months.”
“Jesus!” David hissed.
“I can’t help but assume it was my fault.”