Envy

chapter 32

COLTON JAMES’S BEDROOM was one of three in house number 17, a light-yellow one-story with a low roofline that might have had one of the best views of the bay in Port Gamble, but otherwise was not so special. The house wasn’t even really that old, having been barged over by the lumber company from Port Ludlow in the 1920s. His parents had the largest room, the one closest to the only full bathroom in the house. The other bedroom was used by his mom as an office. It had floorto-ceiling shelving overloaded with catalogs that she’d collected in the years before the Internet became her lifeline to the outside world. Shania James, not surprisingly, did most of her shopping via catalogs. The UPS man and the FedEx lady had made so many trips to the Jameses’ house that both had been to Colton’s birthday parties, family barbecues, and other gatherings.

If one hadn’t noticed that Shania James stayed in the house ninetynine percent of the time, they’d never have thought there was anything strange about her.

Colton’s own room was organized chaos. His often-away fisherman father had installed Peg-Board above the teenager’s desk. Wires were coiled on hooks, and jars of teeny, tiny computer components hung above the workspace. Colton seldom used those things anymore; they were left over from the days when he built his own computers.

That was then. Now he was all about apps. While he was sure that Steve Jobs would bring him on to Apple one day—any day—he focused on coding, design work, and learning the business of being an entrepreneur at age fifteen.

To see him hunched over his computer at night, Coke can at the ready, Cheese Nips open and available for serial consumption, was to witness a boy’s true intensity. Code was beautiful to Colton. It was elegant. It was nearly a living, breathing thing.

And yet, Colton James was no geek. He was fit, handsome, and could actually talk to adults while looking into their eyes. None of that “are you talking to me or the floor?” for Colton.

Colton’s screen saver was a picture of him and Hayley that Taylor took on her phone when the three of them were out on his father’s boat, the Wanderlust. The quality wasn’t the best, but the look in Hayley’s eyes was priceless to him. It was, he was sure, the look of a girl who really got him.

He scooted his keyboard aside and set Katelyn’s laptop on the desk. He was plugging in the power cord when his phone buzzed.

HAYLEY: BREAK THE DA VINCI CODE YET?

COLTON: JUST STARTED. GIVE ME 10 SECS.

HAYLEY:

Katelyn’s laptop whirred on and Colton put on some music while he waited for the log on window to pop open. Colton didn’t like the idea of cracking Katelyn’s password so her mother could do some postmortem eavesdropping on her life. Yet, he’d seen the tears in Sandra’s eyes, the longing she had for what was never coming back, and he knew he had no choice. Password cracking was never really that easy. He knew a kid in school who used jailbreak software to crack his mother’s password so he could get into the system and disable the Net Nanny tool that he’d found so humiliating.

“I’m not doing anything that bad,” the kid had said. “Looking at porn is normal. It isn’t like I’m paying for it on their credit card. It’s free. They’re like porn Nazis.”

Colton thought about the last time he’d seen Katelyn. It was in the school cafeteria. She was sitting alone, looking over at the group of Buccaneers cheerleaders and the second-string players who couldn’t manage a ride off campus. Starla was there, the center of it all.

“Hey,” he had said to Katelyn on his way to the trash can.

She nodded.

“You got plans for the holidays?” he asked.

When he played back the conversation he knew that it was a lame attempt to engage someone he no longer really knew.

“Grandparents are coming over. Nothing great. You?”

“We’re going out of town to spend some time with my dad’s family in Portland.”

“That’s nice,” she said. “Your mom going too?”

“Yeah. She’s pretty freaked about it, but my dad’s got a plan.”

Katelyn smiled. “I like your mom.”

Colton appreciated Katelyn just then. He could tell that something was troubling her, but no matter what it was, she still had it within her to be kind to someone.

Hayley texted again.

HAYLEY: TRY TEAM EDWARD. JUST A WILD GUESS.

COLTON: LKE TWILITE?

HAYLEY: LOL. YET. MINE WZ TEAM JACOB. DON’T TELL ANY1!

COLTON: ABOUT TEAM EDWARD?

HAYLEY: ABOUT ME & TWILIGHT. THAT WZ A LONG TIME AGO.

HAYLEY LOOKED UP FROM HER PHONE and faced her sister.

“I don’t like lying to Colton,” she said. “Not at all.”

Taylor nodded. “I know.”

The two of them sat on the floor in Taylor’s room, obsessing about Katelyn and what her mother had wanted to find on her laptop. Both girls knew the password as if it were their own. Somehow, when they touched the laptop, the password had imprinted on their minds.

“I just didn’t want him to struggle too much,” Hayley said. “Sure, he likes a challenge and he can do anything when it comes to computers. But, you know, we can help out, so why not?”

Taylor got up to fish a sweater from her bottom drawer. The walls of her bedroom leaked cold air like a crab pot leaked water, and she was freezing.

“Agreed,” she said, pulling out a gray oversize sweater with pilled, stretched-out sleeves and a couple of missing buttons. It was a favorite cast-off of her dad’s that she could never part with. “Totally.”

“Your sweater needs a shave,” Hayley said.

Taylor shrugged, and then put on a wicked grin, teasingly, of course. “I was thinking the same thing about your nasty legs,” she said.

COLTON TYPED IN THE SUGGESTED PASSWORD and … nothing. He thought for a moment and figured that if TEAM EDWARD was Katelyn’s password, she probably would have used a numeric sequence to make it less obvious.

That was easy to guess too. He typed in TEAMEDWARD23, the number for the Berkleys’ house. He’d used his own house number tagged on the end of plenty of passwords over the years. It was always easy to remember.

The computer rumbled softly and the screen opened wide, baring all of Katelyn’s secrets.

Got it, he thought.

No illicit software had been needed after all, and that made Colton feel a little better about what he’d been asked to do. It was one thing to password-crack a dead friend’s computer; another to enlist a skanky Internet tool to do the deed. It seemed cleaner somehow to do it with a guess-and-go technique. Less criminal. Hayley had given him more than half of what he needed and that brought a smile to his face.

COLTON: SUCCESS. NOW WOT?

HAYLEY: COPY HER HARD DRIVE. EVERYTHING. I’LL EXPLAIN L8R.

COLTON: ???

HAYLEY: KATELYN WZ IN TROUBLE. SHE’S DEAD BECAUSE OF IT.

COLTON: WTF?

HAYLEY: EXPLAIN L8R. PROMISE.