Chapter 26 Cracked
Cracked
While Oscar changes clothes in his bedroom, I’m sitting at the table in his kitchen, talking to his mother, who’s in her mid-thirties. She’s in the middle of cooking traditional Cuban rice and beans with fried plantains.
It smells so good in here, especially since I haven’t eaten much all day, except for some trail mix that was in my glove compartment.
Cuban pop music plays on her phone.
“Isn’t the water cold at the beach?” she asks, referencing my swimwear.
“Yeah. But we didn’t swim or anything.”
“No? You two were just sitting on the sand?”
“Yes.” I hate lying to Oscar’s mother like this. She’s so nice.
“I guess it’s better than those video games you boys always play. I don’t understand what’s so fun about shooting people, even if they aren’t real.”
“It’s like an escape,” I say.
“That’s not an escape,” she says. “Dancing to Salsa Cubana: now that’s an escape.”
She turns up the music on her phone and starts dancing, all while monitoring the plantains in the fry pan with a spatula. She looks so full of joy.
Oscar walks into the kitchen, now wearing jeans and a short-sleeved button-up shirt with a sailboat pattern on it.
“Echa ahora, mami!“ Oscar raises his hands and dances with his mother.
It’s really sweet. But more so, it’s so foreign to me, this closeness between parent and child.
After they settle down a bit, I say to Oscar, “We should get going. I have to change too.”
“You boys are not going anywhere until you’ve had a proper meal,” says Oscar’s mother.
“Nah, ma, we got some things to take care of.”
“Eat first.”
“The things we’re doing are important and shit.”
“Oscar! Why are you always speaking like this? If you talk like you’re trash, then people think you come from trash.” Oscar’s mother spreads out her arms to display her fit body, wearing a pretty classy dress for being in a kitchen. “And do I look like trash to you?”
“Disculpa, mami.“ Oscar kisses her on the cheek.
She ruffles his hair.
Oscar looks at me, using his eyes to ask me what we should do. I give him a quick nod. He takes a seat at the table too.
His mother feeds us.
Because we scarfed down Oscar’s mother’s food, it’s not long before we’re back at my house. From what I can tell, Nash hasn’t been in here since I left this morning.
In my bedroom, I grab a similar outfit to Oscar’s but different colors (and the shirt has random shapes) and take them to the bathroom.
I quickly shower and change. I also replace the bandage that covers the wound on my head, behind my right ear, from when I slammed against the nightstand yesterday.
Through the door, Oscar talks to me. “Imma try to bang tonight, Hunter. You gonna try to bang tonight? I’ve never had sex with a college girl.
They got experience and shit. No more of this amateur stuff with Blanca.
It’s getting real tonight. I don’t wanna nut too fast though.
Sometimes, when I know Blanca and me are gonna bang, I jerk off and drop a load before I see her.
That way, I can last longer when I’m with her.
You ain’t had sex yet, so you don’t know.
Dude, I might have to nut before we go. Can I use your parents’ bathroom? ”
I walk back into my bedroom, dressed. “Seriously, dude?! You’re really gonna masturbate now?
This is some serious shit going on with my brother, okay?
We’re not out having fun. We’re not partying.
Nash is a murderer. You understand that?
He’s trying to fuck my shit up right now.
And I don’t know how far he’ll go to cover his ass.
You get it, Oscar? Do you understand what’s going on here? !”
“Yo, calm down, Hunter. I’m just talking. A man’s just talking.”
“Sometimes I can’t even with you!”
Oscar is silent.
Apparently, my conscious mind has forgotten that I pulled him into this mess, that I’ve gotten him into trouble at my brother’s college and with the police, that he’s the one who got hold of my brother’s laptop which may be the only thing that can save me.
“Sorry, dude,” I say, quietly, apologetically. “I’m really on edge right now. You’re the best. If you wanna go in the bathroom and jerk off, then go ahead.”
Oscar shakes his head. “Nah. Now I’m thinking I don’t wanna overdo it. I already nutted when we were just at my house.”
“Wait. What?”
“Yeah. In the shower. That’s why it took so long. I was pumping out a load.”
I can’t help but laugh a little. “You really are something, Oscar.”
“I’ll take this more serious,” he says. “Sorry, bro. My breakup’s messing my shit up. Like, I think about Blanca with Victor, and I get all jealous, like I need to get with a girl in order to get even or something. I’m stupid. I know.”
“You’re not stupid. You’re just emotional. I understand that.”
“We’re both single now, Hunter. I know we ain’t supposed to have fun, but when this is all over we can be each other’s wingman.
It doesn’t have to be a competition between me and you.
Because we both have, like, totally different tastes.
You’ll help me get them thicc girls, and I’ll help you get them Barbie-looking girls. ”
I think to myself, “Or Ken.”
Oscar reaches into his pocket and pulls out what seems like an endless strip of condom packages and throws them onto my bed. “To show you how serious I am about helping you, I’ll even leave all these rubbers here. No rubbers, no banging.”
This is the most screwed-up situation I’ve ever been in—Oscar too, but he doesn’t realize it or totally understand it. But that doesn’t mean I can’t pretend that some of this is fun, at least for Oscar’s sake.
I point at the condoms. “Bring them.”
Oscar smiles wide and grabs the condoms. “You never know what’ll happen. Right, Hunter? Right?”
As we walk out of the room, I nod my head. “Right.”
By some miracle, Sruthi’s software cracked the PIN to Nash’s laptop (0-4-1-5). Unfortunately, his Chrome browser, which probably stores the passwords to his e-mail and social media accounts and everything else, needs a password. Sruthi is running the software to hack that.
In the meantime, as we’re all huddled around her in the back of the comic book shop, Sruthi’s looking in all his file folders. I haven’t told her or Carter T. Douglass what’s going on, so they don’t know what it is that they’re looking for, just “anything suspicious.”
Sruthi says, “This all looks normal. Mostly schoolwork.”
She looks in his trash folder. It’s empty.
She gets up. “You look, Hunter.”
After snooping around a bit, I get more and more frustrated, because I don’t think there’s anything on here that will help me. We need to get into his e-mail.
I move out of the way so that Carter T. Douglass can look around. Maybe he’ll catch something that Sruthi and I missed.
After a while, he says, “This is interesting.”
“What?” I lean in.
“In the downloads folder, there are all these PDFs that he most likely downloaded from e-mails he received. Your brother may be going to college, but he’s not what I would call a good student.”
Over Carter T. Douglass’s shoulder, I take over the keyboard.
Nash has actually been doing really poorly at school.
There are letters outlining how the school has put him on academic probation, then how he’s at risk of getting suspended, and then another one that says he could get outright expelled.
He’s been lying to our parents for years, telling them how well he’s been doing in school, how of course he’s set to graduate at the end of this academic year. But his grades have been consistently bad. It’s surprising he’s lasted this long.
Then, all of a sudden, the laptop screen flickers and shuts down.
“What happened?” I say.
Sruthi pushes us aside and tries to turn the laptop back on. It won’t.
“Either your brother’s laptop is fried,” she says, “or he had a security program installed where he could completely shut it down remotely.”
“If he did, wouldn’t he have shut it down a long time ago?” I ask.
“Maybe. But maybe he didn’t know it was gone until now, or maybe he couldn’t get to another computer to shut it down until now.”
“Or maybe he was so high off coke, it took him time to figure out what was going on,” says Oscar.
A worried look crosses Sruthi’s face.
“What?” I ask.
“Maybe,” she says, “he didn’t shut the laptop down because he was tracking it. Maybe there’s a GPS tracking program installed, and he’s been monitoring its location this whole time.”
All of us simultaneously look out the door of the back room and into the comic book shop.
It’s quiet out there, but there’s nothing suspicious, as far as we can tell. There’s just the bearded man behind the counter and a few younger kids reading comics off of the new-releases shelves.
Suddenly, Oscar’s cell phone dings, which makes all of us jump.
He looks at his phone. “Hunter! It’s Twyla. She forwarded me the address. It starts at 9.”
“That gives us a couple hours.”
“But it’s all the way in Riverside County.”
“Riverside? We need to leave now. Stake out the place before anyone arrives.” I close the laptop. “I don’t know what to do with this. I don’t want him to know where I am.”
“As long as it’s shut down like that,” says Sruthi, “it can’t be tracked. You’re fine now, as long as it’s powered off.”
“That’s a relief.” I pick up the laptop. “Sruthi, Carter T. Douglass: thank you so much.”
“That was the most fun I’ve had all year,” says Sruthi.
Oscar cocks his head. “Seriously?”
“Thanks for the softball tips,” says Carter T. Douglass.
Soon, Oscar and I are walking quickly down the sidewalk, back to my car. We’re both looking over our shoulders, looking all around us, to see if anyone’s watching us, if anyone’s following us.
When we turn the corner, we see a college-aged guy with a pervy mustache standing near my car on the sidewalk.
Oscar and I slow down. We glance at each other.
“That dude looks like he molests,” says Oscar.
Then, a girl about his age comes out of a sandwich shop. He’s standing between my car and the shop. It looks like he was just waiting for her.
“What took you so long?” he asks her.
She says, “There were two other people waiting for the bathroom.”
“Oh,” he says. “I thought you were dropping a deuce.”
She slaps his arm. “Billy!”
They laugh, as they walk away.
Oscar and I get into my car and get the hell out of town.