Part 8 (2/2)

”h.e.l.lo? Amelia? Are you listening?” Why did she not get the gravity of this? Then it dawned on Adam what she was thinking. ”You don't think it was Tom Fenway do you?” he said. ”Do you think he's blackmailing you to take the job? Oh my G.o.d! Do you think that's it?”

”No, Adam. It's not Tom Fenway.” Amelia paused. ”It's Ted Bristol.”

”Ted Bristol? Lisa's-I mean, T. J.'s dad?” he hadn't told Amelia about Lisa yet and this didn't seem like the time.

Amelia took a deep breath, still looking down at her hands. ”Yes.

We . . . we had a meeting the other day and I didn't exactly give him the answer he wanted.”

”Wait, what? What are you talking about? What meeting?”

”He somehow found out that I hacked into Gibly.”

”How? Didn't you conceal your ident.i.ty?”

”I don't know how, but he found out. And he called me and it sounded like he wanted to fix it, and so I went to University Cafe to meet him and explain everything. I thought he was going to ask me how to fix the problem. He was so nice on the phone, I was certain he wanted to do the right thing.”

Adam felt his face go white. Oh, G.o.d. What had she done?

”But then he tried to pay me off, Adam. He didn't want to do what needs to be done to change the monitoring, and he said the whole Lloyd's payment issue wasn't his problem, that the deal just needed to go through.”

”How much did he offer you?”

”At first it was ten, then it was twenty-five, then it was a hundred. And a job, nothing specific, kind of like choose your own-”

”Wait,” Adam interrupted, feeling his ears turn red. ”One hundred . . . thousand?”

”Adam, that is dirty money and you know it.” He couldn't speak. It felt like there was something lodged in his throat, preventing the expulsion of air Amelia glanced away. She knew she had to tell him the last part, but he looked so devastated. ”And then I . . . ” she said, meekly.

”And then you WHAT?”

”When I got home, I e-mailed the editors at TechCrunch with the details on what I'd found. I put a security tag on it so they could only access it during a one-hour window, which they did. They posted on it pretty much immediately. A bigger article came out this morning.”

”And you think Ted . . . to get back at you . . . ?”

”He knew about you, Adam. I mean he knew I had a twin brother and that we were on financial aid. He must have-” Amelia suddenly realized what she had done. No financial aid meant Stanford was finished. It had been too good to be true, after all, this world where she could spend all her days coding and being around people who were driven by the same pure aim of creation. No, she shouldn't have ever let herself believe four years of this was possible. One year was more than she deserved. Now it would be back to figuring things out, just her and Adam. Just the Dorii.

But when she looked up at Adam's face, painted with anger and betrayal, she felt an even greater panic. Would it be her and Adam, or her alone?

”Adam, say something,” she pleaded.

”You,” he started, then shook his head as if trying to put it all together.

”First you turn down an unbelievable job opportunity. Then you turn down one hundred thousand dollars. Then you knowingly backstab one of the most influential people in Silicon Valley to have our financial aid revoked?” He felt a pit in his stomach, like someone had punched him under the ribs.

”I did what was right. I did what I had to do to keep the Internet free,” she said, but, in doing so, felt how weak and naive that argument sounded against the charges Adam had just lodged.

”Don't you get it, Amelia? We're poor. We're dependents. Taking this high moral ground? Taking risks for an ideal? That's a freedom and it's a luxury, and it's not one you have.”

His use of ”you” struck her hard. Everything was always ”we” with them. She understood then just how betrayed he felt.

”Fix this, Amelia. I'm not giving this up. I'm not.” He turned and walked out.

Amelia sank back into her chair. This room, this safe place where she felt so at home, suddenly felt foreign.

Chapter 17.

A White Comforter on A Four Poster Bed.

Everything was a blur as Adam hopped onto his bike. ”This couldn't be real. How could she?”

The sun was setting and he'd left his bike light at home but he didn't care. He had to see Lisa. He peddled hard to Atherton and called Lisa's phone from outside the front gate.

”h.e.l.lo?”

”I need to see you. I'm outside your front gate.”

”What? No, Adam, you can't be here. Dad is-”

”I have to see you, Lisa.”

”We're in the middle of dinner. We have guests.”

”I'll wait.”

”You can't wait out there. They'll see you.” He could sense her thinking on the other end, scrambling for a solution.

”Come around to the back gate. The code is 8924. There's a key under the flowerpot next to the side door and a back staircase. Take it to the second floor and go to the third door on the right. That's my room. I'll be there as soon as I can, but it's probably going to be thirty minutes at least.”

”I'm on my way.”

She hung up. Adam followed her instructions and carefully crept into her room. He wasn't sure at first if he was in the right place. Could this really be an eighteen-year-old girl's bedroom? he thought. It was ma.s.sive, with hardwood floors covered by an intricately patterned Turkish rug. A four-poster bed with a draped white canopy was neatly made, a plush white comforter and a dozen or so mint-green and white pillows covering its surface. But the vanity in the corner-a deep cherry wood to match the other furniture in the room, topped with a ma.s.sive mirror-gave Lisa away.

Pictures of high school friends, cheerleading camp (she was a cheerleader? of course she was a cheerleader), and Lisa and T. J. in front of the Eiffel Tower, were neatly stuck around the edges of the mirror. The vanity drawer was open, and Adam saw it was cluttered with lip glosses and nail polish and metallic eye shadows.

He sat on the stool of the vanity and looked in the mirror. So, this was what it felt like to be a rich girl.

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