Breaking and Entering Read online

  Fittingly, a four-pin padlock protected an outside door. Working together, Zhu and Rex picked it easily. Fifteen fellow hackers poured inside, and Alien, coughing, followed.

  It was dark, of course. Alien had thrown on appropriate clothing to join the others, but discovered now that in her rush she had forgotten a flashlight. For the first minute inside, she had no choice but to get her bearings from the stray beams of others’ lights. These illuminated faded yellow radiation warning signs still hanging on the open doors of empty rooms.

  Together the group entered a large central room dimly lit by streetlights through dirty windows. Deconstruction had already started here; rubble covered the floor where a wall had been. With the others, Alien poked through dusty boxes of resistors, vacuum tubes, and ancient electronic parts. They turned over and stockpiled biohazard signs, light-up laser warning signs, and signs about handling radioactive chemicals, to take back to the dorms. Rpunzel and Aziz climbed cabinets to walk across the exposed beams high above them.

  A few feet in front of her, Alien saw a short staircase and headed toward it.

  “Wait a minute.” A flashlight briefly blinded her, and Cal stepped forward. “Wherever you’re going, you’ll need a light,” he said. “I’m coming with you.”

  They descended the stairs together, finding a maze of empty white-walled rooms. All the doors were open. We’re too late, Alien thought. Everything’s gone.

  Just in case, Cal searched every corner of the rooms with his flashlight. A coughing fit overcame Alien and she walked back to the staircase to recover. By the time the fit stopped, her eyes had finally adjusted to the dark. Underneath the staircase, she noticed now, were several hundred bricks, piled to waist height.

  Alien made to pick up a brick—a final souvenir of Building 20. But when she grabbed the one closest to her, she found it impossible to move—as if it were glued or nailed in place in the pile.

  What is this?

  Alien knelt and dug her fingers in the narrow crevice separating this brick from the adjacent one. Working hard, Alien managed to pry them an inch apart—but then the instant she released her grasp, the first brick snapped back to the pile like a biting tooth.

  “Jesus!” Alien said. She could have lost a finger.

  “What is it?” Cal joined her. “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” Alien said. “I think I found some kind of super-magnets.”

  “Super-magnets?” Cal asked skeptically. “Why would they leave those behind?”

  “Try to take one,” Alien said. “You’ll see.”

  Cal tried, but it took the two of them working together, one at each end, to separate a single brick.

  “It’s got to be neodymium”—a rare earth metal—Cal said. He gestured to the pile with amazement. “This is probably more than a million dollars in magnets. And it’s lying under a staircase.”

  Alien grinned. “We’ll each take a brick,” she said. It was saving, not stealing—after all, MIT was knocking the place down the next day.

  “Go tell Rex and the others,” Alien told Cal.

  Cal nodded and then jogged upstairs. Holding the separated brick under her arm by herself, Alien felt it tug back fiercely toward the pile. This gave her an idea.

  Alien and her hallmates returned to Fifth East at sunrise, each person carrying a magnetic brick along with his or her favorite sign. They hung around the kitchen, making a huge pot of spaghetti. No one knew whether to feel exhilarated or depressed at their haul.

  “It’s the end of an era,” Rex said. “We’re the last people ever to enter Building Twenty.”

  Vanessa stirred the pasta. “What should we do with the magnets?” she asked.

  “Don’t put them near a computer—or a credit card,” Cal said. “They’ll erase everything.”

  “So where can we put them?” Alex demanded.

  “I know,” Alien said.

  Everyone stared at her.

  “Well, since they’re magnets . . . ,” Alien continued, “I think they belong on the refrigerator.”

  Her fellow hackers grinned.

  “Okay,” someone said.

  “Yeah,” said someone else.

  “Try it.”

  Carefully, as if leading an overeager pet, Alien arranged six bricks on the refrigerator door. Then she crossed the room to the other side and opened the silverware drawer. With one hand, Alien selected a fork; with the other hand, a spoon.

  “Oops!” she said, “accidentally” tossing them in the general direction of the fridge.

  Rather than fall in a normal parabola, the utensils flew to the door as if sucked. They stuck like glue.

  “Awesome!”

  The others ran to grab their own forks and spoons—and then, inevitably, knives, and finally the kitchen’s large pots and pans and baking sheets, all of which landed with a terrific clack. Soon the fridge was completely covered.

  Mace reappeared that Tuesday. Alien was in the student center, really, truly studying electricity and magnetism before her Wednesday morning midterm, when she took an early afternoon break to check her email. Mace had written the entire hall: “I have a 3:30 p.m. exam. Can someone PLEEEZ make sure I’m awake at 3?”

  The message made Alien smile. At three on the dot, she picked up a phone in the student center and called.

  “Good afternoon,” she said when Mace picked up. “This is your wakeup call.”

  Mace grunted. “Thanks.” Alien was about to hang up, but then she heard him say, “Hey, come by my room tonight. I have something for you.”

  Shortly after midnight, Alien walked down the hall dressed in her PSYCHO BITCH T-shirt and black leggings. Mace opened the door and waved her in for the first time since Mardi Gras. His room was bare except for the standard issue furniture. Dense smoke filled the air.

  “I made my room into a bong!” he exclaimed.

  Alien laughed, and then coughed. “I’ve never smoked pot before.”

  “Sorry,” Mace said. “I can open the window.”

  “Nah—it’s been like this all semester,” said Alien. “If I stopped coughing now, I’d probably miss it. Plus, it’s giving me really strong ab muscles.”

  “Cherish that feeling,” Mace said, handing her a real bong. Alien accepted it, and he helped her light it. They took turns inhaling. “Outside this hall, outside this dorm, outside this campus, people are so concerned with being safe,” Mace continued. “I hate that safety net. We’re so separated from the real unsafe world in America, scared to live, scared to die.”

  “You should meet my mother,” Alien said.

  Mace sat down in his desk chair. “Come sit on my lap,” he said. Alien obliged, straddling him, enjoying the attention from a senior guy. “You know,” he said, stroking her hair, “no one wants to admit that they’re vulnerable. But if you admit you’re vulnerable, if you can even get comfortable with your vulnerability, that’s freedom.”

  Alien stared into Mace’s glinting dark brown eyes. Clearly he was high as a kite. But interesting. Most MIT guys were off-the-charts smart, but way too literal-minded to understand anything that couldn’t be expressed in an equation. Mace was different: smart, yes, but also philosophical. And he was so animated—so alive—it already seemed like they’d been talking for hours.

  Alien leaned forward and kissed him.

  Late morning light streaming through the window woke Alien. She turned over, stifling a cough, and then turned back, cuddling closer to Mace’s warm, strong body. He responded with a loud hiccupy snore.

  Alien grinned. Last night Mace had put on music and they kissed on his top bunk for more than an hour. Later—it was all coming back to her—he had reached under Alien’s pants and tugged the band of her underwear. Again, though, she had gently rebuffed him. It was fun being high for the first time, moving with the deep bass of the music, feeling Mace’s skin and watching him smile. For now, she had thought, fun was enough.

  Alien sat up. She felt like she was forgetting something
. . . but what? Gingerly, she climbed down from the bunk bed and wandered into the hallway.

  “Hey!” Shannon called to her before Alien had moved five feet. “We shut off your alarm. It was blaring for an hour, dumbass.”

  No! Alien rushed to her door and turned the key, since whoever had broken in to shut off her alarm had been polite enough to lock up afterward.

  Her clock’s silent digital readout seemed to be accusing her: 11:34 a.m.

  Alien’s mind burned. She’d missed her physics midterm. Stupid, stupid.

  On a cold morning two weeks later, Alien walked with Rex, Vanessa, and Sam to Joanie’s, a diner in Central Square that opened at three thirty a.m. This week MIT was hosting campus visits for admitted high school students. Fifth East had held a smaller, shorter version of their fall hacking tour, and Alien had been chosen as a scout. She loved sneaking ahead of everyone, watching out for janitors and CPs. Afterward, when all the prefrosh had been returned safely to their respective campus hosts, the head “Jacks” had invited her out with them to breakfast.

  Cramming into a tiny little table with the upperclassmen just before dawn, Alien ordered the $1.25 plate—two pieces of buttered toast and a fried egg.

  “Nice job tonight,” Rex said. He cleared his throat. “You know, Zhu’s graduating. And when we become seniors, we’re going to have to apply for jobs or grad school, and we won’t be able to get out as much.”

  Alien nodded. It was strange to see her fellow hackers acting wistful—or mature, for that matter. A few days earlier they’d held a “freestyle” sprinting competition where everyone ran up and down the hall, kicking the fire doors open at each end. On Alien’s final run, the heavy black door had slammed shut on her pinky finger and claimed her little baby fingernail, whole and bleeding. Alien had put it in her jewelry box. That was the hacking spirit: make every day an adventure and claim even your injuries as prizes. She knew no one made a living crawling through tunnels, climbing up elevator shafts, or dangling off rooftops for the fun of it, but look at an alum like Aziz: he was twenty-five and he still went out with them. It seemed to her that hacking wasn’t something that you could just age out of.

  “Anyway . . . ,” Rex continued. “We’re going to need new Head Jacks for the fall tour. It’s a big responsibility.”

  “You should think about it,” Sam said. “That’s all we’re saying.”

  “Don’t think about it,” Vanessa said. “Just do it.”

  Alien beamed. In one year she’d go from clueless frosh to leading some of MIT’s most audacious hacking expeditions. “I’m in!” she said. “Thanks!”

  Immediately, though, an unspoken caveat occurred to her: I just have to learn electricity and magnetism first. Somehow she was managing to scrape through most of her classes with a B or C, even the ones for which she had never bought the book and borrowed it only to read the chapter minutes before the exam. Physics, of course, was the big exception. To pass the class now after missing the midterm, Alien had calculated, she’d need a 98 on the final.

  Alien thought about asking the older students for advice. But why bother? They were all, always, buried in work. MIT even had special terms to describe the perils of undergraduate existence. “Tooling” was working or studying in the extreme. You were “hosed”—as in drowning under a fire hose—when you were overwhelmed with assignments no matter how much you tooled. And “punting” was what you were doing when you should have been tooling on something but were not.

  Right now, for example, sitting in Joanie’s with her friends, Alien was punting.

  “Hey!” Rex called her back to attention. “Earth to Alien.”

  Alien looked up, making sure to maintain her smile. “What?” she said.

  “Are you going to eat that?” he asked her, pointing at her delivered plate. “Because if you’re not—”

  “I am,” Alien told him. She rapped his hand with her spoon. “Back the fuck off.”

  Sam and Vanessa laughed.

  Alien shrugged, happy, hungry, and exhausted.

  The morning of her physics final, Alien opened her eyes to white lights. Her bed felt funny—the mattress firmer, the pillows softer. She inhaled clean air instead of the usual cigarette fumes invading her room from all sides. The only sound was muted white noise.

  Nirvana.

  “You’re up,” said an unfamiliar female voice.

  Alien turned her head toward the voice. Speaking to her was a reedy middle-aged woman with red hair worn back in a ponytail, dressed in nurse’s scrubs.

  They were in a hospital room together at MIT Medical, the university infirmary.

  Alien tried to sit up, which started her coughing. “Careful,” the nurse advised, moving closer. “You’re still very sick.”

  Alien fell back. Two nights earlier, she remembered, she had been sitting in the Fifth East hallway, shooting the shit and trying to study. When she doubled over coughing and couldn’t stop, the East Campus night watchman escorted her here. The first doctor Alien saw insisted that she had whooping cough, but the test results came back negative. The next gave her lots and lots of codeine. Alien broke out in a huge rash from head to toe and started throwing up. An allergic reaction, it seemed. And, in its own way, a miracle.

  Now she could apply for a medical incomplete in physics.

  “Do you want food?” The nurse showed her a menu.

  “Thank you.” Alien was amazed. Chicken noodle soup, peanut butter and jelly sandwich, fruit cup—the infirmary’s offerings seemed like sumptuous feasts after the canned tuna she had been surviving on all semester. Even better, since IV tubes filled her arm, she wasn’t even hungry. Notwithstanding everything the doctors here had put her through, she’d probably gotten more rest and nourishment in the last forty-eight hours than she had the entire semester leading up to it.

  It’s like a spa, Alien thought.

  “Let me look and then I’ll call you back,” she told the nurse.

  The woman left. Alien smiled and relaxed, settling into her “vacation.” The drip, drip, drip of the IV evoked a soothing fountain.

  A minute later, Alien picked up the bedside phone, eager to chat with someone now that she had free time. Her friends would all be asleep or in exams, so she called her mother.

  “I’m in the hospital,” she announced cheerily as soon as she could get a word in edgewise.

  Silence. Then “Oh. My. God,” her mother said. “I’ll be right there.”

  Alien gazed at downtown Newark through the front-seat passenger’s window of her family’s cranberry-colored Volvo station wagon. Five days had passed since calling Mom, who’d brought her straight home to New Jersey. Alien’s childhood pediatrician had diagnosed a sinus infection and put her on antibiotics. Now her cough was finally waning. This morning she was taking Amtrak back to school.

  Alien still needed a 98 to pass the class. But she wouldn’t have to take the makeup final until the beginning of September. After the hacking tour.

  She had three months to study hard, she told herself.

  “Thanks,” Alien told her mother as they approached the train station. “I can just hop out here, so you don’t have to deal with parking.”

  “I can’t believe you’re not staying home,” her mother said. “After how sick that place made you.”

  “It wasn’t the place that made me sick,” said Alien. That might or might not be true. But it was definitely the story she was sticking with.

  No matter what, Alien was spending the summer in Cambridge. Unlike most colleges, MIT kept its dorms open. Almost everyone at Fifth East was staying. They could play all day and hack all night.

  “Love you, Mom,” Alien said. But I’m not going to be you, she added silently.

  04 / /

  A Death in the Family

  Look good, feel good, Alien told herself. She was late to help lead the Spelunkers’ Tour—the most advanced form of the first-week hacking tour, reserved for only the most interested freshmen—but at least she looke
d formidable: black combat pants, black tank top, with her Leatherman on her hip and her hacking card in her pocket.

  A full year had gone by since she had entered MIT. Then the Jacks had seemed like mysterious, all-knowing, all-powerful figures. Now she was a Jack herself—and a Head Jack, no less. Six days earlier, at the very beginning of Rush, Alien had paced the Fifth East ledge at midnight, watching the East Campus courtyard fill with eager, intrigued freshmen, before descending to claim her wards in the now familiar Building 54 lecture hall. Theirs had to have been the best tour. The frosh had been so excited being taken across the roofs, up onto the Little Dome, down though the steam tunnels, and finally into the sacred space of the mural room for the first time.

  Grinning, Alien ran from her dorm room to tonight’s tour meeting point at the MIT Chapel—the last place campus cops would think to check.

  Nine p.m.—almost there. But en route her good mood shifted. Something nagged at her. Something was wrong.

  “I’ve got to go back to the hall,” Alien told Sam and Rpunzel at the chapel. “Meet you later in Sixty-six”—Building 66, where they’d hung the point and tonight planned a secret large-group ascent.

  Alien walked back as fast she could. This summer, visiting alumni had given her LSD—a venerable tradition. In the 1970s, it was said, most of the LSD on the East Coast came from MIT chemists. Her jewelry box contained the last couple of strips.

  Alien hadn’t seen the jewelry box when she was getting ready, she realized. That must be what was bothering her. Rush was the obvious time to get busted for something stupid.