Free Killing Britney by Sean Olin

for a guy named Ted Dempsey, but Dempsey was never around, and Bobby ran the show, tearing apart and rebuilding motherboards and towers sometimes until four-thirty in the morning. That is, when he wasn’t fiddling with his web site or trying to hack into the Department of Motor Vehicles records. Right now, he and Adam were eating Doritos and playing EverQuest. His T-shirt today showed a drawing of a severed human arm on a plate; underneath, it read Tastes Like Chicken.
    Bobby had embedded all sorts of cheats so that his EverQuest character would be unkillable. He explained to Adam that “this means I can go around hacking people up and stealing their money and basically doing whatever I want, and there’s nothing they can do about it. They can’t even kick me off the game because I’ve build an override to counteract the host commands.”
    Adam was pretty handy on a computer himself. He knew all the cheats Bobby was using—they weren’t that hard to figure out—but playing an unkillable character was sort of boring. What Adam liked about EverQuest was the web of relationships that you developed throughout the world of the game. You had to think about the consequences of any action you took, and you had to work with the rest of the gaming community to really succeed. If you could just go and slaughter people, what was the point?
    It was 10 p.m. and a school night for Adam—not for Bobby because he’d skipped a year and graduated early. Except for last night’s dinner in Ricky’s honor, it was also his first night off since he’d been hired by Amoeba Records, and there was no way he was going to waste it on doing schoolwork.
    “So, you were right,” he said, shoving a Dorito into his mouth. “Britney got all weird when I mentioned your name. What did you do to her?”
    Bobby’s gaze remained on the game. He continued typing commands into the computer throughout their conversation. “What did I do to her? The question is, what did she do to me!”
    “Well, tell me.”
    “It’s complicated.”
    “Everything’s complicated. Life is complicated.”
    “She’s just …” Bobby paused and frowned at the screen. “She’s a messed-up girl.” He started tapping the keyboard with a rapid vigor. “Look at that!” He grinned maniacally at Adam. “I just burned that mofo’s house down! Let’s go see what he’s got to steal!”
    They played the game for a while—or Bobby played, and Adam watched. Figuring that he wasn’t going to get anywhere with his questions, Adam said, “I heard this great CD two days ago at my new job—”
    “Oh, man,” Bobby cut him off, “I can get you whatever you want for free. I know how to get around all the firewalls. What do you want? Grab a blank CD from the shelf over there. We can burn it right now.”
    Before they could get the process started, the metal grate that served as a door began rattling. The sound echoed ferociously around the room, bouncing off the concrete floor.
    “That must be Melissa,” said Bobby. “Can you get it? You just have to push the button against that wall over there.”
    To reach the automatic door opener, Adam had to watch his feet, picking his way across the room. Spare cords, loose mice, keyboards, and small green plates covered with wires and knobs were strewn everywhere. He actually had to climb over a wall of monitors.
    Once the door was open, he discovered it was the same Melissa who was Britney’s friend, the redheaded girl who had rubbed her shoulders at the dinner, shivering outside. Well, that’s odd, he thought. But he didn’t mind her showing up here at all—last night, when she’d been wearing that blue crushed velvet gown, he’d thought she was beautiful, and now, here, even in her ski jacket and woolen cap, nothing had changed.
    “Hi, Adam,” she said, as if she’d expected to see him, as if they’d known each other all their lives as opposed to having seen each other, what, maybe five times total, and always in