Free Three Miles Past by Stephen Graham Jones

was neck-deep in that particular fantasy, and sinking fast.
    At lunch I found RJ, leaned in, told him my plan.
    “ Her? ” he said back.
    Her phone was newer, brighter, better, was supposed to be harder to hack. I wanted to try the app there, if she was game.
    “Maybe we’ll play some Naked Leapfrog too,” I told him, shrugging, trying to come off more lecherous than I was.
    “I put a text button on it,” RJ said back.
    “Link-with-attachment, right?” I said, suddenly concerned.
    He didn’t dignify that.
    Of course it would be link-with-attachment. Trying to build our own cute little text program inside our app, we’d have to be poring through different carriers’ protocols, asking permission for this, not stepping on that.
    “What about the Lonely Brigade?” I asked.
    It was our code for the social networks.
    “You think?” he said, kind of doing his sneer thing.
    We were really talking now. Like it had always been.
    “Why not?” I said. “That’s where we want the pics to show up, don’t we?”
    “There’s no revenue for second-hand impressions,” he said. “You know that, right?”
    Because there would be no real way to track them.
    “But we can brand them, anyway,” I said. “Just clear-letter, discrete. Directing them back to the app, keeping it part of the chain, all that.”
RJ shrugged one shoulder, was watching somebody across the cafeteria.
    It was Lindsay. I could tell by the way he let his eyes keep skating past her.
    “Remember that toddler game?” he said, coming back to me. “That my dad said?”
“Red light, green light. Go directly to college.”
    “That’s all he could use it for, wasn’t it? For his MIT application. Because—putting banners on it would be stupid, wouldn’t it? Who advertises to babies?”
    I blinked, focused.
    He was right again.
    “But we’re not like that,” I said.
    He shook his head no, agreeing with me.
    But still.
    That guy, that app, he was our origin story. And now it was hollow. Now he was somebody we’d make fun of.
    “Think the app’ll scare her?” he asked then, catching my eyes for a flash.
    “You sleeping, man?” I asked back.
    “Jump right out of her pants, right?” he went on, then lifted his chin to get me to look.
    It was Lindsay, maybe two steps from us, balancing her water-with-lemon, her salad.
    She smiled, twirled past, biting her lip in hello and doing something impossible with her eyebrows.
    “Life Science,” RJ said, not watching her walk away. “What’s homework going to be like for that, you think?”
    “Exactly,” I said, and brushed past him, my eyes glued.
     
    ~
     
    Two days later, RJ started texting me some of the new takeback images he was generating.
    I was in the library with Lindsay and two of her friends. But mostly with Lindsay. At least in my head.
    So far I’d agreed to show her where she could nab papers online, places the faculty didn’t know about. I was going to show her where all the good music and movies were, too, but was going to space it out some. Surprise her on Thursday with what wasn’t in the theatres until Friday, that kind of stuff.
    You use what you’ve got, I mean. This was my one chance.
    And now RJ was helping.
    I looked at the image he’d flashed across, then lowered it under the table, scanned both ways to see if any teachers were close.
    “What?” Lindsay said.
    Her dad wouldn’t let her load any apps he didn’t scan first, as it turned out. The human virus checker, as it were.
    But when you’ve got a daughter like that.
    “Give me your number,” I said to her—that easy—and bankshot the image off a tower two miles a way, drilled it back under the table, to her phone, balanced right there on her thighs.
    It was a takeback pic, sure, but RJ had done something different, had twisted the code back on itself somehow.
    Behind the washed-out version of his long hallway was the crawling girl. She wasn’t on the wall anymore, though, but the floor. And not floating