Free Three Miles Past by Stephen Graham Jones Page B

found reasons to be outside, stayed there just piddling until RJ’s dad pulled up, lifted his briefcase to me on his way in.
    I waved back, looked back to my house, and went inside to check if RJ had uploaded that particular shot to the hidden directory.
    He hadn’t.
    It was just the stock hundred we’d come up with together. They seemed so tame now.
    I was about to back out of that terminal—already had, really, had to key back in—when I caught the tail-end of that list of files I’d just called up.
    The count was a hundred, like I’d been expecting, and they were named sequentially after the sneak_up lead-ins—clever clever—but there was another directory there now. Inside the protected directory.
    I tried “Lindsay” as password, but it wasn’t her this time.
    I tabbed up, then, went root to try to at least see how many characters this password might have, but I suck in the shell, and the architecture, it was all different now, was some kind of chutes and ladders game, a labyrinth, one with dead-ends and bottomless wells and something that, when I tried to open it, locked up my system.
    What had RJ done?
    I rebooted, was about to just rush that file system, hit it with everything I had, but then that image of RJ’s dad was in my head again.
    The bedroom door. The door to RJ’s dad’s bedroom.
    I pulled my phone, called the picture up.
    The doorway was on the wrong side.
    Wasn’t it?
    Yes. I’d practically grown up over there. RJ’s dad had encouraged it, even, after his last encounter with my dad.
    But how could it be on the wrong side?
    I stood, walked out into our own hall. It wasn’t as long as RJ’s, and had tables and junk all cluttered in it, but still.
    I stood at the end, right by my doorway, closed my eyes and took a takeback pic.
    Just normal.
    I looked through the walls, to the memory of RJ’s house, and then to this hall.
    The mirror.
    He had the mirror.
    I dragged my mom’s in from her closet—she was out walking, like always, ‘because it was daylight’—set it up against the turn into the living room.
    Already I didn’t like this.
    I could see myself too well. Like I was at the end of the hall, waiting for myself.
    But screw it.
    This wasn’t for me, this was for the app. This was for RJ.
    I walked up to my reflection, held my phone down and backwards, snapped another pic.
    Nothing. Just the usual.
    I turned around, sure I was missing something—did RJ’s dad have some old brown-and-white photographs framed on the wall on the left side?—and lowered my phone, didn’t realize the app was still on until I felt the camera burr, the image processing.
    I held it up.
    It was my hall, reversed.
    Except I was standing there right in the middle of it.
    “What are you doing?” I said out loud, to RJ, and just then my dad stepped into the hall in his workshirt, looked from the mirror to me and didn’t even say anything. Just brushed past, shut his door behind him.
     
    ~
     
    The day Lindsay gave me a ride home was the day RJ had to spend in the main office. There were counselors and principals and even a city police.
    It wasn’t for the takeback shot in circulation today—a benign old image of Cedric he’d blacked-out, let bleed at the edges, like he was loping up behind, his mouth glittering—but for the one of his dad, shot in the head.
    “What do you think they’ll do to him?” Lindsay said, both hands on the wheel.
    “He’s just screwing around,” I told her.
    Still, the support forum on our site had a few members now. From school, mostly, because he’d put the brand on the bottom of the images he was texting.
    When Lindsay pulled up to my curb, I didn’t get out at first.
    I turned to her, was in some level of prep for asking her to maybe hold back on forwarding any more of the messages, that I needed to talk to RJ first, but then her face was right there.
    I bumped into her, pulled back smiling.
    And then we sort of kissed.
    I rose from the car, drifted across the