|
: : : —HEY, SAYS THIS GUY, A real zitface, wearing a Mudvayne T-shirt, what's-his-name, Tim's seen him before, Will something.
—What? says Tim, turning the dials on his lock.
—You got any of those discs for sale?
Tim looks up and down the hallway, scanning the crowd for administrators, teachers. —Maybe, he says. He pops open his locker. —Who'd you hear that from?
—Maurice, says Will.
—Maurice, Tim repeats, to remember. The fact that he sells what he sells is personal information; it's important for him to know how that information travels from person to person, through which channels. He keeps a map in his head of who knows. He keeps a list in his head of who tells.
—It's ten, Tim says. He digs back through the clutter and shit in his locker until he finds the small banded stack of CDs. He slides one off the top and holds it close to his chest while Will fumbles with his wallet.
—All I've gots is a twenty, Will says.
—What the fuck do I look like? Tim says. —A bank? He's standing there with the disc in his hand. He's been caught before; they know what he sells; if they see him with the disc in his hand like this with Will standing there with the money in his hand there's no way he'll be able to just pretend the disc is something innocuous like music. Is anyone coming? He looks back over his shoulder to check.
—I'm sorry, man, says Will, —the ATM—
—Fuck the ATM, says Tim. —I'll sell you two. He peels another disc off the stack and presses them both towards Will.
—What the fuck am I going to do with two? says Will.
—Sell the other one yourself, Tim says. —Fuck, sell it for twenty and you break even.
—I don't know, man—
—It's two or nothing, Tim says.
—Can't I come back to you later when I have change? says Will.
—No, motherfucker, says Tim. He looks back over his shoulder again. —You got me standing here with the thing out in my hand. You know I'm not supposed to be selling this shit. If I'm caught with this shit again I'm suspended. That makes this transaction a risk for me. When you make me take a risk and then say oh, sorry, I'll come back later, when you make me take a risk and then leave me with nothing, I have to start wondering whether you're a person I want to do business with.
—Okay, man, fuck, says Will, offering up the twenty. Tim pockets it but when Will reaches for the discs he pulls them away. Will contorts his face into a uncomprehending grimace.
—I'm not supposed to be selling this stuff, Tim says. —And I don't want just anyone to know that I'm selling this stuff. I don't want it all over the whole fucking school. Maurice told you and I'm gonna talk to him about that. Now if I hear that you went around telling everybody—
—I won't, man, I ain't gonna tell anybody shit, says Will.
—OK then, says Tim. He hands off the discs. —Now get out of my face.
The discs contain 700 megabytes of pornographic images downloaded off of the Internet. He gets them from sites that he's subscribed to using other people's credit card numbers, numbers he's gotten by simply wandering around town and taking credit card statements out of people's mailboxes. Every couple of months or so he'll have a night where he'll stay up in front of the computer, down in the basement for hours, drinking Coke and popping No-Doz while his parents sleep upstairs, and he'll work his way methodically through vast archives of images, saving them to a folder somewhere deep in the file structure where his parents will never think to look, and when he's got enough to fill a disc he'll burn a batch, swiping CD-Rs from one of the spindles that his dad buys in bulk. If he sells ten he makes a hundred bucks. He can sell ten in two days.
An extra hundred bucks every couple of months is plenty. He wants to keep the operation small. When it gets too big he makes more money but it becomes more noticeable; that was why he got caught in the first place. That was when he first got started, a little over two years ago, back before he'd learned to watch who he sold to. (His other mistake was trying to do it during summer school; he knows now that the fewer kids are around, the harder it is to do something you're not supposed to be doing.) Within his first week he sold discs to maybe fifty kids and it was nice to have five hundred bucks but he should have known that somebody was going to rat him out. They didn't suspend him but they turned the discs over to his parents and that was a fucking nightmare. He's just glad they didn't find out that he'd been swiping credit card numbers; things could have been a whole lot hairier.
He closes his locker and watches Will disappear into the crowd. He has to be careful. That's all he has to do.
: : :
:: Year entries
Index | << | 10 | >>
:: Tim entries
Index | << | 2 | >>
|
