XGeneration 1: You Don't Know Me by Brad Magnarella Page A

beside the Pattersons’ garage door, the one he’d hidden behind that morning. Maybe it was because of the dream, or because he’d made it through his first day of high school intact, but in the light of midafternoon, everything appeared more promising.
    Scott crossed the street, then ran the rest of the block home, rejuvenated, his arms and legs fueled by hope. One of Scott’s hopes was that if the FBI hadn’t come down on his head, it was because they didn’t have enough evidence or didn’t consider his crimes criminal enough. There were still no Crown Victorias in his yard, anyway. Scott let himself in the front door using the key kept on the string around his neck. He dropped his backpack in the hallway and, without breaking stride, headed toward his room, J.R. yipping circles around his feet.
    The solution, Scott told himself, was to leave his equipment in the storage room in the garage and give his extracurricular activities a rest for a while, take a hacking hiatus—a long one if need be.
    But standing inside his doorway, Scott could see that was going to be easier said than done. His brain still harbored a compulsion to beeline to his computer desk, flip on his equipment, and launch into his latest hack, the behavioral groove well established and deep. Scott did go to his desk, but it was strangely naked, like a hairless cat you had to look at enough times to get used to, much less feel affection for. Imprinted in the emptiness of the desk top was a large dustless square. A smaller square stood out where his modem had spent the summer beeping and crunching. Gone too were all the notes he had scribbled from the hacker boards.
    Scott leaned his arms on the back of his office chair and pushed out a sigh. There would be no more navigating the networks, no head-splitting challenges, no fist-pumping victories. He was out of “The Game,” as some hackers called it. At least until he was no longer a person of interest.
    You need Wayne.
    Scott picked up the cordless phone and punched his number. The exchange and suffix pulsed out—a pause a few milliseconds too long—then a ring. With one hand, Scott ushered J.R. from the room, letting him keep the stick of pizza crust he’d foraged from beneath the bed, and closed the door. On the eighth ring, Scott hung up. Either Wayne had divined it was him, or he wasn’t home yet.
    Scott scrubbed a hand over his face and drew up his blinds. Light flooded the bedroom, shining over stacks of boxes where plastic comic book bags peeked out, over D&D manuals, modules, and metal figurines crowding his lone bookshelf, over model spaceships dangling from vents and lining the windowsills, and over the mess that was the rest of his room. Scott frowned in thought. Something seemed out of place, and it wasn’t that the walls were bare from his having yanked down the hand-drawn Bell schematics the night before.
    Then it hit him.
    The room belonged to somebody barely out of elementary school, a child. So much of his attention the last three years had focused on Ma Bell, ARPANet, D&D, and comic books that he had neglected the fact that he was growing up. Today, he’d been the tallest in almost all of his classes. (His P.E. teacher had even asked if he would be trying out for ninth grade basketball—now that was a laugh.) But nothing in his room reflected that growth. And after the revelation at lunchtime that he was among a more mature, more accepting breed of student, he didn’t want to remain in his childhood any longer. He didn’t want to hide in his bedroom behind his computer. He wanted to belong.
    Especially after his encounter with Janis.
    Scott?
    He drew a Glad Bag from the box his mother had set beside his trashcan (she had almost smiled when she said the trashcan was the one thing in his room that was actually clean). He whipped the trash bag open and pushed the scatter of RC Cola cans into its mouth. At the start of the day, he had imagined himself dropping into bed upon