Double Digit by Annabel Monaghan Read Free Book Online Page B

plopped down on her bed, crossing her impossibly long legs beneath her. “It’s Howard. I’m probably just being stupid, but I feel like there’s something going on with him. I can just feel it, you know?”
    Yes, I know, feel it. Please.
“What do you mean?”
    “Well, like last night I called him six times and he never picked up. You know how that guy always has his phone at the ready. So this morning he said, ‘Yeah, sorry, babe. I went to bed early.’ He never goes to bed early. Ever.”
    This was hardly a smoking gun, but I was starting to feel more and more relieved. She went on: “And
then
I called him on my way back from the airport to see if he wanted me to stop by, and he said, ‘No, sorry, babe. I’m turning in early.’ What the hell, right?”
    Anyone without the information that I so unfortunately had would have suggested that maybe he was sick. I decided to feed the beast. “That is weird. What do you think it means?”
    “I don’t know. I can’t imagine he’s . . . I mean, he wouldn’t . . . Let’s check Facebook.” She pulled out her laptop and started banging away.
    “Tiki, if he’s doing something he doesn’t want you to know about, he’s not going to post about it.”
Duh.
    “But someone else might have. I just need to see what was happening on campus last night. Someone’s got to have a photo.” It didn’t take long for her to find a photo of Howard dancing with that blond girl at Simmons Hall.
    “Oh,” I offered, sympathetically.
    “It’s not enough.” Tiki was up and pulling at her hair, adjusting the spikes like she was trying to secure a clearer connection to the universe. “I’m not going to go down as the crazy high school girlfriend who overreacted to a photo on freakin’ Facebook. I need proof. I need an eyewitness.”
    Actual real-life eyewitness said, “But there is no eyewitness.”
    We went back and forth like this for a long time before Tiki decided we needed to hack into his Facebook account and read his private messages. “Let’s try the obvi passwords. It used to be Tiki and my birthday. No? Okay, try Tiki is a ten, all one word. No? His dog’s name is Snoopy?” We exhausted everything we could think of—including the name of the girl in the photo.
    “You could just ask him.”
    “I can’t. I don’t want to get into a whole big thing and come out of it seeming crazy because he’s just denying it. He has a way of turning everything around and making me seem like I’m paranoid. I’ll end up apologizing to his cheating ass. This has happened before.”
    I kept trying logical passwords, then adding numbers to the end. It could take a century to crack a code this way, but I was getting hypnotized by it. Snoopy124, Snoopy125. Tiki may have read my mind. “Before you slip into the Digit Zone, why don’t we download one of those brute force programs that go through every possible iteration to crack a password? It can run while we sleep.”
    Scott had showed me one of these programs on that first night in the dorm. They were pretty simple; they just tried various combinations of letters and numbers in an orderly way. Eventually the code would be cracked. They were written in any one of the coding languages I’d been learning in my computer science class: C, LISP, Perl, Java. They were really beautiful languages, some better than others, but they were all like paints that you could use to either create a big red circle or the
Mona Lisa.
The power was in the mind of the programmer. I’ll admit it: The idea of just pressing Go to run one of these programs left me a little flat. It’s like painting by numbers or making a cake from a box. What’s the point?
    “We could get into a lot of trouble if someone caught us buying one of those programs. How would we explain it? If you’d just give me a little while, I can write one. We’ll run it, get the password, and I’ll erase it. The perfect crime.”
    “You’re going to write a program? Because