I fell asleep waiting on Tad to come back that night. Then sometime later, my door creaked open, waking me up. I opened my eyes for a second, then closed them, trying to pretend to be asleep. I thought it was my mother. She was a nurse at the hospital and worked long shifts and gobbled up as much overtime as she could. So, sometimes she’d come home at three in the morning, sometimes five, or seven. But every time she did, she would come into my room and kiss my cheek.
I anticipated the perfume she always wore—I don’t know the name of it, but it had a vanilla scent—and then the peck on the cheek. What I got was something completely different. Someone shook my arm, waking me up for real. It was Tad.
“Damn, dude,” I said. “What time is it?”
“Shh, bro. It’s like two. Sorry, I just wanted to see you.”
I rose, pushed the covers to the side, and felt for my glasses on the dresser.
“Turn the light on,” I said, adjusting my frames.
Tad turned on the light.
“Why are you wet?” I asked.
“I washed a girl off me,” Tad said, winking. He sat down on my bed.
“Already? You just got out.”
“What can I say?” He shrugged his shoulders and wiped unseen dirt off his arms. We both laughed.
“What do you wanna do?” I asked.
“We don’t have to do nothing. Just chill. Maybe you can ask me anything that’s been on your mind. I haven’t really talked to you since you was twelve.”
I didn’t know where to start. The crash, prison life, school, the chair. Hell, how do you ask five years worth of questions in one sitting? You can’t.
“What’s with the spiders?” I said. Tad had these little, black spiders crawling up and down both arms. There must have been twenty of them.
“Each spider represent an inmate I had to kill to survive…” He trailed off, looked at the ceiling, then looked back at me, laughing. “I’m just fuckin with you.”
“Real funny, Tad.”
“Sorry, bro. I had to. What they really means is nothing. Just some wannabe white boys, calling themselves a gang. Prison really be like the movies, you know? Sort of. You gotta have allies.”
My eyes widened, I blinked rapidly. Kids at school had joked about Tad getting raped in prison to piss me off, and I thought maybe it was possible, but when he said prison was ‘like the movies,’ I really thought he had been.
“Did you… You know. Like, did they…”
“What?”
“I don’t know… Did they try to hurt you?”
“Fight? Hell ya! Almost daily.”
“No. I mean… sexually.”
He blinked a couple of times, looked away from me, then got quiet. It scared me. Bad. I thought it was coming: the confession.
“No. Tell you the truth, I kinda started liking it. That’s something I been meaning to tell you about. Prison changes fools, and, well, I’m gay.”
My head exploded. Not for homophobic reasons—I could care less what a man or woman does with their uglies—but because Tad was the straightest man I knew. He’d been with hundreds of women—so he confessed—and so I absolutely believed.
“Oh,” I said. “Well, that’s… um…”
The words had left my mouth for not one-thousandth of a second, and he burst into a hideous roar of laughter.
“What’s so funny?”
“I’m sorry, bro. Had to. I’m not gay, man. And nobody tried to butt-fuck me.” Laughter came from both us this time.
He went on to explain the spider tattoos in more detail, saying that they were mostly to kill time, and that it didn’t hurt for people to be afraid of you in prison. He asked about the iPod again, and I told him all I knew. Then he wanted me to show him the Internet; he wanted to see how much had changed.
“Can you help me?” I said, trying to sit up. “Just turn my legs.”
He got up, shifted my legs, and helped me into my chair. He tried to push me, but I told him I had it, and made my way to my desk. I opened the lid of my Alienware laptop—which took me about three years of savings to buy—and booted it up.
“Damn, this sick,” Tad said.
“Yeah, it’s called an Alienware. It’s top of the line, for gaming and shit.”
“You play games?”
“Hell yeah. I’ll show you Call of Duty 2; it’s awesome. You’d like it.”
“Aight.”
I played some Call of Duty 2 multiplayer for a few rounds, and I tried to show him how to play. He was awful, but he enjoyed it. I guess that’s the point, really. Then I closed out of the game, and showed him Google.
“Google?” Tad said. “I think I remember that, just before I did my time.”
“Yeah, it was out then, but it’s different now. It’s the best search engine on the planet. Way better than Yahoo and Ask.com. If you’re unsure of something, or just downright curious, you type it into this search bar.” I pointed to it on the screen. “Then it pulls up tons of results, and you click on them.”
“Word?”
“Word, Slim Shady. Got something in mind?”
“Not really. I don’t remember this much. Show me how it works.”
“Okay. Let me think—Oh, I got something. There’s this bad-ass movie coming out in October called The Departed.” I typed the movie’s name into the Google search bar and pressed enter. Thousands of results came back, in less than a second. “See.”
“Damn, that’s dope.”
I clicked on the Rotten Tomatoes link, and when it loaded, said, “See, it shows who directed it, when it’s coming out, how many people want to see it. All of that. If it weren’t for something like Google, I’d have a hard time finding stuff.” I closed out of the browser, and opened a new window. “There’s something way better than finding out about movies, though.”
“What’s that?”
“Titties. And none of that pay-for-it shit you’re used to. It’s all free now. Anything you can imagine is out there.” I showed him a few provocative searches, and told him not to come into my room using my computer to look at that shit. He could use the computer in the living room for that.
After I closed out of the Mozilla Firefox browser, I checked my torrents that were downloading. If someone were to tell me that downloading movies, music, and games was going to make me a millionaire in three years, I would’ve told them, “Yeah, and I go jogging in the mornings before school.”
“What was that?” Tad asked.
“Oh, it’s just some downloads. It’s called uTorrent. Kind of like Napster, but not just music. Movies, games, everything. It’s all free, too. The official term is ‘file-sharing.’ I’ve got tons of downloads on my hard drive.” I checked the Downloads tab. “Ah, good, Final Destination 3 is done.”
Tad was speechless. I looked at him, and his green eyes were staring fixedly at the monitor. Looking back now, I know that was the moment when the seed was planted. I was the farmer, and I’d just deposited a crop that—unknowingly—was going to set our lives up forever, and eventually destroy them. It’s an interesting prospective, looking back, that is. If I could change the past, I’d have let Tad take my laptop to his bedroom, so he could watch porn all night, and I never would have showed him the BitTorrent client. But, I can’t change the past, anymore than a weightlifter can change their genetics. Sometimes you just have to accept the choices you’ve made and play the cards you’re dealt.
“You watch the movies on the laptop?” Tad asked.
“Yeah. Sometimes I burn them to a DVD, so I can watch it on the TV.” I pointed to my television. Then I clicked opened the folder Final Destination 3 was in, and showed him the movie.
“Very nice.”
It takes a lot of alone time, sitting and thinking about the past, to see the little things that shaped your future; the small moments that move us from one stage of life to the next. I, too, only heard Tad say ‘very nice’ that night. I know now that he meant more. Much more.