Hack by Peter Wrenshall Page A

think that it would get stolen in my neighborhood.
    Anyway, the FBI was paying.
    This new bike was so light that I could lift it with two fingers. It was so smooth, it almost rode itself. My first mountain bike had been steel, and heavy. But it had been good for thousands of kilometers. I rode that piece of junk over half of Washington State.
    Back at the house, I put the bike in the garage. I noticed that there were two his and hers bikes already in there. At the table, Richard looked tired and annoyed. He was drinking beer straight from the bottle. He’d been out all day, I figured, probably really working hard. The fatigue he was showing was probably real—the tiredness of a thirty-something who has to travel an hour to work and another hour back. I heard him burp quietly, from the beer, and he noticed me looking at him. He seemed slightly drunk.
    After we had finished eating, he said, “That was good,” to Hannah.
    “You’re welcome,” Hannah said coolly.
    I seconded it. “It was great.”
    “Chicken and vegetables. Not exactly adventurous cooking,” Hannah said.
    “Do you want to go anywhere tonight?” Richard asked her.
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    “What did you have in mind?”
    “I don’t know. A look around town, maybe?”
    “Not tonight. Let’s go tomorrow instead.”
    “Okay.”
    Suddenly Richard started talking about how the police caught some criminals raiding a local bank, and Hannah nodded, adding the occasional comment.
    “This guy,” Richard said, shaking his head as he demonstrated with his hand,
    “came out of the bank and ran straight into the road, and got mowed down.”
    I was surprised at how quickly Richard and Hannah had gotten over the argument. I sat, listening to the conversation, while I thought back over the argument.
    Unlike the arguments I had seen between my real parents, no threats had been made, and nothing was thrown. Nobody slammed any doors, and nobody left, never to be seen again. My new parents just sat there, talking about local events. It was a perverse parody of the nuclear family that left me with the feeling that I had to be alone.
    I went to my room, and sat with the light off, looking out at the pristine suburb, dimly lit in the autumn darkness. Everything was quiet and peaceful. Here, everything seemed to be in its place. Maybe I could just stay here for the rest of my life, I thought. David Johnson, space cadet from Elmwood High, rides bikes, and excels in computers, math, and science. Thinking about how my life had turned out, it seemed crazy to me. How had I got here?
    I closed my eyes, and thought back over my life. I had once lived in a house like this when my parents were married. I had little memory of it, but I recalled a large house in a quiet suburb in Washington State. I also remembered an argument, and waiting for my father to return. I waited, and waited, always trusting that he would come back. But he never did.
    After that, I moved with my mother to an apartment. She got a job at a casino.
    When her new friends came around, they would party and play music and dance. She worked the late shift, and in the evenings I stayed with a neighbor, Mrs. Robinson, until I was ten, and no longer needed a babysitter.
    I made my own breakfast and dinner, and watched television on my own. It was around that time that my unusual fascination started. I remember the first time.
    I had been sitting in a bank one day, waiting while my mother smiled through her teeth at a bank clerk.
    She was taking care of some grown-up business that she had refused to discuss with me, and I was bored and absent-mindedly gazing at an oversized display check that was hung on the bank wall. In those days, people still used paper checks instead of credit cards, and that big cardboard check reminded me of a TV program on bank fraud that I had seen a few nights before.
    In the TV special, a convicted fraudster described how he had made millions of dollars by altering bank checks. All paper checks came with a