Nathan Hill - The Nix

“What’s Professor Anderson hiding?” Larry said. “What’s on his computer?”

“Something embarrassing. Maybe even criminal.”

“Seriously?”

“Definitely,” Laura said, and she was maybe about eighty percent sure this was true. Because who didn’t have something embarrassing on their computer? A dubious downloaded image, something questionable in the browser history. The odds were in her favor.

“I’m only supposed to log in to someone’s computer if they ask me for help,” Larry said. “I can’t go snooping around.”

“You can say you were doing routine maintenance.”

She took another step toward him so that she emerged from behind the towel. She couldn’t be sure what was going on down there, focused as she was on Larry, but judging by his expression — the way he stared at her — she figured she was now mostly exposed from the waist down.

“Think about it,” Laura said. “If you find something that proves he’s not fit to be a teacher, you’d be a hero. My hero.”

Larry stared at her.

“Will you do this for me?” she said.

“I’ll get in trouble,” he said.

“You won’t, I promise,” she said, taking his head with the other hand, letting go of the towel, which dropped softly to the floor.

She always loved this moment, the change that came over men when they recognized what was about to happen, how fast they clicked over to a new kind of intensity and focus. Larry was already grabbing at her.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

She smiled. At that moment, he would have agreed to anything.

It was never this moment that Laura had a problem with, the moment of seduction. The problem was afterward. Men tended to drift away from her in a few weeks. They could not be counted on. She’d had three different guys, for example, all friends-with-benefits type guys, come out as bi-a-sexual soon after their encounters, meaning, they said, that they were no longer attracted to either gender, equally.

Which she was like, what are the odds?

After Larry had finished and left her dorm room and she had wiped the slimy traces of him off her shinbones (which was a first), she returned to iFeel, hoping that maybe she’d have more clarity now, maybe she’d be able to figure out what to say, what she felt. But no luck. Her emotions seemed as foreign as ever.

She decided to activate the auto-correct function on iFeel, a really excellent little piece of software that took whatever emotion you thought you were feeling and compared it to the millions of entries collected in the iFeel database and, in a crowd-surfing, data-mining sort of way, extrapolated which of the fifty standard emotions you were actually feeling. Laura clicked a link, a text field opened up, and she began typing:

iFeel like i dont deserve 2 fail my class just b/c i cheated on some dumb assignment but also i know i prolly shouldnt be cheating so much in all of my classes b/c someday ill have to go out & get a job & have knowledge in my field or whatever but at this point i actually HAVE TO cheat b/c ive cheated so much in the past that i usually have no idea whats going on in any of my classes so if i stopped cheating i would get really bad grades & maybe even fail out of school so it seems 2 me if im going 2 fail either way i might as well cheat & get the grades i need 2 become the powerful business professional my mother so desperately wants me 2B. so i have to prevent this meeting with the professor & ive thought about it alot & ive realized that the university wont require the professor to come to this meeting if the professor is NOT AN EMPLOYEE OF THE UNIVERSITY \(^.^)/ so maybe the way forward is to totally discredit the professor & get him fired & ruin his life which makes me feel a little guilty & also angry that the school has boxed me in this way & essentially forced me 2 do something i will feel sort of remorseful about later all b/c i plagiarized one stupid paper ¯

She pressed Enter and the iFeel app processed this for a moment before the auto-correct displayed the answer:

Do you mean “Bad”?

Sure, that must be what she meant. She posted it right away: iFeel Bad. And seconds later the text messages poured in.

cheer up grl!:)

don’t feel bad ur gr8!!

luv ya!

ur the best!!!!

And so on, dozens of them, from friends and admirers, boyfriends and lovers, colleagues and acquaintances. And while they did not know the reason she felt bad, it was surprisingly easy to pretend they did, that they knew about the plan, and so each message had the effect of steeling her resolve. This is what she had to do. She thought about her future, her mother, everything that was at stake. And she knew she was right. She would go through with the plan. The professor had it coming. He was asking for it. He wouldn’t know what hit him.

THEY MET at one of the chain restaurants near Henry’s suburban office park, the kind of place erected right off the highway, on a terrifyingly busy one-way access road. The route here tended to confuse one’s GPS device or map app, as it required a series of awkward and counterintuitive U-turns to navigate the various viaducts and on-ramps and cloverleafs made necessary by the nearby fourteen-lane expressway.

Inside, the music was happy Top 40 sing-along stuff, the floors industrially carpeted and, within the orbits of children in high chairs, chummed with food globs and milk slicks and crayons and damp little twisted flecks of napkin. Families stood in the front vestibule awaiting their tables, staring at the round plastic puck the hostess gave them, a device that contained some kind of inner motor-and-light apparatus that would blink and agitate when their table was free.

Henry and Samuel sat in a booth holding menus — large, laminated menus, dynamically colored and complexly subdivided, roughly the size of the Ten Commandments in that one movie about the Ten Commandments. The food was pretty standard chain-restaurant fare: burgers, steaks, sandwiches, salads, a list of inventive appetizers with names involving whimsical adjectives, e.g., sizzlin’. What allegedly set this particular restaurant chain apart from others was that it did something weird with an onion — cut it and fried it in such a way that the onion unfurled itself and resembled, on the plate, a kind of desiccated, many-fingered claw. There was a Rewards Club one could join to earn points for the eating of such things.

Their table was cluttered with the several appetizers Henry had already purchased with his company’s credit card. They were here doing “field research,” as Henry called it. They sampled the menu and discussed which items had frozen-meal potential: golden fried cheddar bites, yes; seared ahi tuna, probably not.

Henry noted all this on his laptop. They were digging into a plate of miso-glazed chicken skewers when Henry finally asked about the topic he was eager to discuss but trying hard to seem indifferent about.

“Oh, by the way, how’s it going with your mother?” he said in this dismissive way while sawing at a chicken chunk with a fork.

“Not great,” Samuel said. “Today I spent the whole afternoon at the UIC library, going through the archive, looking at everything they had from 1968. Yearbooks. Newspapers. Hoping to find something about Mom.”