The Boy Kings

in a way that grad school had not. Throwing my entire lot in with Facebook (to the point, even, of moving in with my coworkers at a company pool house) could turn out to be perfect. My interest in the Hotel California had not faded a bit since the days when my friend Dana and I drove the highway to San Diego searching for it. What more perfect metaphor for American society, and its obsession with belonging, with scenes of darkness and excess, with cults that you fall into and find it hard to leave? It felt like America was right there with me, ripe for a new experiment in community spirit. And the pool house would be my Hotel California.
    As we were moving into the summer house in Menlo Park, I placed a Hotel California LP on the mantel in the empty living room. I smiled to myself as I regarded it sitting there, with its picture of a classic Los Angeles hotel illuminated golden behindpalms, unnoticed by my colleagues milling around the house. In addition to the record and my clothes, all I brought to the house that day were a few books that I’d packed to help me make sense of this new scene about which I knew little. Joan Didion’s famous words from Slouching Towards Bethlehem were on my mind that afternoon as the sun set on our new house and I settled my things into my room. “California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.” We, I felt that day, was me, a conglomerate of one, at the end of a line and the beginning of another, staking a claim to what I suspected would be a new gold rush.
    Unlike the office with its domineering male energy, the house felt relaxed and cool, I thought with satisfaction, as I toured it in a denim skirt and flip-flops. A seventies ranch home of no architectural value, the house was solid—a little better, as most things are, for the wear and tear. The front yard sported Edward Scissorhands -like topiary bushes and a perfectly green lawn. As is typical in suburbia, the front living room sat in shadow behind closed drapes and went largely unused. The back den with the requisite seventies-porn-movie-style wet bar, stone fireplace, and sliding glass door to the pool, was where we would socialize. It was a little like being in The Brady Bunch, without parents.
    Mark’s room was across from mine, small and bare, but he didn’t stay there. He had a famously minimalist apartment nearby (he claimed to own no furniture and have only a mattress on the floor for a bed) but he kept the room as a social placeholder, comingover with his friends or his girlfriend on the evenings and weekends to hang out. When he was at the house he invariably took up position under a Roman-looking tent by the pool, pacing back and forth while he mulled over the day’s business. In his sandals and shorts, with his hand sometimes raised to his chin while he mused, he looked every bit the part of a little emperor.
    I remarked on this to Sam as we lay in our bathing suits on the pool deck that first weekend, surveying the scene. Since meeting at happy hour, we had quickly formed something of an alliance. Alone, we might just have been the odd employees interested in something besides accumulating mountains of data and power but, together, we were the weird kids who occupied the far edge of Facebook’s cultural map, composed mainly of Harvard fraternity boys, preppy Stanford kids, and other engineers of similar provenance. Sam and I claimed the pool as our de facto territory, given that we were more comfortable in swimsuits and in the sun than most of the engineers, and set up our towels on the deck in the afternoons to watch the goings on around the house.
    Lucy, a petite, good-natured Stanford ex-cheerleader who had recently been added to the customer-support team, lived at the house and often worked on answering emails from the pool, her laptop perched precariously on the edge of the deck. Fiercely competitive (she made sure to win all sports competitions held at Facebook, like the yearly Game Day, which wasn’t very hard to do, considering that most employees weren’t particularly athletic), she made it a point to answer more emails than anyone else, even while half submersed in the pool in a bikini and turning a deep tan.
    Maryann also often came to the pool in her