The Boy Kings

twenty-four hours, so we always ended up there. We went grocery shopping in the middle of the night because it was the only time that we were both awake. In the morning, Thrax was sleeping and I would be at work. After midnight, he was working (or at least he was at the office, where he alternately coded, watched, or filmed videos, and managed his Internet presence across multiple forums and sites) and I would be asleep. Our schedules overlapped only between ten and midnight, and this is when we became friends.
    In the empty Safeway lot, Thrax parked his car, letting the jazz station that we fought so hard to find trail on for a few seconds before turning off the engine. As we walked toward the fluorescence of the grocery store, I noticed that we were both wearing thrift store T-shirts and old jeans: the suburban indie uniform, though we both come from places the other has never been. I was surprised that we had anything in common at all, not just our clothes, but music, our dry humor. Georgia seemed too far to be familiar. I’d read too many stories about the South in my literature classes to think of it as anything but other: a place where all the American themes of racial darkness twist intosomething even darker, stranger, more impenetrable than in the American states like California and Connecticut, which are seemingly without accent. Yet here we were in the parking lot in the middle of the night, two young Americans on a mission to buy groceries in matching outfits.
    Though we were in California, Thrax’s grocery list read like it was definitely from somewhere else. Bologna, white bread, Miracle Whip. We wandered the overly bright, unkempt deli side of the decaying Safeway for fifteen minutes looking for sale bologna, meaning that it cost ten cents less than the one that wasn’t. Thrax explained that in Georgia he was able to eat for twenty dollars a week just by buying the right bologna. This confused me, because he was earning at least twice what I was, and even I couldn’t imagine that the five or ten cents’ difference mattered. But he was strangely resolute about buying the cheapest sandwich ingredients.
    As I followed him around the aisles, I found this to be equal parts cute, as if he were introducing me to his former life as a scrappy, d.i.y. Georgia teenager, and equal parts a sign of the telltale deployment of power that marks the powerful. Driving a used BMW to Safeway to buy the cheapest sandwich ingredients to save the pennies, the constantly weighing pleasure versus cost, was all part of the game, of the calculation required to organize the resources to build the things that would remake the world the way it should be.
    Eventually we found the cheapest bologna, bread, and spread. Thrax was incensed that even the budget bologna was at least thirty cents more than it was in Georgia and complained about it all the way to the produce section. Once we were there,he forgot all about the bologna and started making fun of me for looking for organic fruit. I could see why the idea of organic produce was ridiculous to him; he didn’t eat it, as it was never on sale at whatever Georgia supermarkets he bought his bologna from in college. He couldn’t know that it tasted better than the genetically manipulated fruit sold at Walmart, and so, of course, the whole idea of organic seemed like some kind of Ponzi scheme that only a naive California girl would fall for.
    This is the classic position of the nineteen-year-old boy hacker: He thinks that, by having nothing and being from nowhere, he can outsmart everyone and build an empire without anyone taking notice. He thinks everyone is by definition an easy mark, comparatively weak, because he assumes they have it better than him. He thinks he will know, unlike the naive masses, when he’s being taken for a ride. His job—which is also his identity, an identity he chose at around age thirteen when he first began searching the Internet for evidence of how it worked, of how it could be broken—is to find the holes, whether in a website or in someone’s logic, that he can exploit.
    That night in the grocery store I could have tried to explain to Thrax, but didn’t, that I bought organic food because it makes me feel better, and that this was my hack: to live as richly as possible with next to nothing, with few reliable career prospects as of yet, in a place that didn’t have as ready and profitable a place for me as it did for him. I invested in what made