The Boy Kings

the Riviera’s yellowed ceiling. Though younger than us and with fewer diplomas, Thrax was the man on this trip: He was keeping the receipts, he had the company credit card, he was Facebook’s green-eyed, adolescent hacker, leading man. We were just along for the ride.
    Sam and I spent the afternoon at the pool at Caesars Palace, opting for the iconic hotel’s opulence over the Riviera’s seedy ambience. We were always looking for reasons to lie on chaises in the sun, or in the sauna in Thrax’s apartment building in winter. “Oh, you guys are getting naked again,” Thrax would observematter-of-factly whenever, on social occasions, Sam and I would inevitably find the closest pool, beach, or sauna in the area and strip to our swimsuits.
    Sam, unlike the rest of the engineers, adopted a wry tone in relation to all of this: the site and the company. He was a military kid whose mother was in the Air Force and acted as the family breadwinner, toting Sam and his sister around to various military bases in America and in Europe. He didn’t have particular attachments to places or even to particular social milieus that the rest of us did. He knew this scene would pass and that there would be another. “You look pale,” we would often say to Sam’s fellow engineers in the office with affectionate sarcasm, quoting Less Than Zero, because it was true, and because it was funny. Everyone in the office looked pale—not because they had been away from California, like Clay in the novel, but because they lived indoors. “You look pale,” Emile would sometimes say back to us, trolling, since by the end of the summer Sam and I were well-bronzed.
    Thrax called us at three in the afternoon after waking up from a nap or the night before, we weren’t sure. His sleeping schedule was erratic, consisting of twenty-hour days on the computer followed by sleep, from which I imagined him waking only to put his fingers back on the keypad and resume the line of code or AIM chat that he was writing when he passed out. The mere thought of this completely unregulated, unnatural sleep cycle made me imagine a sensation akin to being plugged into an electric socket at all times, minus fresh air, circadian rhythms, or exercise. His apparent lack of the need to exercise or be in nature fuelled my only mistrust of him at the time: Can he beentirely human? Most boys need to be outside sometimes, to tackle the open street, on a skateboard or a bike. I had never met anyone who could be indoors all the time, who drove everywhere, who didn’t need to burn off energy outdoors. I wondered how Thrax didn’t get rickets, how even his young bones could stay firm without sun.
    Eventually Thrax made his way to Caesars to join us at the pool, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt that was slightly too big. Shorts on most grown-ups are automatically funny, and he must have realized that because he told us immediately that he didn’t want to wear them anymore.
    “I want us to go shopping to buy clothes for tonight,” he declared, having made reservations at a steakhouse at The Palms, then the most expensive restaurant in Vegas (according to his extensive research). He said he could charge the new outfit to Facebook and, when I thought about it, I figured he could. A one-hundred-dollar shirt was nothing compared to $25 million or whatever our latest round of funding was (at this point, I was losing track).
    Facebook was not going to buy me an outfit to wear that night, and I wasn’t even going to try to slip it onto the company credit card. I’d have to wear the same American Apparel tank dress from grad school that I’d been wearing all weekend, while Thrax would don the new outfit that I would help him find. It felt ludicrous, to be shopping for VC-funded clothes for a kid who made more money than I did, but then there was nothing about the entire experience—the hacking convention, my new crew of friends, our Facebook business cards with whatever snippets of pop culture we chose to put on them, like Mark’s “CEO,bitch” or Thrax’s “You run, I con”—that was not, from some angle, ridiculous.
    “I think we should go to Marc Jacobs,” I suggested, because at the time it was my favorite store, and the idea of putting a skinny boy in a pair of skinny pants sounded like a good way to spend an hour.
    “Who’s that?” he asked.
    I almost laughed. For all his obscure, self-taught knowledge of technology and Internet culture, he really was