The Boy Kings

straight out of Georgia. “His stuff is cool, kind of mod,” I explained. “You’ll like it.” I wasn’t even sure if he knew what “mod” meant but he didn’t ask.
    Sam and I continued to lie on the chaises for a while, letting the glittering Vegas sun gradually slip behind the Ionic columns that circle the pool. Thrax didn’t relax, leaning forward on the pool chaise, drumming his fingers against his knees. He looked at Sam and then back to me, and asked, “Is Sam coming with us?”
    “Uh, yeah.” I mean, I had assumed so. Sam was sitting right beside us and looked as confused as I was that this was even in question.
    “I think it should be just us,” Thrax said, affectlessly, flipping his hair out of his eyes with a flourish. “It’s time for Sam to be the left-out one.” His flinty eyes looked directly at me, as if challenging me to make a choice. What? I thought. Who is this kid? Why do we need to leave Sam out?
    Despite Thrax’s wish to leave Sam out and occupy the center of attention for a while, all three of us walked away from the pool and towards the Caesars Forum shops together, racingthrough the casino’s deliberate labyrinth on a mission for what Thrax thought would be fashionable clothes. I led the boys past Agent Provocateur with a tinge of longing that told me that in my heart what I really wanted was a boyfriend who would take me to Vegas and buy me a lingerie set that I could wear because I would know he loved me, and it would be okay to be naked, vulnerable in front of him. But I, we, were not there yet. Our scrappiness was exquisite in its own way, but not yet safe, not something I could make myself completely vulnerable to. We were at a hacking convention that was about breaking things, not making them secure. Despite this, I felt better with these boys than I did with the standard, preppy engineers we had left at the office. I thought this was why I sought out the hackers rather than the Harvard bros as friends: If I had to succeed the normal way, I wouldn’t make it. We had this in common.
    While I felt comfortable in the hackers’ company, there was also an intense opacity to them. Who were these people that the company adored, and were they people at all, or were they some kind of channel through which an American alpha masculinity was in process of remaking itself? Why else would you want a friend to be left out except to even the score in a game that you’re inventing so you’ll have something to win? In college and at grad school, there was a notion of politics, of some kind of larger human goal to one’s work. Here, in the valley, it seemed that life was a game and the goal was just to win.
    But what did it mean to win? At the time, I thought it meant that we got to be everything we imagined for ourselves, that we got to write the script to get exactly what we wanted. But what we wanted and how we would get there was not yet clear, quite.It was a strange feeling knowing you are supposed to want to win when you aren’t sure what it is you are winning.
    • • •
    That evening, the three of us were sitting at a table at the Palms, Thrax in a Lacoste button-down I had picked out after we spent two hours in Caesars Forum, rejecting everything else for being wrong in some way—too trendy, too fratty, too try-hard. There were celebrities in the restaurant but we barely turned our heads. We were at the center of things, even if no one else knew it yet. Thrax ordered a $175 bottle of wine that only Sam and I were old enough to drink. We poured him thimblefuls while the waiter wasn’t looking, and cut zestily into our steaks, feeling more sophisticated than usual in the sleek atmosphere created by the room’s mirrored columns, modern furniture, and soft lighting filtered by palm fronds. It felt, suddenly and intensely, that we had arrived.
    That night, back in the hotel room, I really did have to choose between them, unlike earlier that day by the pool, since there were two lumpy Riviera beds and three of us. I didn’t hesitate—it seemed right to sleep in Thrax’s bed, and so I did, and the three of us talked ourselves to sleep. Thrax’s hand and mine stretched near each other instinctively and I woke up later with my arm slightly touching his. His skin felt cold, almost inhuman, but I didn’t pull away.
    For several years, we slept this way on work trips or social ones—they were one and the same: connected, but not quite, like the physical enactment of the