The Cipher (4 page)

11

“MY LIFE IS
bizarre. Call me
.”

Smiles needed a good vent, and he was pretty sure Mel had a free period in the afternoon. He shot her the text as he flew over the Longfellow Bridge on his way back from Mr. Hunt's office, completely forgetting that it was Thursday and Ben would be waiting for a ride back from MIT. Smiles picked him up every week—or almost every week. To be perfectly honest, it wasn't the first time it had slipped his mind.

Luckily he saw him from the Infiniti: the tiny frame, the semi-hunched back, the determined little steps down Massachusetts Avenue. Smiles had to laugh. His next-door neighbor was a bizarre dude, no doubt, but it was a relief to see him. Much better to hang out with Ben for a few hours than to sit around alone, stewing about the letter.

Smiles couldn't resist. He floored it, angled to the curb, and jammed on the brakes. The screech sent Ben about twenty feet in the air. On the way down, his army backpack disengaged from his shoulder and landed in a spray of pens. He really made it too easy. Smiles tried not to overdo it, but in fairness, Ben was like a walking solicitation for practical jokes. He was wearing a typical outfit today: tattered blue jeans and a yellow dress shirt that fit him like a tent, his freakishly thin body imperceptible beneath it. He looked out at the world through timid brown eyes that were the stuff of bullies' dreams.

Smiles tapped the horn as Ben gathered up his backpack. He jerked upright, his shirt billowing around him, pirate-style.

Smiles rolled down the window. “Hey, bud!”

Ben cracked the door and sat down heavily in the car. It took all of his arm strength to heft the backpack onto his lap. It looked like there were bricks in the thing. “So, like, that never gets old to you?”

It may not have been the first time Smiles had ambushed him on the sidewalk.

“Not if your vertical leap keeps improving like that.”

“Well, thanks for the ride, anyway,” Ben said. “Thought you might blow me off today.”

“You kidding? Not a chance.”

Smiles turned off Mass Ave and cut through a rat maze of back streets to the Pemberton, which was even closer to MIT than it was to Mass General. (Especially if you ignored a couple of one-way signs.) He had discovered the Pemberton entirely by chance, after getting thoroughly lost on the way back from the hospital during his dad's first extended stay there. He'd pulled over in frustration and seen a
FOR
RENT
sign in the office window. His presence was no longer requested at Kingsley by then, so Smiles had followed his impulse and signed a month-to-month lease for the one-bedroom—theoretically, a temporary base from which he could visit his dad every day. But when his dad had returned to their home in Weston that first time, Smiles had stayed on in the city. It had been almost six months since he'd moved in, and Smiles had spent every night of it at the Pemberton.

“You're gonna be ready early tomorrow, right?” Ben said as he huffed up the stairwell to the second floor.

They were going to Fox Creek for the weekend. It was a huge casino just two hours away in Connecticut, and Ben had some nerd-fest math conference there. In the last year, Smiles had lost $22,000 playing online poker, but the last $10,000 or so was just unlucky breaks—he was actually getting pretty crafty at it. He'd been secretly thrilled when Ben asked for a ride. A nice little winning streak at Fox Creek could make for a decent birthday celebration, after all.

“Yeah, definitely,” Smiles said.

Ben was scurrying down the hall, all eager to get back to his formulas, but Smiles wasn't ready to go back to his empty apartment. He semi-forced his way into Ben's place and plunked down in the inflatable Budweiser Super Bowl chair.

“So you gotta do some gambling with me tomorrow,” Smiles said. “I mean, as long as you're at Fox Creek, you should have some fun.”

Ben made a beeline for his desk (shocker) and started dumping books out of his bag. “I'm going for the conference, not to goof around,” he said.

Smiles slumped in the plastic chair, reminding himself that he wasn't dealing with a normal person here.

The apartment looked exactly as it had that first day, six months ago. Halfway through a game of
Call of Duty
, Smiles had heard a clunking sound outside his door and found a scrawny-ass dude trying to lug a desk up the stairs by himself. Smiles's first instinct was to whip out his phone and get it on video; it would have gone viral in a second. Instead, he had introduced himself and helped out.

This had turned out to be a brilliant move. Smiles was just doing a good deed, but then Ben had let it slip that he was only sixteen and going to MIT. Which meant: mad genius. A brain like that could pay off big someday, Smiles figured, and he'd decided right then and there to chum up to the crazy little guy.

The only furniture Ben had was the desk, a bed, a folding chair, and a card table to eat his meals on. The one addition since he moved in was the inflatable chair, which Smiles had picked up at the liquor store so he'd have somewhere decent to sit when he came over.

Ben had his nose buried in his notebook already. The guy was a monk. Always working away, staying focused, making himself better. Smiles watched him and wondered, as he often did, why he couldn't be more like that.

He had his doubts by now that Ben would ever become the next Robert Smylie Sr.—the questionable hygiene alone would be an impediment to that kind of success—but Smiles had to admit he enjoyed the kid's company. Hanging out for hours at a time in Ben's place helped fill his days, yes, but he also liked the feeling it gave him to steer Ben away from his more disastrous life choices (e.g., Dockers) and instruct him on the finer things in life (e.g., RRL Low Straight Carolina Wash jeans in gray, single cuff). The one time he saw Ben in the Rag & Bone Yokohama shirt he'd given him for Christmas, his downy cheeks shaved for once, Smiles realized his grooming advice to Ben was probably the most productive contribution he'd made to society in his entire life. The strange friendship had even given him his last great idea for
his own thing
: to start a comprehensive life-skills school for the socially awkward. Hopefully with students more receptive than Ben, who despite that one shining moment seemed to ignore the copious copies of
GQ
and
Men's Health
that Smiles “accidentally” left in Ben's apartment in hopes they might stir some interest in his own betterment.

Smiles had given up on the nerd-school idea after drawing up one lesson plan (“Acne: Know Your Enemy”), but he was still holding out hope for his ultimate project: getting Ben a girlfriend. Smiles mulled over strategy as he wandered to the card table. On the wall above, Ben had taped an official-looking letter from some big-shot journal called
The Annals of Mathematics
, which had accepted one of Ben's math papers for publication. Smiles desperately wanted to make a joke about how it sounded dirty, but he figured Ben wouldn't appreciate it.

“So, you nervous about meeting with those spies?” he said.

Ben had told Smiles that he had to get some kind of government agents to clear his article before it could even get published. All top-secret and everything. That's why Ben was going to the conference—to meet with the agents about his article.

“They're not spies,” Ben said. “They're just some guys from the NSA.”

“The NSA,” Smiles repeated, not wanting to ask.

“The National Security Agency. They do cryptography.”

“Umm-hm. Cryptography.”

“Code-breaking,” Ben said, his voice bored now. He hadn't even looked up from his books.

“So what do you have in that paper, anyway—state secrets?”

“It's nothing special. All high-level work in cryptography has to be screened before it gets published.”

Ben was playing it off, but Smiles knew the truth: The kid was a mad genius.

Melanie's reply buzzed through his cell: “
In trig. Hang in there—see you tonight
.”

Tonight. Why she had agreed to come over tonight, Smiles wasn't exactly sure. Probably to give him the ax—or, knowing Melanie, maybe she was just being nice. Either way he had to make the most of it. Smiles figured he should probably clean up his place, or at least make a dent in his mountain of laundry. Just the thought of tackling it made him tired.

“Seriously, man, how do you live without a stereo?” he said, flipping through some of Ben's mail and other papers.

Ben just grunted.

“You need some music in your life. It's healthy.” Smiles was just talking to himself, like he did regularly here. It was nice to have someone there to hear you, though. Ben was like having a cat, Smiles thought as he read a crinkled flier from a place called the Clay Mathematics Institute.

MILLENNIUM
PRIZE
P
ROBLEM
CHALLENGE
it said at the top, and underneath—

Holy shit. They had seven math problems there, and they were giving away $1 million if you figured any of them out.

“Dude,” he barked so that Ben wouldn't ignore him this time. “Are you trying to solve these?” Smiles waved the flier at him.

Ben turned around. “Maybe.”

“What do you mean,
maybe
?”

“I don't know. They're hard.”

“I hope so, for a million bucks.” Smiles read some more. Ben had circled one of the problems in pen. It was called the Riemann Hypothesis, and it appeared to be the granddaddy of them all. Something to do with prime numbers. Smiles was pretty sure his dad's system—his special encryption technique—was based on prime numbers, too.

“So come on—are you doing this or not?” Smiles said.

“Put it away, Smiles. Just leave it.”

“God, that'd be pretty sweet to make a million dollars off a math problem.”

“
Just leave it
.”

No, he wasn't always the friendliest dude. He got moody like this, and sometimes he'd just kick Smiles right out of his apartment. Ben had mentioned once that he was a borderline Asperger's case—which as far as Smiles understood meant you were, like, actually medically diagnosed as a nerd—and he chalked up most of his strange behavior to the mental disease thing. Smiles knew that Ben didn't mean to be harsh; he was just too wrapped up in his brainy projects. Feisty and wise: He wasn't a cat, he was like a modern-day Yoda.

“Don't get all pissy.” Smiles carried the flier over to the desk and swiveled the notebook toward him. “Are you working on it now?”

Ben tugged the notebook back. He sighed again, much heavier this time, staring at a blank spot on the desk while he spoke. “If I promise to gamble with you,” he said, “will you let me work?”

Smiles threw up his hands. “Say no more. Work away. Tomorrow we ride!”

Smiles went across to his apartment, happy as he'd been all day.

13

AT EIGHT O'CLOCK
on the nose, Melanie appeared at his door holding a huge plastic container filled with water. Something dark was coiled at the bottom. Smiles recognized it immediately.

“Oh my God, Mel.”

It was the best birthday gift he had ever gotten.

Five minutes later, the dragon eel slipped into Smiles's 120-gallon tank, which had been sitting vacant since Virgil the barracuda bit it two weeks ago. The dragon eel had these fearsome little horns, and black and orange stripes across its body that a tattoo artist couldn't have drawn any better. The thing was a genuine beast, more than a foot long. It squirmed and settled around some fake coral.

“He'll be shy for a while,” Smiles said, “until he gets used to it.”

Melanie watched, her green eyes transfixed. Smiles understood—sometimes he just stared at his fish for hours before he realized a whole afternoon had passed. But now, he couldn't help staring at Melanie.

She didn't have freckles anymore, but you could still see the tomboy. In a month she would have a tan from cross-country practice. Her face was all elegant lines—sharp cheekbones, defined lips, the long curve of her eyebrows. Melanie was smokin' and she didn't even know it.

“Oh, look,” she whispered. The eel stirred along the bottom, churning the fluorescent pebbles like flakes in a snow globe.

Smiles watched her watching the eel, and his chest caved a little. They were leaning in so close he could smell her. Clean sheets and spring mornings. Maybe it was just her shampoo. Who cared—the familiar scent lit up his brain receptors like the Fourth of July.

They made eye contact, and all of a sudden he was just doing it: dipping his head and drawing toward her. Kissing her. Tender but intense, soft but electric.

After a while, Melanie broke it off. “Umm, wow . . . Look . . . I don't know—”

“Oh . . . no, I'm sorry . . . I just . . .”

Melanie had made it clear that they weren't together at the moment, and it looked like she was hitting about 9.5 on the freak-o-meter right now.

“Well, guess I did all right with the present,” Melanie said perkily, trying to laugh it away.

Then, “Don't worry about it, it's okay.”

And then, after a long minute of staring at the eel together, “What was that text about anyway?”

His text. About the letter.

Smiles wasn't sure he wanted to talk about it anymore. Maybe Mr. Hunt was right—the letter was toast, and it might be best to give up on it.

“Oh, I don't know.” It was already inching its way out of his mind, carting itself off to the trash heap of failed ventures he'd tossed away over the years (making varsity lacrosse at Kingsley; fronting an alt-metal band; seducing Ms. Callan, his ninth-grade math teacher).

“Tell me,” Melanie said. She slipped the palm of her hand into his, patting it on top.

Smiles decided he should probably talk about something before he went on another mad kissing spree. “Well, get this. I went to see your dad this morning.”

He told her about the message from his mom, and the “package,” and how her dad had destroyed the letter at his dad's direction. They sat on the couch, with Lake Jägermeister on the carpet between them. Smiles hadn't been able to get it all out yet.

The more he talked, the more Smiles missed his mom. This letter thing was stirring up the pain, like the rocks in his tank. There was comfort in the hurt, though. He wanted that bed of memories; he wanted those bits of her.

“Smiles . . .” Melanie hesitated.

“Yeah? What do you think?”

She gave him a quizzical look. “It's just that . . .”

Smiles waited for her to continue, but she just sat there, doing a kind of tilted-head thing. It reminded him of his frustrating conversation with Mr. Hunt earlier in the day. Was this something genetic? Were the Hunts programmed to turn gooey and useless at critical moments in Smiles's life?

“C'mon, Mel, just say it.”

“Well, don't you think . . . don't you think that it . . .”

“
What?
”

“Don't you think the message could be from your birth mother?”