Mason Croft Our First One, a Good One We were thirteen when we figured out how to download our first one. We knew already that other boys in our school had a few, and it wasn’t a secret how they got them. Jimmy Wright’s older brother showed him how to get one first, and Jimmy showed Jared Trench who showed Miles Tanner who taught the McFarlane twins how to get one, and the twins printed out instructions and peddled them in the hallways to anyone who’d give them five dollars. Even some girls knew how to get one before we did. Overnight the school split in two. Jerome and I came in one day and news was never mind your clothes or how you did your hair, now there was something more to care about. “They’re just videos,” I said. “Aren’t they?” Jerome asked. They were, and weren’t. The way everyone talked about them, never in a whisper, confirmed we were missing out on something essential. Once the knowledge of how to get one—and the want, too, a creeping and new want, which confused us when we discovered we’d been mutated by it as well—was there, having one, or telling everyone you’d get one, was inescapable. We agreed: we had to have our own. Eric Hirsch gave us the instructions during math class. He wouldn’t relinquish his printout but he tore a piece of paper from his textbook, pulled a pencil from behind his ear, scrawled out the steps in short, cramped lines, then folded the paper in half and passed it to us under the table. When Jerome and I opened it at my locker, we felt the grease stains from Eric’s hair gel between our fingers. We planned to meet at my house after school. It was Tuesday so my younger sister, Cassie, who normally spent afternoons at our grandmother’s, was home and I had to watch her. I put on her favorite Disney movie in the living room. It was a good one and I almost started watching it too, but Jerome showed up and we went to look for a computer. We used the one in the basement, the one that took a few minutes to boot up and no one used anymore. Following the instructions, Jerome found the online forum Eric used to get his, checked the specs for the file converter program the forum recommended, and installed that first. Then we entered the command prompt, a mechanical string of characters, eerie as they were nondescript: dir /ab. The forum spat out a list of files longer than a Chinese restaurant menu, reams of data loading on the screen in flashing blocks of fifty. There were hundreds of them. We probed the directory for one with a good title. Some of them made us giggle, others made us howl. We read them aloud and grabbed each other’s arms, howling. Then we read one that shut us up. “That’s gotta be a good one,” I said.
48
