Mason Croft

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.

Jerome clicked. The program automatically pulled the file from the website and began downloading. I was stunned how easy it was. No wonder everyone had one now. A small window appeared and told us how long it would take. Against the dark color scheme of the forum, the download window glowed brighter than anything else on screen. I noticed my mouth was dry.

Jerome stood guard while I checked on Cassie. She was hungry, so I put a frozen pizza in the oven—Mom hadn’t taught me how to cook anything else yet. Jerome got bored and came upstairs, and I showed him how to make swamp juice. Take all the fizzy drinks and juices in the fridge and mix them together, I told him. Coke, Sprite, orange crush, apple juice, cranberry juice, grenadine syrup, whatever you have. I’ve been drinking this since I was eight, it’s good. Jerome took a sip. He thought so too.

We took turns tip-toeing down to the basement to check on it. The download bar crept slowly, percent by percent, towards 100. It took so long that we had time to finish the pizza and swamp juice and walk Cassie to my grandmother’s. Shouldn’t have her around, Jerome warned.

We stopped at the corner store to buy milk for the house. Mom left some extra money that day, so I bought a chocolate bar and Jerome bought his favorite bubble gum. Back then, bubble gum came with collectible stickers and Jerome nearly had the whole set. He didn’t know what he’d do once he got the whole set, but he’d be able to tell everyone he got the whole set first. We weren’t the type to be first at most things. While we were out, we didn’t talk about it. When we got back, it had finished.

The house was empty. We locked the basement door and pulled the curtains anyway. The room plunged into darkness, lit only by the hard light of the old computer. There was one chair so Jerome sat down and I stood behind him. We made sure to use the video player that didn’t keep a view log knowing, even then, it was safer to shroud our sexuality in deniability.

We checked the door again, placed ourselves in front of the monitor, and pressed play. The screen glowed brighter, brighter, until it was the only thing we could see. The first few seconds were distorted, pixelated, like a deep-fried VHS tape. Its images shook and pulsated between lurid, overexposed pinks and greens and blues, silver static like boiling mercury, and the plump flesh of bodies being filmed. My hands gripped the back of the chair. I heard Jerome’ s breathing drop into his belly. We lurched violently forward from one kind of thirteen to another. The video calmed down and its first grainy scene appeared.

“I hope it’s a good one,” Jerome said.

“Yeah, it better be a good one.”

We couldn’t admit to each other we didn’t know what a good one was.