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Laptop Story

"Is anyone sitting here?"

This sounded good to Kyle. The person asking was a girl in her mid-twenties, Kyle, being forty, and married, said, "Oh, no, go ahead." and tried to act cool when on the inside, the old show started playing again, the fantasies, snippets of porn, thoughts of putting his left hand down to conceal his wedding ring, his kids, his wife, the possible affects of a divorce, how he might perform sexually if something happened, how he might perform-always worried about that. Where could he get a condom at this hour? Was he fat? Would a twenty-something year old girl this age mind a little belly fat around the middle? If he stood up straight . . . How would he look, naked in the afternoon light in a motel room?

This all sped through his thoughts in an instant. The girl pulled a laptop computer out of her computer case. A wireless mouse, car keys, power cord, cell phone. He glanced over while her attention was on her unpacking. She was "setting up camp" for a study or work session in the coffee shop, completely unaware of him. He was already forgotten.

He went back to his spreadsheet. His department head wanted some statistics, boring stuff for a presentation he would take full credit for while Kyle crunched all the numbers. Kyle's supervisor was a fat slob from India. Kyle suspected he exaggerated his accent. He was bossy, unfriendly, and known to lie if he thought it would advance his career. In a word, a prick.

Kyle took a sip of his coffee. It was going cold. He thought this might be his chance to open a dialog with the young girl, who was, he realized, young enough to be his daughter.

"Could you watch my stuff for a minute?" He asked. It was really unnecessary to have her watch his stuff, because no one would want to steal his crappy laptop, the laptop his idiot boss wouldn't replace. The laptop that took five full minutes to boot up, a laptop that was an embarrassment to even show in front of customers, which he was often required to do, in order to show the PowerPoint slides he worked on, which in turn displayed his company's product's obvious superiority over their competitors.

The bored girl at the counter with the amazing breasts, the breasts that amazed Kyle every single morning, without diminishing in any way through familiarity, the gravity defying breasts, the gum-chewing tomboy, freckled faced redhead with the amazing breasts, looked bored while she refilled his cup.

* * *

While Kyle was obsessing with the girl at the counter's breathtaking breasts, the girl who sat next to Kyle, whose name was Amanda, was collecting Kyle's things and stuffing them into his laptop case, and collecting her things and stuffing those things back in her laptop case. She kept the car keys ready. She was halfway out the coffee shop front door when she heard the guy go, "Hey!" and she broke into a sprint.

Amanda threw the laptop case into her backseat and backed out of her parking spot. Kyle MacDonald got behind the car to try to stop it. He put up both hands in the universal signal that meant, "Stop right now, I really mean it! I'm not moving!"

Amanda ran him over.

She knocked him back, at least. Later, witnesses would say it looked like both of his legs should have been broken. One witness said he screamed like a little girl, but the newspaper reporter, who was sympathetic and didn't want to kick someone who was already down, left that detail out of his story.

The witnesses were right. Both of his legs were broken. They snapped, Kyle heard them snap, and Kyle commenced a screaming session that lasted until the paramedic gave him something for the pain, something that make Kyle wonder if the ambulance paramedic was David Lee Roth.

The paramedic was not David Lee Roth, but he had a remarkable and unfortunate resemblance which annoyed the paramedic because he was asked, all too often, if was indeed David Lee Roth, because by now everyone kind of remembered hearing a story about how David Lee Roth, the ex-lead-singer from Van Halen, was a paramedic. After being asked this enough times, he started to reply that yes, he was David Lee Roth. It never got him laid.

Kyle was in the hospital for three days. The only thing that saved him was the clip for his cell phone, which miraculously caught on the bumper of Amanda's car. Otherwise, he would have been thrown completely under the car and crushed. His wife visited him every evening until eleven. Back at home, after the kids were asleep, her co-worker, Don, visited her in bed. Kyle and the kids knew nothing of this, and no one ever found out.

Two days after Kyle got out of the hospital, he was fired. The loss of the laptop caused Kyle's company some very bad press, and a bunch of lawsuits. Kyle's wife left him a month later for Don.

* * *

Amanda did not steal the laptop at random. She had taken a seat next to Kyle MacDonald for a reason. Kyle MacDonald was an account manager for XPress Credit Agency, and the social security numbers, credit card numbers, names, addresses, birthdays, maiden names, and a slew of other information on more than 40,000 West Michigan consumers were on the "boring" spreadsheets and databases Kyle MacDonald had so irresponsibly left exposed on his unsecured laptop.

When she took it back to the apartment she shared with her boyfriend Michael, he was astonished at what she had scored.

"There's no password on this." Michael said. "This is fantastic."

"It's making me really doubt my fellow man," Amanda said. She wondered how anyone carrying around this kind of information could leave it on a laptop with no password, and ask a perfect stranger to "watch" it. Darwin was wrong. Man hadn't evolved a bit.

Amanda took great pride in her ability to mock everything anyone did around her, either out loud, if the target of her mocking wasn't within earshot, or in her head, if she was too close to mock her target out loud. Her targets were invariably human, and she knew why: her "fellow" humans were chimps.

"What's that smell?" Amanda asked. There was a sweet, sickly smell coming from somewhere, either around the small dining table or from the small kitchen area of their apartment. She sniffed and crinkled her nose while Michael hunched over on the couch with the laptop on the coffee table. He rolled a joint and stared at the screen in rapt attention. He remarked that he didn't smell anything.

"I'm defiantly smelling something."

"I don't smell anything."

"Did you try to cook?" She opened the refrigerator, saw nothing out of the ordinary, sniffed the box of baking soda, didn't smell anything strange, and shut the door.

"These are high-income demographic folks here," Michael said. He was staring amorously at the laptop screen, reading the names of random individuals with high incomes and no clue that they were about to be ripped off.

Amanda poured a bowl of Lucky Charms and then she heard the lighter flick and she knew neither one of them would be worth a damn for about a half an hour.

They got high. The stuff they currently had was some kind of sticky "blue Hawaii" shit, or so their dealer claimed, and Amanda suspected it was laced with something. She smoked it anyway because it got her really, really stupid-high.

Later, she said, "Shit."

"What?" Michael was sprawled back on the couch, staring straight up at the ceiling.

"Dr. Phil's on." Amanda scrambled for the remote.

"That sack of crap?" Michael asked, as annoyed as he could be while he was as high as he was. "Why do you watch that sack of crap?"

Michael had heard the term "sack of crap" on a movie a few nights before, and he had adopted it, working it into every other conversation he could manage. Amanda thought Michael was a "verbal chameleon". He adapted phrases and didn't have the imagination or nuance to work it in so that people wouldn't notice. He was a weasel-faced chimp that Amanda was just waiting to dump, but no one better was coming along any time soon, she figured, so she thought she'd stick with Michael until someone did. Maybe she'd go lesbian. She liked to try new things.

Dr. Phil was bawling out some teenager with mascara running down his face. The teenager seemed to be a fan of "The Cure" lost fifteen years too late in time. It was a sad case of social anxiety and getting mixed up with the "wrong crowd", and by the time it was over, Michael and Amanda were laughing so hard, their mascara would have run as well, if they wore makeup, which the didn't.

"What a loser," Michael said when Amanda clicked off the television. Amanda wasn't sure if he meant Dr. Phil or Mascara boy. She supposed it didn't matter.

Her buzz was wearing off and it was time to get down to business.

It was time to order some shit online, compliments of sloppy-no-password guy and his spreadsheet of magic numbers.