Next time I’m a fugitive, I thought, I’ll remember that. Life sure is strange sometimes.

Kanye interrupted us. Brain glanced at his clearly jerry-rigged pop-up monitor to see who was calling, then ignored it. He was on a roll. “We started dissecting the code they released, seeing if we could find a footprint. It was really hard. But then Judy, Judy McElnea, she’s secretary of the club, anyway, she also plays the guitar. She’s in a real band…” He frowned, then admitted, “They’re not that great. Anyway, Judy told us that music has footprints too. She was doing a project, trying to figure out why some groups get popular when their songs don’t really sound that different. So she converted their music into code, trying to find the repetitive elements. You should see what she came up with, Mr. Stone. It’s really good, I mean really. You could look at a code and figure out what band it came from.”

As he dived into this explanation, Brain was transformed from a teenager huddled in a chair to a confident young man, swimming easily in his element. His whole being had come alive as he explained this to me. The chair seemed to disappear. There was a twinkle in his eyes, a brightness to his spirit. And suddenly, enjoying my bagel and very impressed by Brain, I suddenly realized why I couldn’t keep my big mouth shut. Why I felt compelled to stand up against the Wrightmans of the world. I wanted to make sure the America this kid and his friends inherited provided for them the same opportunities I’d enjoyed. I wanted them to know what it meant to be proud to be an American.

I caught up with him mid-sentence. “… treat the segment of code they released as a piece of music instead of digits. We graphed the repetitive elements and we were able to figure out its rhythm. Listen.” He hummed about fifteen seconds of seemingly atonal bars, moving his hand up and down as if conducting it. I have to admit it sounded a lot like progressive rap to me, which I don’t appreciate. He ended his demonstration and looked at me somewhat sympathetically. “You understand what I’m saying?”

“Oh yeah, sure. Absolutely.” I did get the general concept. “That music you were humming is the code.”

“Exactly. Anyway, we named it ‘Judy’s Screaming Cat.’ That was ’cause Judy has this cat that just wouldn’t be quiet. But we took that rhythm and backtracked, trying to find the composer, the hacker. We had to go backward, find another code that had the same rhythm. If we could do that, we would know who wrote the cyjack code.”

He paused as George refilled my cup.

“That was tough. Honestly.” He looked down, into the past, as he remembered that. “It took weeks and we tried everything we could think of. We got code from all over, from any source we could think of.” He confided to me, “If you want to know how Barbie is programmed to answer questions, just ask me. And this was all going on while we were prepping for the SATs. It was totally crazy.” Then he sat back and smiled with self-assurance. “Then we found it.”