“Please tell me,” Jonah began, “that in that other dimension you lived in, Mom and Dad never limited your time on the computer, and you became some genius programming-hacking expert. Please tell me you don’t have the same friends I do, and, I don’t know, you’ve been hanging out with Dushaun Ross the past three years. And maybe learned everything he knows?” Dushaun Ross was a kid in Jordan’s class who had probably been born clutching a laptop. Jordan could remember only one conversation he’d ever had with Dushaun Ross: Once, in fifth-grade computer class, Jordan’s computer had frozen up. When Jordan raised his hand to ask the teacher for help, Dushaun had reached over and hit some magical combination of keys that made the computer work again. The whole time, his eyes never even left the screen of his own computer. Come to think of it, that hadn’t actually been a conversation. “I’m not friends with Dushaun,” Jordan admitted. “And I’m not a computer expert.”
