Mustafa’s Paper

                                                                                            Nate

“It’s already nine, I should probably call.” Leaning against the kitchen counter, I dig into my front pocket as I feel for the corners of my phone. I pull it out just as the front door is flung open. There he is, late as usual. “Do you know how late you are?!” I exclaim.

Nate looks up at me. His eyes just as dull as before. Look into those things too long and you might see a ghost in there somewhere. Nate is in his mid-twenties but bears the skin of a fifty year old, featuring pale skin and dark bags that hug the bottom of his eyes. He slowly brings his arm up and gingerly tugs away at his sleeve revealing half of his prison tattoo. Flicking his wrist, he glances at the stained face of his stainless steel watch. The same watch that our parents bought him on his 18th birthday. Nate smirks, and looks back up at me. “33 minutes and 12 seconds”.

You have all the right to assume that I would eventually get used to his sarcasm and learn better than to blatantly set myself up, but it can’t be helped. Nate always finds a way to make a smart-ass comment despite the situation. He wears the same unamused, unimpressed expression on his face until he has the opportunity to make someone feel stupid, or to be able to respond with any form of sarcasm. Only then would you see a flicker of life in the unsettling persona that is Nate.

“Can we just do this already?” I scoff, as I impatiently tap my foot against the unfinished floorboards. “Yeah, yeah, whatever”. I pull a chair from the kitchen the table and wake the screen of my laptop that has been sitting on the table for 34 minutes and 7 seconds. Nate gingerly hobbles over and sinks into the chair next to mine. He actually used to run track and was offered 6 D1 scholarships. Running on the track would turn him into a completely different person. His colorless, glazed over eyes would light up, his back no longer in a hunch as he itched to hear the starting gun crack. Everything was looking promising for Nate until he split his knee wide open. Along with his track career, his tickets into top tier colleges were taken away from him. He would go on to attend community college, becoming the first individual in our family to ever do so only to drop out one semester later.

The end of Nate’s college life would mark the beginning of his life as a felon. He spent months indoors behind a buzzing monitor teaching himself how to hack into public databases. He started off with somewhat smaller crimes, such as stealing credit card information and buying untraceable prepaid visa gift cards. What seemed to be a somewhat insignificant criminal drastically changed in the eyes of the government when Nate learned how to break into bank databases to access information about any customer he desired. Instead of using the information for himself, he sold it to higher class criminals. To be honest, he was raking in a lot of money. A lot more than I do flipping week-old frozen patties from 9 to 5 every day. Long story short, his spree finally ended when he foolishly sold the information regarding a high-profile government official to an undercover officer.

A couple years and a couple tattoos later, Nate would finally be released from prison, visiting once a week to teach me everything he knew about the art of computer hacking. I don’t know how, but I know that we won’t need to cash in welfare vouchers given 6 months time.