This is what Sister Benedict Joan was thinking about as she powered up her laptop. Like always, she had no answer. She shook her head and sipped her Earl Grey tea.
The Sister liked to watch the computer go through its electronic ablutions: loading Windows, loading the antivirus software, checking for updates, and checking e-mail. She imagined it was guided by the hand of God, though she knew it was the minds of the men who created such technological wonders, and not the wonders themselves, that were the real evidence of divine grace.
She opened her browser and checked her blog. She never liked the name Christ’s Cadets, but all the good names—Christ’s Warriors, Christ’s Knights, and Christ’s Soldiers—were already taken. There was one new comment, which was a bit unusual. While Sister Benedict felt certain that people read her blog, they rarely left comments. When they did, they usually took the form of “Get a life, you f***ing joke,” only the “uck” wasn’t blocked out.
This new post, like the few others, was anonymous, and it simply said, “This must not be allowed to happen.” Beneath that plea was a link to Jared Stone’s eBay listing.
***
Sherman Kingsborough liked life. He liked it a lot.
At twenty-three years old, Sherman was already stinking rich. He was the happy recipient of a trust fund bequeathed to him by a father who’d made millions war profiteering during Vietnam, and who had died on Sherman’s eighteenth birthday.
Sherman’s mother had returned to her native Korea when he was a little boy (his father had more or less dispatched her like she was an unwanted employee), and he never had contact with her again. Sherman was, incorrectly, led to believe that his mother had abandoned him. With no siblings and no parents, and having grown up in a world of excess and extravagance, Sherman’s moral compass was left to drift unchecked. It spun round and round, never quite finding north.
It wasn’t surprising, then, that Sherman used his newfound millions to indulge every whim and fetish imaginable. From sexual encounters too deviant to name or number to keeping the most exotic endangered animals as pets, only to eat them for dinner, Sherman had denied himself nothing. If his brain thought it, he did it.
It wasn’t all depravity and debauchery, though. Each time Sherman found himself plumbing the depths of his darkest impulses, he would follow it with a noble gesture. When he fired his father’s entire household staff because of a spot on a wineglass, Sherman spent two months working at an ashram in India. A week after he told a fifteen-year-old high school girl he loved her just to get her into bed, ditching her in a seedy hotel room the next morning, he flew to the Bering Strait to clean oil-soaked gulls that had been caught in the wake of a tanker spill. And after evicting a poor family from one of his father’s many real estate investments—a dilapidated apartment building in Queens, New York—Sherman climbed to the top of Mount Everest as part of an expedition that was raising money for Habitat for Humanity. Each gallant act a counterbalance to atone for one of his sins.
It was an unbreakable cycle that seemed to be (like Sherman actually was) on methamphetamines. He never stopped to catch his breath, never took stock of who he had become; he was afraid of what he might find.
After six years of living such a high-octane life, Sherman Kingsborough was bored out of his freaking mind. For the man who had everything, or at least had access to anything, there seemed to be nothing left.
But Sherman had felt this way before. After he summited Everest, he was sure he had peaked, a pun he repeated to himself through the entire descent, but found traveling with opium smugglers in Pakistan to be a whole new high (the latter pun unintended). It seemed that whenever he was out of new things to try, a previously unknown path presented itself. It’s better to be lucky, he liked to say, than good. It was the guiding principle of Sherman Kingsborough’s life.
It was also the first thought that came to his mind when he saw Jared Stone’s eBay listing.
***
Jackie was lying on her bed staring at her new iPhone, scrolling through Neil Gaiman’s Twitter feed. In the few weeks she had owned the phone—she and Megan had each received phones as gifts for the new school year—it had become an extra appendage for Jackie, never more than a few feet away, almost always in her hand. She was already plugged into every social network she could find—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram—but almost never participated. She was a lurker, a voyeur.