*As Understood by Someone Born in 2002

You wake up to the sound of your clock radio. You grab it, along with your landline, camera, calculator, calendar, and fax machine, before heading out the door.

Standing on the sidewalk, you yell, “Uber!,” as loud as you can. Wouldn’t you know it, one pulls up to take you to school about twenty minutes later. The front is reserved for Luddites who still carry their clocks and radios separately, so you wander to the back of the big yellow Uber. Without gadgets and screens to distract you, you use this opportunity to make meaningful friendships with every other student on board, except for the forty-five kids you bully relentlessly. Nothing can replace the benefits of real human contact.

Homeroom. Before you can so much as balance your checkbook, one of the kids from the ride to school, Jamie, sneaks up and pantses you! At least it’s over quickly. No one outside the room will ever know it happened, and it’s not as if Jamie’s future employers will be able to Google the incident in the encyclopedia. You start to think that everything’s going to be O.K. “Not so fast,” he warns you. Jamie always did have a knack for knowing what you were thinking and even what you were narrating aloud. “Lookie here.” He holds up—a Polaroid! Jamie has a Polaroid of you with your pants down in homeroom. Even Mrs. Pillikers is laughing at you. It totally sucks that images are proof of something and not just a suggestion of something that might have happened. You grab the Polaroid and destroy it. Then you pull up your pants.

After learning the finite amount of information the world has to offer, you decide to leave school early. Now no one who cares about you has any idea where you are, and you have no idea where anyone you care about is—complete peace. That night, the house phone rings. It could be anyone in the entire world. You pick up. Jamie surrenders: “I’m sorry about today.”

“That’s O.K.,” you lie. You’re going to kill that son of a bitch.

Your plan is simple: you’re going to do it, and then you’re going to lie about it. You open the Yellow Pages and search for an entry labelled “How to kill someone,” and then for one labelled “How to delete Yellow Pages search history.” No luck on either score, but now you’ll be in great shape if you ever need hospice.

After printing out the Maps app, you bike over to Jamie’s. All the bases are covered: Your checkbook is balanced. The street lights are on, so everyone thinks you’re at home. Wait—what if someone telephones and you miss it? You knock on Jamie’s door and ask his dad’s permission to plug in your landline, just in case. He’s cool with it. He’s honestly a pretty chill guy over all. Sucks that you have to kill him now, too.

I’ll skip the gory details, but let’s just say no one’s going to be pulling your pants down again. The next morning, the police knock on your door. “Could we please search your home?” they ask. You ask if they have a warrant. They do. You rip it up. “Goddammit,” one officer says. “That was our only copy. Someone’s gotta figure out a better way to keep a record of this stuff.” They leave and come back with another warrant; this time, they hold it just out of your reach. Inside, one of the cops starts poking at your Canon A-1. “Anything in here we should know about?” he asks.

“Go ahead and check,” you say. So he opens the film compartment, instantly destroying all the selfies you took with Jamie and his dad the night before. Lesson: All it takes is an unimaginably small amount of ingenuity, and you can get away with any crime you set your mind to.

You’re writing all this up on a legal pad for your monthly newsletter, when a second cop startles you, rather rudely: “There! Look—it’s right there!” He’s pointing at something in the Yellow Pages, but you’re not nervous. You used a page-to-page encryption that only a Yellow Pages specialist could crack. The cop dog-ears the page and asks to use your landline. Of course he can. A few minutes later, there’s another knock at the door.

“Did somebody call for a Yellow Pages specialist?” Shit. ♦