He and Mom exchanged a look. A long one.
“All right, I guess,” he said, finally. “Sounds like it might keep you out of trouble.”
“That’s what I thought too.” I put down the spoon and started backing out of the room. “Me and trouble are no longer on speaking terms.”
Lucy whined, “Lois gets to do everything fun.”
I stuck my tongue out at her. “Your turn will come.”
I’d spend some quality time with Lucy later.
She had a holoset—it hadn’t come with the game she’d asked for, but she played it enough despite that. I wanted to try it out, learn more about how the tech worked in prep for taking on the Warheads. But first, I had a more pressing engagement.
“Dinner’s in twenty minutes,” Mom said as I turned and bounded up the stairs to my room. I closed the door and waited a second with my ear to it to make sure no one was following, including Lucy practicing her stealth skills. Then I turned the lock.
Sure, it was probably overkill. But my friend claimed it was too dangerous for us to talk on the phone, let alone use Skype. He wouldn’t tell me his real name, or let me see his face or hear his voice. He said it was too much of a risk for him—and for me, too, by extension. He wasn’t willing to chance it. He wouldn’t say more about why. I suspected it had something to do with his parents, though he claimed they were just farmers.
But I always locked my door to prevent having to explain to my parents or kid sister what I was doing, since any of them were capable of barging in without warning. My friend and I were also careful about passwords. We only communicated using a hyper-secure chat service. He had an online techie developer friend who was paranoid about spyware and had created the app we used on our phones and the more elaborate software installed on my laptop. Secrecy when we met up was a ritual now too, like locking the door. Habit.
He was my secret and I would keep it faithfully. Yes, it was irritating that he wouldn’t trust my word and refused to tell me who he was. But, well, it wasn’t irritating enough for me to give up on our . . . friendship. He had his reasons and I had to believe that they were good ones.
Someday maybe he’d tell me what they were. Or I’d figure them out on my own.
For tonight, I hoped he was there.
I opened the silver lid of my laptop and typed in my secret fourteen-character alphanumeric password. After it was accepted, I opened the chat window and put in the next code.
He was there waiting, or at least it looked like he was. The second I logged on to my chat account, invisible to anyone else, I saw his handle. Before I could type a greeting, he did.
SmallvilleGuy: I expected to see you on the news, the first girl ever kicked out of a Metropolis high school on her first day. I was going to tell you I was impressed. But a job?
I grinned. Rolled my eyes a little, and laughed. I typed out several messages in a row, not letting him get a word in edgewise—he was used to that from me, he always teased—about school, my new job, and the fact that even my dad had seemed to approve.
Sorry to disappoint you, I typed last, but I told you it’s going to be different here. I’m making a change, onto the straight and narrow.
I waited, the cursor blinking, until a line of text popped up that told me he was typing a response.
Those seconds when I was waiting to see what he’d say next, sometimes they were the longest moments of my life. The pure anticipation made my heart race.
I could admit it to myself, because no one else would ever see it. Even he would never know how silly and vulnerable I was while I waited.
I—also known as SkepticGirl1—had first met SmallvilleGuy two years earlier on Strange Skies, a message board where the slightly-less-lunatic fringe tracked reports of phenomena or sightings or events that couldn’t be easily explained away, no matter how dedicated the local cops and the military and anyone else who got asked about them were to downplaying and denying.
I wasn’t dumb—especially when he said he couldn’t tell me his name, I was aware he might be some middle-aged creep pretending to be my age, and so I demanded proof that he wasn’t.
After a few minutes, he’d sent me a message with an image attached. It was a photo he’d taken with his phone of his learner’s permit, his thumbs covering up his name and his face. The age and locations were right, though, and it had only been issued a few days before.
Then fourteen, he was too young for a regular driver’s license, but had been able to get a permit early because of his parents’ farm. His willingness to provide proof (and his personality and my gut feeling) had convinced me.
Before, I never really had anyone I could talk to. No one who was interested in things the way I was.