“Jesus!”
“It was happening right then. Live! As they were talking to me on the phone! Some guy in a Best Buy in Ohio was trying to use my card to buy…I don’t even know! I forgot to ask! How stupid can I get?”
Jen put a hand on her arm. “Calm down. It’s not your fault. You’re not stupid. You’re just upset.”
“Wouldn’t you be?”
“Of course! Something like that? I’d feel so…violated.”
Violated
An image flashed in her mind: Steven with his erect penis.
You know you want it
She pushed the thought away. “I need to get this taken care of. Cover for me, will you? I’m going to go in the bathroom and make some calls.”
“You don’t have to hide in the bathroom. He’ll understand.”
Anita glanced toward the optometrist’s closed door. “You didn’t see the look he gave me when I came in. Because I was almost late. Cover for me?”
“Sure.”
In the bathroom, she sat down on the closed lid of the toilet. She tried to call Kyle, but he’d set his phone to voicemail, and when she called the store, the line was busy. So she spent the next ten minutes talking first to a computer, then to a man with a thick Southern accent who elicited the information needed to secure her credit line. She was about to call Equifax when Jen came in and said, “Better wrap it up. Mrs. Wheeler’s here for her appointment. He’ll be out in a minute.”
“Thanks,” Anita said, shutting off her phone.
It was a busy afternoon.
She didn’t have time to call Kyle until it was almost time to go home.
3
Only one day to go and his suspension was over.
If this was one of those 1980s teen movies his parents always forced him to watch when they came on TV, he’d return a hero, his street cred boosted by his battle with The Man. But things didn’t work that way anymore—if they ever had. What was actually going to happen was that he would go back to school to find that no one had even noticed he’d been gone.
Nick finished watching the last of the morning’s Parks and Recreation reruns on FX, then turned off the TV and reluctantly switched on his laptop. His teachers had not only emailed his homework assignments, they’d tacked on extra work, apparently to punish him for getting suspended. As if that weren’t bad enough, his dad was making him help out at the bookstore this afternoon. So after he finished his schoolwork and after he ate his lunch, he was supposed to show up at Brave New World to shelve books or straighten books or do something equally useless.
Feeling depressed, he checked his email, scrolling down. The spam he received was getting much more adult. Not porno-adult but business-adult. There were offers to enroll in real estate seminars, ads for automobiles, lists of job opportunities and several recommendations for various financial institutions. He tried to remember if one of his fake profiles had him recently turning eighteen. That could explain this sudden influx of commercial announcements.
His attention was caught by the tagline of the last email: Nicholas Decker! Are you bored, suspended from school and in need of money? Just click…
Suspended from school?
That was pretty specific.
He knew enough not to click on spam from unknown senders, but the fact that the description was tailored so directly to his own situation intrigued him. He deleted it along with the rest of the spam and, seconds later, another email popped up: Nick! Need some easy money? Before you go to the bathroom and pop some Pringles, click on this!
That was not just specific, it was downright creepy.
He did have to go to the bathroom. And he had been planning to grab some Pringles before starting on his homework.
He deleted the unopened message and quickly exited his email account. It had to be a coincidence. Still, it was more than a little unnerving, and he forgot about going to the bathroom, skipped the Pringles and got to work on his algebra. It was after ten and the day was bright, but the inside of the house seemed dark, and after the third math problem, he got up and turned on not only the light in the dining room, where he was working, but in the kitchen and the living room as well. It suddenly seemed quiet, too, and he turned the television back on, lowering the volume until he could hear a murmur of voices loud enough to make it seem as though he was not alone, but not loud enough to be distracting. Feeling better, he worked on his homework until he was finished, then made some macaroni and cheese for lunch.
He was done eating by twelve forty-five, but the Twilight Zone episode he was watching was a good one, so he waited until it was over before heading to the bookstore. Taking his bike out of the garage, Nick thought about how far it was to Brave New World, and how, even if he took the shortcut, he would have to pedal up the high hill on Bluff Road.
He needed his own car.
But his parents were adamant that he was not going to get one until he graduated from high school—and then only if he maintained a 3.5 average his senior year.
He rode his bike out of their neighborhood, onto the highway and toward downtown, staying as close to the shoulder as possible. The high school’s lunch period was over, but in a small redneck burg like Montgomery, teenagers weren’t the only ones who liked to swerve their pickups in order to scare bicyclists.
The afternoon was warm, and Nick was sweating by the time he approached the center of town. Frowning, he looked to his left. Was that his mom’s car in front of the nursery? She was a plant lover with an impressive yardful of flowers that had been a stop on the Montgomery Garden Tour last year, so there was nothing inherently unusual about her spending her lunch hour looking at plants. But the sight of her Kia parked in the gravel lot gave him an uneasy feeling. He couldn’t say why, or what about it felt wrong, but something sure did, and he found himself pedaling faster in order to get away from the nursery before she came out and saw him.
He turned onto Main.
Ordinarily, he would have ridden his bike through the alley to the back of the store, but the last time he’d done that, he’d gotten a nail in his tire. Not wanting to risk another flat, he got off his bike at the gas station and walked it along the sidewalk the rest of the way down the block.
There was a big white sign in the dingy window of the empty storefront next to Brave New World, and he stopped to check it out. The sign stated that the space was to be the new home of The First People’s Bank. Nick was surprised. A bank in a narrow, crappy little spot like this? That made no sense. There was movement behind the window, a furtive shifting from one side of the room to the other, though the darkness and dirty glass would not let him see the figure clearly.
He purposely turned away, not wanting to see it.
As pathetic as it was, and as impossible as it might seem to be frightened in the middle of the day on a public street, he was frightened. Something about the figure’s quick jerky moves reminded him of a nightmare he’d had, and Nick pushed his bike forward, opening the door of the bookshop and pulling the cycle in behind him.