“Me, too. But it all depends on whether we’re accepted or not.” Jen held up her eggroll burrito. “This thing is really good. I didn’t think I was going to like it, but it’s amazing.”
Anita speared a fiesta wonton with her fork. “Mine’s good, too.”
“I should probably go back to bringing my own lunch to work, though. Try to save a few bucks.” Jen sighed. “Then maybe I wouldn’t have to keep relying on my parents.”
4
Seventeen years old, and he still didn’t like staying in the house by himself.
The minute his mom drove off, Nick turned on the TV in the living room and the light in the hallway, needing to hear some noise and wanting make sure there were no parts of the house that were dark—even though it was mid-morning on a particularly bright day. Such fears were childish, he knew, but he couldn’t help how he felt. He wondered if things would change once he became an adult, but the truth was, he didn’t really see that happening. He’d be eighteen in less than a year, and it was hard to imagine any radical changes in personality taking place in that time.
He wasn’t exactly sure why he still got scared being home alone. The house wasn’t that old. It wasn’t as if they lived in some historic mansion where a rich madman had murdered his wife in the 1800s. Theirs was just a regular home on a regular street with a bunch of others that looked just like it.
But he’d always had a vivid imagination, one that had inevitably turned toward darkness. As a little kid, he remembered seeing a movie on television about an escaped lunatic who lived between the walls of an ordinary family’s home, and for years afterward, every stray noise Nick heard in the house made him think that someone was hiding in the walls or the attic or the crawlspace.
His phone buzzed, and Nick picked it up to see a text from a number he did not recognize.
It was some bank, offering him his own credit card.
That was weird.
He automatically deleted the text. It was probably just some scam. How could he be eligible for a credit card? He didn’t even have a job. Someone was just fishing for personal information to use in order to create a fake account or…get a credit card.
Maybe he was eligible.
The idea appealed to him. Last summer, he’d wanted to upgrade his phone and had asked his dad for a loan, only to be told that the embarrassing antique he carted around was perfectly fine. If he’d had his own credit card, he could have charged it.
His phone buzzed again, but there was no text this time, no call. Apparently, the phone was ringing for no reason.
Was he being hacked?
Suddenly filled with panic, he flipped his phone over, pulled off the cover, slid open the back and yanked out the battery. He had no idea how sophisticated hacking operations were these days, but since phones could be tracked even when they were turned off, it made sense that they could be hacked that way, too.
The one thing in his favor was the fact that he almost never put correct personal information about himself online. His Google account was connected to a fake name with a fake address. For anything requiring a birthdate, he typed in random numbers.
Although…
The phone bill was paid by his dad, so it was probably linked to a credit card.
Should he call his father and let him know? If he did, his dad would just give him a lecture about allowing himself to be hacked. Besides, there was no guarantee that that was what was going on.
Maybe it would be better if he just waited to see what happened.
He decided to keep the battery out of the phone for the rest of the day and then put it back in before his parents came home.
Leaving everything where it was, Nick walked into the kitchen and got a water bottle out of the refrigerator. Twisting off the top, he took a long drink as he looked out at the back yard through the window over the sink. If it wasn’t a hack, what could have made his phone ring like that? he wondered. Was there something wrong with the device itself? Some sort of technical glitch?
Maybe it was a ghost.
The idea was absurd, and he knew it was absurd, but once in his mind, the notion was impossible to shake. He glanced back at the doorway. He was suddenly afraid to go into the living room and even look at his phone, certain for some reason that he would see something on the no-longer-dead screen, a picture, the face of a little boy, an overly serious little boy with obsidian-black hair and hard piercing eyes, looking out at him.
This, Nick understood, was one reason he continued to scare himself even though he was almost an adult: the specificity of his fears. He was never afraid he was going to see some generic ghost or amorphous blob. It was always an old lady with no teeth hiding in the closet, or a gibbering monkey-faced man crawling down the hallway.
Or an overly serious little boy peeking out at him through his phone.
He had no idea where these ideas came from or why they occurred to him, but from the second his brain conjured such an image, he was consumed with nothing else until he could prove to himself that it was not real.
Forcing himself to be brave, steeling himself for whatever he might see, Nick returned to the living room and picked up his phone.
Nothing.
A black screen.
Relief flooded through him, and he put the battery back in, turning on the phone, reassured that he saw nothing unusual on the screen as it came to life. He probably had a touch of OCD, since the stress and worry he’d felt disappeared as quickly as it had come, replaced by a sense of calm.
The phone rang, and he jumped, nearly dropping it.
Before he could yank out the battery again—his first reaction—he saw from the number that the call was from was his friend Victor. A glance at the time told him that at school they were on break.
“Hey,” he said, picking up.
“Where are you, man? What happened?”
“Suspended,” Nick said, and felt a little proud. That was not something that had ever happened to either of them.
Victor’s voice dropped conspiratorially. “What did you do?”
“Nothing. It was that play I wrote for Nelson’s class.”
“They suspended you for that?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s cuz it had the word ‘shit’ in it, right?”
“Which, right now, you are saying freely in the hallowed halls of Montgomery High,” Nick said drily.
“How long are you suspended for?”
“Two days.”
“What are me and Aaron supposed to do at lunch?”
“You’ll figure something out.”
The school bell rang in the background. “Gotta go,” Victor said.