The Watcher in the Wall by Owen Laukkanen Page A

are going to die warm in their beds in the nursing home sixty years from now. There’s nobody real.
    Totally agree,
Gabriel replied.
Too many time wasters. And you?
    Madison blinked.
And me what?
    Are you real?
    Madison looked at Gabriel’s picture again.
Hell yes,
she wrote.
I’m as real as it gets
.
    < 32 >
    They worked on the profile for a solid hour. Chose a username—XXBlackDaysXX—and raided Mathers’s laptop for an old school picture.
    “Why me?” Mathers asked Windermere.
    “You’re barely out of grade school,” Windermere told him. “Plus, you’re not famous yet. Stevens is too old to be playing a moody teen, and I’ve had my picture in the paper too much to stay incognito.”
    Mathers grinned. “The curse of the Supercop.”
    “Anyway, if we want to attract this girl’s attention, it’s better if we’re a guy.”
    “That’s assuming she’s a girl at all.”
    “She’s playing a girl on the Internet, Derek. We’re playing the guy who thinks she’s cute in her profile picture. That’s all that matters, at this point.”
    “Fair enough,” Mathers said, uploading the picture. “But we need some kind of backstory. What’s our boy doing on this forum, besides scoping out the hotties?”
    Stevens and Windermere didn’t say anything for a moment. Then Stevens shifted his weight. “Sure,” he said. “What if we’re being bullied in school? That seems pretty common.”
    “Okay,” Mathers said. “Why, though?”
    “Because we’re clumsy and awkward,” Windermere said. “Because we’re constantly doing silly shit like falling on our faces in front of the whole school, or wearing our shirts inside out. Or wearing the same clothes over and over because our dad’s in the hospital and our relatives don’t have enough money to buy us a new wardrobe every month—or year, for that matter. Or maybe we don’t have any friends because we’re too tall and funny-looking, and we don’t go to school dances, because if we do, we just stand against the wall because nobody would ever be caught dead dancing with us.
    “We’re lonely,” Windermere continued. “We see everyone else in the whole goddamn school walking around with friends and, like, girlfriends or whatever, but we go home alone. We go home and wash our shitty clothes until they’re threadbare so we can wear them tomorrow without smelling bad, and we don’t go to parties or out to the movies, and even the friends we
do
think we have would sell us out at a moment’s notice, just for a chance to be more popular.” She exhaled. “How’s that?”
    Stevens and Mathers were staring at her. Mathers’s eyes were wide,like she’d just told him she’d emigrated from Neptune. Stevens was studying her with that concerned-dad expression of his, like he knew there was something the matter and he didn’t want to let it go until he’d sorted out the problem.
    Windermere took a step back, feeling flushed. “Or, whatever,” she said. “Those are just, you know, suggestions.”
    “That’s a backstory, all right,” Mathers said, turning back to his laptop. “Should I just type that out and send Ashley Frey a message, then?”
    “Heck, no,” Stevens replied. “We send her a message so quick, she’s going to smell something funny. We need to draw her to us.”
    “Okay. How?”
    “We wait,” Windermere said. The men turned to her, as though they hadn’t expected her to speak up again. As though they figured her little rant had been her exit speech. She pressed on. “We bat our eyes and try to look pretty, and hope that she sees us. Maybe we post something on one of the forum threads, something she’s bound to see. Something that’ll make her take notice.”
    “I like it,” Stevens said. “Some kind of forum post. She likes lonely teenagers. Let’s play up Carla’s angle.”
    “But we’re not lonely teenagers,” Mathers said. “What if she sees through us, smells a rat?”
    “We’ll take that chance,” Stevens said.