Twisted Fate(49)

Finally I found it—a folder labeled simply “Allyson.” There were dozens of films in it. I figure I’d start with the latest one first—since the other ones were probably creepy things he took from the window before they were really talking.

I clicked on it and a window opened with my face. I was totally shocked. Graham had never interviewed me in his room before. But there I was sitting in the leather chair. I clicked Play. He was asking me questions. And I was shyly answering them. Then he started kissing me.

I watched in horror and fascination, trying to remember when I did this. My heart started pounding. I felt dizzy like I was going to be sick. I felt terrified. There was no way this happened or I would have remembered it. I did not do these things.

I clicked on another and it was me sitting in the passenger seat of Graham’s car, my hair blowing in the breeze and laughing. I never went for a drive in Graham’s car.

“Are you going to go for another ride with me?” he was asking.

“Of course,” Ally’s voice said while my lips moved.

“We’ll drive out and make movies like me and Eric,” he said.

“We’ll be stars,” Ally’s voice said dreamily while my face smiled.

I clicked on another one and it was me talking about baking muffins, wearing Ally’s clothes and the pearls she borrowed from Mom, and then I realized it was shot in the hold of Dad’s yacht. I haven’t been on that yacht since I was in middle school.

Something was terribly wrong. I was freaking out, but then I realized he had simply found a way to transpose my image over hers and use her voice and her answers to the questions he asked her. I can’t believe he made it look like we were making out. That was the weirdest part. He must have really liked it that one time we kissed in the garage and just gotten carried away I guess. It looked like he had a whole bunch of films of me but they were all things Ally did and said. Why would he do that? Was this just more of his weird art? It had to be. Or was he doing something creepier like selling this film to some weirdo pervert but making it so they would see my image instead of Ally and go after me?

Graham Copeland was getting stranger and stranger by the second. Just as I was about to click on another movie I heard a door creak downstairs and then footsteps. I quickly logged out of the Ally files and shut down the computer. Then I looked out Graham’s window. His father’s car was in the driveway. I quickly opened the window and slid out onto the ledge, then pulled myself up onto the roof. I walked over the roof to the back of the house, then hung down and dropped onto the back balcony. Then I hung off the balcony, dropped to the ground, and ran quickly into the woods. My heart pounding in my chest.

I could not believe what I had seen.





I couldn’t look at him after I saw that movie. But of course I had to. He lived next door. Our yards were connected. My sister was still in love with him. There were few things as horrible as that. Or at least I didn’t yet know how bad things could get.

I decided to talk to Becky about it because she was Junior Hacker Extraordinaire.

She had long since stopped talking to him after the stuff with little Brian.

“It’s not that hard to get some spyware on his computer, but finding out stuff that he has buried by using a Trojan horse or trapdoor is going to be really hard.”

“Can you do it?”

She looked really uncomfortable. “I can. But it’s the breaking and entering and doing something illegal that I’m not so into.”

“Are you kidding? For this guy?”

“I think we should stay away from this guy.”

“Can you teach me how to do it?”

She looked at me for a long time, like she was trying to figure out if I was smart enough.

“It’s tricky,” she said. “I could see you getting frustrated and messing things up.”

“Can you make a thing—whatever you said, Trojan horse or secret passage or whatever—can you make one on your computer and then show me how to get into it?”

She nodded. “I can. But listen, I don’t want any more part of whatever weird shit is going on with this kid. I’m pissed at him, but honestly, Tate, I’m scared of him. I’m scared of him and then sometimes I think he really is one of our friends and we should try to understand him and make him stop doing weird things. I mean, you know how it is. You’re super weird and we love you. Declan’s some kind of freaky Buddhist nerd who still studies up in his tree house. Graham’s just a little further on the f*cked-up scale than we are. I don’t think we can figure all this out on our own. I don’t think this is something we can do.”

“NO?” I shouted. “Then who is going to do it? This guy sold movies of you and Brian and God knows who else to pedophiles! He has weird movies of all of us probably.”

“Yeah, but that’s not what he was trying to do. He thought people just loved his art. He was just stupid.”

“Becky! Listen to what you’re saying. I don’t know if that’s even true, and think about this carefully. When you get right down to it, is there any real difference between stupid and dangerous?”

She sighed. The days of us hanging out and getting high and listening to music and walking around in the woods were over. She was doing full-time computer programming and code writing and making jewelry out of sea glass. What happened to Brian was sobering, except to Declan of course who was never really sober and never really slowed down for anything. All the terrible events didn’t make him pause and go back to doing homey things like it had Becky. It made him get high more and study more; he bought Rosetta Stone language courses for Swahili and Cantonese. When I asked him why he said the world was a strange place and knowing how to communicate better meant you had more options to go become a hermit somewhere. So I guess maybe he was kind of affected too in his own way. Had some long-term escape plan going on. But Declan was easy to interest in any kind of investigation.