Playlist for the Dead(33)

USER NAME: HAYDENSTEVENS

PASSWORD: ATHENA



And I was in. Simple as that. Or not so simple, really; I had a million questions. Who, or what, was Athena? Why was it important enough to be Hayden’s password? And how did Astrid know? Not to mention the still-open question of what really happened to Jason and Trevor—my brain felt like a whirling blob of confusion. It was all too much. I had to focus on one thing at a time, and right now, I was focused on Hayden’s computer.

I’d always been a little bit of a snoop. I’d found the hiding place for Hanukkah presents every year until I was ten, when Mom finally sat me down and said, “You know you’re just ruining it for yourself, right?” Yup. I was just starting to get how much the surprise of the gift was part of the fun, sometimes even more so than the present itself. But even though I stopped looking for Hanukkah presents, I didn’t stop looking through Rachel’s stuff trying to find a journal (not a chance; she wasn’t much of a writer, and even if she were, she’d be great at hiding it), or even through cabinets trying to find Mom’s stash of Oreos (she thought if she hid them she wouldn’t have to share, but she was wrong). And I considered myself the king of Internet stalking; the few times Hayden or I found a girl we liked I’d practically put together a dossier on her, though neither of us had ever had the guts to use it. At least as far as I knew.

This meant that the process of going through Hayden’s computer should have been one of the most exciting things I could imagine. The combination of satisfying my innate nosiness and possibly finding out once and for all what had made Hayden do what he did, even if it meant confirming my own culpability—catnip, right?

Yet I sat there staring at Hayden’s home screen for what felt like hours. I didn’t know what to do first—check his email? Read his documents? Go through his music? All of the options felt wrong, and not just out-of-order wrong, but not-okay, bad-person wrong. Like many snoops I was a private person myself, and the idea of someone going through my computer, even after I was dead, was horrifying. It seemed like everyone these days was all about letting everything hang out, but not me. I liked seeing what everyone else was doing without revealing myself in the process. And as far as I knew, Hayden had always felt the same way. Looking at his stuff now felt like a major violation.

Not to mention that ArchmageGed could apparently show up at any time, on the computer and in real life, and if he was really Hayden, he might be pissed. Maybe he was even watching me right now, crazy as it might seem. And if there was any chance that ArchmageGed was somehow involved in what happened to Jason and Trevor . . . if he could make all those terrible things happen to them, what would he do to me?

But, I reminded myself, this computer technically was mine now. If anyone could look at Hayden’s stuff without being overly judgmental, it was me. I really only had three options: 1) wipe the hard drive and start over; 2) leave Hayden’s stuff where it was and just start using the computer myself, without looking at any of it; or 3) dive in. Was there really any question about what I would do?

I tried to be as methodical as I could. If it were my computer it would have been easy; I was a complete slob in real life, but my computer was perfectly organized, everything in files and folders with names that accurately described their contents. Hayden was the opposite, though—he was super tidy with his stuff, but his computer was chaos. He seemed to save everything to the desktop; it was wallpapered with files bearing titles that made no sense, or were misspelled. Dyslexia or no dyslexia, this was the computer of someone who just didn’t give a shit. I guess he figured no one would see it.

There should be a word for the thing that reactivates guilt, the trigger that made my skin prickle and my ears turn red, that made my head almost involuntarily droop, that made my pulse race with anxiety, then slow back down when I realized nothing had actually happened. Then maybe someone could find a drug to counteract it. Of course, there could already be one, but for now I’d have to manage without it.

I decided first to go through the documents. I reorganized the desktop so they were at least in alphabetical order, and then I started reading. All I found, though, were Hayden’s old papers from school and the typed-up responses he’d saved from his teachers. The essays themselves were gibberish; he’d tried to write papers about movies or music he’d liked, but watching him try to explain the raining frogs scene from Magnolia, for example, was painful. Because I knew him, I could tell where he was trying to take really complicated ideas out of his head and get them across to his teachers, but their responses made it pretty clear that they weren’t seeing it. The number of grammatical errors is unacceptable for writing at this level, they’d write. I saw draft after draft of each paper—he saved them all—where he tried to fix all the problems they identified. But his writing wasn’t getting any clearer. It doesn’t matter how good your ideas are if you’re incapable of getting them across to your readers.

I’m sure they hadn’t meant to be cruel, but I could imagine how he’d felt. Reading the comments, I wondered how close he might have been to flunking out, if they even did that anymore. I’d offered to help him a million times, but he’d always refused; I knew now he hadn’t wanted me to see what he was doing on his own. He was one of the proudest people I knew, and look where it had gotten him. Based on what I was seeing, college was out of the question. Why hadn’t his parents let him see a specialist? They were so insistent that no one know their kids weren’t perfect; they’d expected him to just power through it on his own.