Down to the Liar(5)

My phone rings and I answer.

“Hey, Bryn. What’s—”

“Have you checked Facebook tonight?”

“No,” I say, sitting up. “Why?”

“Looks like they’re going after you now, too.”





The Setup


“Good morning, brindle-coated, dogface bitch,” Murphy says as I join him in St. Aggie’s computer lab the next morning.

“Skyla’s frenemies are nothing if not creative in their insults,” I say, snorting in amusement as I hop up to sit on the table across from him.

Brindle-coated. I can’t even take that seriously. The other two posts Skyla’s antagonizers wrote about me were equally asinine. But the creepy part I can’t laugh off is that the posters knew Skyla had met with me so soon after the fact.

Hence our campout in St. Aggie’s computer lab. We’re starting the job with a Trojan horse scam to see if we can breach the Internet trolls’ defenses through their personal computers. That’s right—good old-fashioned spyware, baby. God bless governments and creepy corporations.

Ms. Shirley, the computer science teacher and chief overlord of the lab, thinks we’re conducting a research experiment on Internet surfing patterns. She has no idea we’re actually planting hacker bugs into the computers, phones, and tablets of a couple dozen of Skyla’s closest friends, so we can monitor every click and swipe they make over the next few days. No doubt we’re violating several school rules, a dozen or so ethical principles, and maybe even a law or two. But hey, if it finds us the culprits, well…what’s a little loss of privacy among friends?

“If Sam were here, he could hack into the Facebook servers directly and get the IP addresses without breaking a sweat,” Murphy says, clacking away on his laptop. But Sam isn’t here is what he doesn’t say. He probably knows I’d sense the judgment. Murphy thinks I shouldn’t have let Sam leave. Or maybe it’s me who thinks that.

“Why bother taking the easy road when we can go the hard way instead?” I say with a shrug.

“Incoming,” Murphy says, nodding toward Bryn, who’s hurtling toward me at a velocity that can only mean she’s pissed about something.

“Bracing for Bryn-pact in three, two…”

He looks annoyed. “Funny.”

“What the hell, Julep? You put me on the suspect list?” Bryn says when she stalks up to us.

A few months ago, I’d have been irked by the accusation—not because it implies I don’t know what I’m doing (which it does), but because I used to hate having to explain every little thing to newbies. But now I’m getting accustomed to playing disreputable-Yoda, which is proof positive that you can teach an old con new tricks.

“First of all, it’s not a list of suspects, it’s a list of people participating in our research project,” I say, signaling her to keep her voice down. If she doesn’t zip it, she’ll tip off Ms. Shirley. “And second, of course I did. I don’t want anyone getting suspicious that you’re not on the list.”

Bryn scoffs. “That doesn’t make any sense. The others don’t know they’re on a list.”

“Whoever’s behind the attacks knows they’re doing something wrong, which makes them naturally suspicious of anything unusual happening around them. Especially if it involves computers. They’re more likely to trust the legitimacy of this research project if they see that Skyla’s BFF is participating, too.”

“How’d you get everyone to agree, anyway?” She folds her arms, her body practically buzzing in irritation.

“The carrot and the stick, like always. The carrot being a five-dollar gift card to the Ballou. The stick: threatening to cut off their access to the school WiFi.”

Murphy looks up. “We did not threaten to cut off their WiFi.”

“I may have threatened to cut off Jenna’s WiFi,” I say.

Murphy’s expression is now as aggravated as Bryn’s.

“What?” I hop off the table. “She doesn’t drink coffee.”

Bryn shakes her head. “This better work. Or we’ll have betrayed all our friends for nothing.”

“Chill out, Judas. In a day or two, we’ll have found our bullies, we’ll eighty-six the spyware, and no one will be the wiser.”

Bryn grabs my arm. “Wait—‘found our bullies’? Skyla made it clear she doesn’t want to know who’s behind it.”