The house was silent the next morning. Mum, Dad and Larrie had stayed up talking for hours after I went to bed, so I figured I was probably the first one up. I was relieved; after last night I didn’t know what to say to any of them. I’d dozed off to the sound of their muffled conversation sometime after midnight, but I’d heard enough by then to know that Larrie and Beth had been together since Easter and that they planned to defer uni next year to volunteer at an orangutan sanctuary in Borneo.
I switched on my computer and went downstairs to make some breakfast. There was a bag of croissants from Petite Cafe on the kitchen bench, next to a note from Larrie saying she’d gone to Beth’s to study. I took two croissants and a glass of orange juice back to my room.
Usually, my Sunday online routine went something like: check email; check Facebook; check Celebrity Meltdown – unless Maz was online for a chat, in which case gossiping about the latest news on Facebook took precedence. There was no sign of Maz this morning and I couldn’t face either my email (which at last check had been clogged with Larrie-related message forwards and nagging messages from Simon about the genetics assignment) or Facebook.
I selected Celebrity Meltdown from my list of favourite sites. Splashed across the home page was a photo of the latest young starlet caught frolicking with a married actor on a beach in St Tropez. Yesterday’s top story (nude photos of last year’s Best Actor Oscar winner, taken ten years ago, when he was an out-of-work drama student) was already relegated to a headline in the sidebar.
I was thinking back to what Mr Dempster said about people inviting scandalous publicity into their lives when a chat window popped up. I began typing without reading the greeting, keen to fill Maz in on the latest developments.
Al-oha: Mum and Dad know about Larrie and Beth!! I blurted it out at dinner last night.
I paused for a moment to let Maz register the gravity of what I’d done, knowing there’d be a string of OMGs followed by a demand for gory details.
Simon_says: Did you get the reaction you’d hoped for?
Al-oha: Oh. Never mind. Thought you were Maz.
Simon_says: Sorry to disappoint you.
Al-oha: What do you want?
Simon_says: World peace, an end to poverty, action on climate change …
Al-oha: I have to get offline now, Mum’s calling.
Simon_says: Wait. You haven’t responded to my emails about the assignment. It’s due tomorrow.
Al-oha: Shiz. I forgot. I don’t have all my data yet.
Simon_says: It’s. Due. Tomorrow.
Al-oha: I. Know. But I’ve had a lot on my mind lately. Sister scandal, ex-boyfriend boasting on Facebook, grounded till I finish uni, etc., etc.
Simon_says: Do you want me to come round now and help you?
I paused before agreeing. There wasn’t much I felt like doing less than spending a few hours with Simon. Other than spending a few hours trying to do the work by myself.
When the doorbell rang, I gave my bedroom the once-over to make sure there weren’t any undies hanging out of my drawers or anything else that might give Simon the idea that this was anything other than a professional appointment. Satisfied that everything was in order, I went downstairs and let him in.
Mum raced out of the kitchen, “Allison Miller! What part of grounded don’t you – oh, hello, Simon.”
“Hi, Mrs Miller,” said Mr Manners Simon. “I hope you don’t mind me coming over, but our Science assignment’s due tomorrow and I said I’d give Al a hand.”
“Of course that’s fine,” said Mum, her expression softening. “I’ll bring up some tea in a little while.”
The way things had been between us lately, I wasn’t sure whether Simon coming over was a sign that he wasn’t angry with me any more, or if he just wanted to see me suffer for the sake of getting my assignment done. But it seemed like he thought I’d been punished enough on Facebook, and he was back to his usual, tactless self.
“Maz said you were pretty upset about what Josh wrote,” he said when we got to my room.
“I’m fine now,” I said stiffly.
“If it helps, Nicko told me that after we left, Josh got stuck into the punch and passed out on the floor with Prad’s sneaker for a pillow.”
It did make me feel a tiny bit better, but I didn’t want to talk about Josh with Simon. Under any circumstances. “Can we get on with the assignment?”
Simon pulled a wad of diagrams and notes out of his bag. “I brought the report I did on my family last year. I thought it might give you some ideas.”
I flicked through the pages he handed me. There was a complicated series of graphs made up of LLs and Lls and Rrs, followed by long paragraphs under subheadings like “Mendelian traits” and “heterozygous alleles”. My eyes hurt even skim-reading it.
“I’ll read while you fill in your gene wheel,” he said. “Then we can see which results are significant enough to include in your report, and decide how to illustrate them.”
I took out the worksheet I’d completed with Mum and Dad and opened my textbook, but I’d paid so little attention in class for the past couple of weeks I had no idea where to start. There was nothing for it but to flatter Simon into helping me.
“Good book?” I asked.
“Very.” He held it up for me to see the cover. It was called Computer Forensics for Beginners. “It’s for a course I’m taking in the holidays.”
“Interesting,” I said, even though hearing about Simon’s adventures at summer geekschool bored me to death. “What’s computer forensics when it’s at home?”
“It’s a type of forensic science. It uses evidence from computers and digital storage devices.”
I stifled a yawn. “Fascinating. What’s it used for?”
“Loads of things,” said Simon, leaping at the chance to show off his nerdage knowledge. “It’s often used in legal cases to prove that there was some kind of electronic activity, or that a file’s been manipulated or a server hacked, but it can also be used to analyse documents or data, say if you need to prove who authored them.”
This was starting to get surprisingly interesting. “Really? Could it be used to track down who put that photo of Larrie and Beth on Facebook? Or the phone number the anonymous messages Larrie’s getting are being sent from?”
“Yeah, probably. None of what they’ve done is exactly sophisticated. I mean, all you need to set up a fake Facebook account is an email address, and anyone who knows the login details can manage Whitlam’s group …”
Listening to Simon speak, I could’ve smacked myself for not working it out sooner. I interrupted his list of ways someone could hide the sending phone number in text messages.
“Why?”
Simon looked at me like I was mentally deficient. “So that the person you’re messaging doesn’t know–”
“You know what I mean, Simon: why are you doing this to Larrie? To me!”
The colour drained from Simon’s face. “Are you accusing me of … ? Why would I … ?”
“I don’t know why. Maybe you were trying to make me look bad so Josh would dump me. Or maybe you thought I’d suddenly fall in love with you if the rest of the school turned against me and you were my only friend. Was that it?”
Simon sat very still. His eyes flicked over my face as if he was trying to work out whether I was serious. The intensity of his stare made me turn away.
After a minute, he stood and stuffed the papers and his book back into his bag. “You have no idea,” he said quietly.
I expected to hear the front door slam, but, in true Simon fashion, he closed it politely behind himself.
Al Miller smells a rat.