Lurker by Stefan Petrucha Page A

sure he didn’t do it. Hiding his ID like that would be too complicated for him. Even asking Matthew to do it would be too much effort.”
    â€œWhat about your new boy, Kyle?”
    â€œI didn’t even know Kyle the night of Nicki’s vigil.”
    â€œDoesn’t mean he didn’t know you.”
    â€œOh, come on,” Mandy said. “That’s ridiculous. Why would he?”
    Laurel shrugged and retrieved her pizza from the plate. She took a bite and pulled back, cheese stretching like suspension wires between her mouth and the slice. She washed the bite down with a swig of her iced tea and leaned back in the chair.
    â€œYour problem is, you’re too rational,” Laurelsaid. “You expect everyone else to act rationally. But that’s not how people are. They want to be, and they can explain every weird-ass thing they do, but that doesn’t make them rational. Even psychos got reasons. It’s that method-to-the-madness thing. Now, you think someone is playing you, and you figure it’s got to be someone that has a reason to be playin’. I’m just sayin’ that some folks don’t need a reason. Some folks get their giggle on just knowin’ you’re scared, whether they know you or not.”
    Mandy tried to think of an argument, but everything she considered struck her as overly rational. Laurel was making sense.
    â€œAnd let’s not forget,” Laurel continued, “people say ‘see you later’ all the time. Now, I can see why you got the creeps in you. I won’t go anywhere near that library myself these days, but it’s not exactly a death threat, you know?”
    â€œIt was that voice, though,” Mandy said. “When I thought I was calling you. The guy’s voice.”
    â€œOld people are scary,” Laurel said.
    Mandy laughed.
    â€œIt’s not that he was old. He just sounded, I don’t know…He sounded wrong, but I can’treally describe it. It seems kind of stupid now. Maybe it was just being by the library that scared me.”
    â€œLet’s talk about it upstairs,” Laurel said. “Dad is floating around in the living room, and I don’t need him finding something new to freak over. He’d probably make me drive a tank to school or something.”
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œNow, eat. Or I’ll put this fine cheesiness away by myself, and my skin so doesn’t need that.”
    Â 
    Before going up to Laurel’s room, Mandy picked at a single slice of pizza. Her appetite didn’t return, and the whole thing seemed to be annoying the hell out of Laurel. In her room, with Mandy sitting on the bed, Laurel went to her computer and killed the screen saver. Her wallpaper, a field of bright yellow sunflowers, burst across the monitor.
    â€œThe first thing to do,” Laurel said, “is forget about that phone call. We both know that nobody can jack into a line like that, unless they’re FBI or magic or something. The signal got mixed up, and you called a wrong number. Unfortunately, you gotsome old dude with Satan’s voice who says ‘see you later’ instead of ‘bye.’”
    â€œI know,” Mandy said. But part of her didn’t know. At the time, she’d immediately connected the wrong-sounding old man with the earlier message. It was hard to sever that connection now, no matter what Laurel said.
    â€œSo, that really only leaves the text messages.” Laurel typed while she spoke. “And, I think I have an answer to that. When we were talking downstairs, I remembered something. Here, come read.”
    Mandy walked across the room and leaned over Laurel’s shoulder to look at the screen. Her friend had loaded a news page from a tech site with the headline Cell Phones New Frontier for Hackers. She read the first two paragraphs, which described a series of cell-phone specific viruses.
    â€œDoes it say anything about receiving