His browser history is predictable. Streams free porn, doesn’t download it, online banking, newspapers. Wow, eight thousand Twitter followers and he hardly ever tweets. Googled himself a few days ago and actually got some new hits. But my eyes keep getting drawn to his bookshelf. I can’t make out the titles. I think about the lines in my dad’s forehead when he’s reading. William Gibson, Douglas Adams, Carl Sagan, Clive Barker, Anne Rice, Robert R. McCammon. Usually big, usually hardback, I thought they must be very serious. He didn’t keep his books. Maybe he would have if we had ever settled down the way they promised that we would someday. Instead he liked to leave them, abandon them in public. He didn’t dog-ear the pages to mark them and was prissy with paperback spines, so they were always in good shape when he’d take in the last sentence and put the book down next to him on the subway or a bench or a diner counter and just walk off. Everybody’s secret Santa. I bet he would’ve liked to have a library, but instead he was Johnny Appleseed sprinkling the country with sci-fi classics and highbrow horror, fantasies of worlds half ending.

The way he can’t read when my mother’s in the room; his eyes keep sneaking up and tracing her movements. I wonder now if she could always see him looking, if this was another one of their little private games.

I duck when Nick enters the frame and bash my forehead on my desk. God, I even have the reflexes of an idiot. It’s eerie being this close to him, face craggy with pores and lines in the unforgiving light of his screen, eyes a breath away from mine, and having him looking into space, unable to see me at all. I know this isn’t the same as being brave. It is cunning, though.

For all his expensive furniture, his ergonomics are pretty bad.

I click over and check that the script I planted in his hard drive is running, then ⌘+tab back to his webcam in time to see him jerk his head up and back away from the screen, hold his hand between it and his face, drop his hand, and move his face closer. This dude’s nose hairs are in charge. Seriously, you could braid them.