“Me, too. But it all depends on whether we’re accepted or not.” Jen held up her eggroll burrito. “This thing is really good. I didn’t think I was going to like it, but it’s amazing.”

Anita speared a fiesta wonton with her fork. “Mine’s good, too.”

“I should probably go back to bringing my own lunch to work, though. Try to save a few bucks.” Jen sighed. “Then maybe I wouldn’t have to keep relying on my parents.”

4

Seventeen years old, and he still didn’t like staying in the house by himself.

The minute his mom drove off, Nick turned on the TV in the living room and the light in the hallway, needing to hear some noise and wanting make sure there were no parts of the house that were dark—even though it was mid-morning on a particularly bright day. Such fears were childish, he knew, but he couldn’t help how he felt. He wondered if things would change once he became an adult, but the truth was, he didn’t really see that happening. He’d be eighteen in less than a year, and it was hard to imagine any radical changes in personality taking place in that time.

He wasn’t exactly sure why he still got scared being home alone. The house wasn’t that old. It wasn’t as if they lived in some historic mansion where a rich madman had murdered his wife in the 1800s. Theirs was just a regular home on a regular street with a bunch of others that looked just like it.

But he’d always had a vivid imagination, one that had inevitably turned toward darkness. As a little kid, he remembered seeing a movie on television about an escaped lunatic who lived between the walls of an ordinary family’s home, and for years afterward, every stray noise Nick heard in the house made him think that someone was hiding in the walls or the attic or the crawlspace.

His phone buzzed, and Nick picked it up to see a text from a number he did not recognize.

It was some bank, offering him his own credit card.

That was weird.

He automatically deleted the text. It was probably just some scam. How could he be eligible for a credit card? He didn’t even have a job. Someone was just fishing for personal information to use in order to create a fake account or…get a credit card.

Maybe he was eligible.

The idea appealed to him. Last summer, he’d wanted to upgrade his phone and had asked his dad for a loan, only to be told that the embarrassing antique he carted around was perfectly fine. If he’d had his own credit card, he could have charged it.

His phone buzzed again, but there was no text this time, no call. Apparently, the phone was ringing for no reason.

Was he being hacked?

Suddenly filled with panic, he flipped his phone over, pulled off the cover, slid open the back and yanked out the battery. He had no idea how sophisticated hacking operations were these days, but since phones could be tracked even when they were turned off, it made sense that they could be hacked that way, too.