The one thing in his favor was the fact that he almost never put correct personal information about himself online. His Google account was connected to a fake name with a fake address. For anything requiring a birthdate, he typed in random numbers.

Although…

The phone bill was paid by his dad, so it was probably linked to a credit card.

Should he call his father and let him know? If he did, his dad would just give him a lecture about allowing himself to be hacked. Besides, there was no guarantee that that was what was going on.

Maybe it would be better if he just waited to see what happened.

He decided to keep the battery out of the phone for the rest of the day and then put it back in before his parents came home.

Leaving everything where it was, Nick walked into the kitchen and got a water bottle out of the refrigerator. Twisting off the top, he took a long drink as he looked out at the back yard through the window over the sink. If it wasn’t a hack, what could have made his phone ring like that? he wondered. Was there something wrong with the device itself? Some sort of technical glitch?

Maybe it was a ghost.

The idea was absurd, and he knew it was absurd, but once in his mind, the notion was impossible to shake. He glanced back at the doorway. He was suddenly afraid to go into the living room and even look at his phone, certain for some reason that he would see something on the no-longer-dead screen, a picture, the face of a little boy, an overly serious little boy with obsidian-black hair and hard piercing eyes, looking out at him.

This, Nick understood, was one reason he continued to scare himself even though he was almost an adult: the specificity of his fears. He was never afraid he was going to see some generic ghost or amorphous blob. It was always an old lady with no teeth hiding in the closet, or a gibbering monkey-faced man crawling down the hallway.

Or an overly serious little boy peeking out at him through his phone.

He had no idea where these ideas came from or why they occurred to him, but from the second his brain conjured such an image, he was consumed with nothing else until he could prove to himself that it was not real.

Forcing himself to be brave, steeling himself for whatever he might see, Nick returned to the living room and picked up his phone.

Nothing.

A black screen.

Relief flooded through him, and he put the battery back in, turning on the phone, reassured that he saw nothing unusual on the screen as it came to life. He probably had a touch of OCD, since the stress and worry he’d felt disappeared as quickly as it had come, replaced by a sense of calm.

The phone rang, and he jumped, nearly dropping it.