“Thanks,” Anita said, shutting off her phone.

It was a busy afternoon.

She didn’t have time to call Kyle until it was almost time to go home.

3

Only one day to go and his suspension was over.

If this was one of those 1980s teen movies his parents always forced him to watch when they came on TV, he’d return a hero, his street cred boosted by his battle with The Man. But things didn’t work that way anymore—if they ever had. What was actually going to happen was that he would go back to school to find that no one had even noticed he’d been gone.

Nick finished watching the last of the morning’s Parks and Recreation reruns on FX, then turned off the TV and reluctantly switched on his laptop. His teachers had not only emailed his homework assignments, they’d tacked on extra work, apparently to punish him for getting suspended. As if that weren’t bad enough, his dad was making him help out at the bookstore this afternoon. So after he finished his schoolwork and after he ate his lunch, he was supposed to show up at Brave New World to shelve books or straighten books or do something equally useless.

Feeling depressed, he checked his email, scrolling down. The spam he received was getting much more adult. Not porno-adult but business-adult. There were offers to enroll in real estate seminars, ads for automobiles, lists of job opportunities and several recommendations for various financial institutions. He tried to remember if one of his fake profiles had him recently turning eighteen. That could explain this sudden influx of commercial announcements.

His attention was caught by the tagline of the last email: Nicholas Decker! Are you bored, suspended from school and in need of money? Just click…

Suspended from school?

That was pretty specific.

He knew enough not to click on spam from unknown senders, but the fact that the description was tailored so directly to his own situation intrigued him. He deleted it along with the rest of the spam and, seconds later, another email popped up: Nick! Need some easy money? Before you go to the bathroom and pop some Pringles, click on this!

That was not just specific, it was downright creepy.

He did have to go to the bathroom. And he had been planning to grab some Pringles before starting on his homework.

He deleted the unopened message and quickly exited his email account. It had to be a coincidence. Still, it was more than a little unnerving, and he forgot about going to the bathroom, skipped the Pringles and got to work on his algebra. It was after ten and the day was bright, but the inside of the house seemed dark, and after the third math problem, he got up and turned on not only the light in the dining room, where he was working, but in the kitchen and the living room as well. It suddenly seemed quiet, too, and he turned the television back on, lowering the volume until he could hear a murmur of voices loud enough to make it seem as though he was not alone, but not loud enough to be distracting. Feeling better, he worked on his homework until he was finished, then made some macaroni and cheese for lunch.