he would have been gone when they arrived. Stalkers weren't harmless, no matter how often they said they wouldn't hurt you. It wasn't only in vids that they sometimes raped or murdered their victims. And in real life, Kelsa thought soberly, their victims were less likely to heroically escape at the last minute.
She took her vita-juice out to the backyard and looked around the base of the tree for evidence, but grass grew right up to the trunk so there were no footprints. He hadn't scraped the tough bark when he climbed it. There was no evidence but her word, and if Kelsa described the tricks he'd played the police would think she was crazy.
The next time she saw him, if there was a next time, she'd pull out her com pod and record everything he did and said. And why hadn't she done that earlier? Because she was stupid, that's why.
Kelsa sighed. With luck she'd never see him again - and if she did, she'd be ready.
She half expected to see him leaning against the lockers every time she turned a corner, but he didn't reappear for the rest of the day. Kelsa managed to get through her history final in reasonable shape, though the number of questions she had no memory of made her realize how much her father's illness had distracted her.
The soft fog of grief threatened to close down again at the thought, so Kelsa opened a side window on her deskcomp and looked up some statistics about stalkers - which convinced her that she really should have recorded him and called the police.
She added the name Raven to her stalker search. If he'd murdered a dozen teenage girls in some other city, she'd call the police without a recording.
She found no mention of a homicidal maniac calling himself Raven, which lightened her mood considerably. On impulse, she ran "Raven/illusionist/magic," even though he was too young to be a professional performer. She didn't find him with that search either, though she did come across several hits on the Native American trickster spirit Raven, who was also a shapeshifter.
So that's where he got the shtick from.
Or that was the form his psychosis had taken. Kelsa shivered and closed the window. She knew what she had to do if she saw him again.
But he didn't come popping out at her as she walked home, and nothing flapped up that night to tap on her thermopane behind the closed curtains.
***
"Have you thought about our summer plans?" Kelsa's mother's voice was filled with the kind of fake cheer that didn't belong at the breakfast table, even at the best of times. "I was thinking, maybe we should do something different this year."
With her father gone, neither of them had the heart to go camping - and Kelsa had no desire to do anything with her mother, anyway.
"I might take Aunt Sarabeth up on her offer," Kelsa said. Aunt Sarabeth lived in an apartment in downtown Chicago, and Kelsa had always thought that she wanted a teenage niece to visit her as little as Kelsa wanted to waste a summer in a city. But her aunt renewed the offer every year, and there was nothing else she wanted to do.
Her mother frowned. "Are you sure? I was thinking maybe you and Joby and I - "
Kelsa pushed her chair back from the table. "I've got homework."
Her mother knew she didn't. Her scowl was designed to trip Kelsa's guilt switch, but Kelsa didn't apologize.
She wanted to go for a walk, but she was afraid that Raven guy would be waiting for her - though as the day wore on, being terrorized by a stalker began to look good compared to the sagging depression that saturated the house. In the last few months her mother - who had once despised d-vid and had strictly limited the amount her children watched - had taken to shutting down in front of the screen for hours on end, watching nothing but comedy and old flat-vid movies with happy-happy endings.
Kelsa understood her mother's need to escape, but by Sunday morning she would rather have hung around with Jack the Ripper than go to church with her mother and Joby and then spend the afternoon listening to canned laughter. Besides, Sunday was Kelsa and her father's hiking afternoon, and she wasn't going to let either grave-robbing sickos or her mother keep her from honoring that tradition.
Kelsa knew her mother was still angry with her, but the expression of