my chair. “Don’t you know any better? Come on, everyone knows to put tape or something over their camera these days. It’s 101.”
Her room is empty, the door ajar. A stuffed sea lion sits in the center of her ruffly purple pillows. It’s every inch as feminine as I expected, splashes of color enveloping the whole thing.
The family’s rottweiler sleeps on the floor next to her bed. He seems like a chill dog. I once fed him half of my burger when I was hiding out by our pool house, avoiding my parents when he wandered over. Thea shouted for him around the front of her house. He must have gotten out. She wasn’t pleased to find her dog cuddled up to me—really, he was trying to push me out of the lounger, total chair hog—while I listened to her search for her dog for close to twenty minutes before she ventured into our backyard.
For the life of me, I can’t remember the dog’s name. Only her pet names for him. Wookiee boy. It made sense when he jumped down from the lounger, stretched his front half low to the ground, and released the weirdest warbling sound before trotting to her side.
I’m in the middle of scanning the colorful posters on the wall, reading their baking puns when Thea strolls in.
The corner of my mouth twitches up.
Flour is smeared across her cheek and dotting her apron. The sleeves of her sweater are rolled up and her hair is tied on top of her head by a big yellow scrunchie with a bow on it. The sun doesn’t shine as bright as the excitement in her blue eyes as she leans over the desk to grab a notebook with pastel tabs sticking out to mark the pages. I drink her in, studying what she looks like when she doesn’t know someone’s watching. She pauses to pet the dog, giving him a belly scratch that has him stretching languidly before disappearing from the room.
Part of me hopes she’ll come back. I have half a mind to start up a sexting session with her while I’m accessing her webcam for a double feature, picturing her wearing only the apron and nothing underneath.
But it’s better for me if she isn’t in the room. Even if she doesn’t know how to prevent hackers like me from doing exactly what I’m doing, there’s a chance she’d notice activity on her computer while I’m remotely accessing the files. I have to be quick, then I can play with her posing as Wyatt later.
Starting with the browser history, I download it to my files to comb through later. The page with Instagram open is her account—@theactualsunbeam. I scroll through the images, clicking at random. The whole thing is a mix of baking and floral aesthetic, mixed with an underlying obsession with positive optimism and self-love quotes. Thick thighs save lives. Be kind always. Spread love (and cookies) around the world. Local goddess gang.
She seems like a fucking woodland creature, too wholesome and good for this world.
Except I know the truth.
I unlock my phone, where the real Thea is. Picking a photo from this morning, I stare at what she shows me—the most stripped down, raw version of herself.
“Who are you?”
Shaking my head, I exit back to her Instagram profile and open Facebook. It loads to her account, login credentials saved.
A soft laugh puffs out of me. “It’s like you want me to have easy access.”
The Facebook feed isn’t as personalized as her Instagram, mostly full of video shares of Tasty videos—damn, girl has a real sweet tooth—and tagged photos with Maisy Landry at a wellness retreat resort, some fancy cabin campground that screams glamping instead of real camping.
Skimming through her files, my annoyance rises. There’s no protection against what I’m doing. Her security is so lax. This isn’t even hard, any creep can learn to do it with shitty spyware.
“Fucking pain in the ass,” I grumble, opening a new window to code in.
A short while later, Thea’s computer has security protocols in place that rival the ones I installed for my own computer system. The only outside threat able to get into her stuff is me. No other little shit will spy on her with her webcam.
Only me.
Nine
Connor
At the end of the week, my good day goes to hell fast. I’m walking down the north building’s hallway on my way to class when I stop in my tracks.
Thea stands with Mr. Coleman, chatting animatedly, her eyes all lit