Her eyes, his lies

Chapter 1

And there, in a small town, in the heart of suburbia, sat a lonely girl.

Her bitten nails tapped feverishly against the laptop keys, the mechanical clicking echoing throughout her otherwise silent bedroom, like crickets in the night.

The space-bar, which was once painted white, had long since faded to a speckled blackness. A blackness much like the lighting of her room.

Jane had been hunched over her laptop since yesterday afternoon, just as she always was. She knew being frozen in that position for so long was bad for her.

Her back hurt. She had skipped dinner. She needed sleep. But she felt none of this. Only excitement, and the gripping touch of guilt.

She adjusted the hood of her jacket, the few moments of rest her hands had felt tonight.

The glow of the screen illuminated her pale face. A worn stuffed toy sat in her lap, a silent witness to her private obsession. Jane's hands paused their endless motion. She chewed on her thumbnail, trying to control the shaking.

Nothing beat this. A rush that she could never reproduce, one that came only in the dead of night, punctuated by moments of indecision and shame. A shameful pleasure. It was the thrill of robbing someone without getting caught.

A thumb drive containing a key-logger, placed in the school's only library terminal, had given her access to every password entered into it. From mundane news website accounts to personal social media accounts, she owned it all. The digital keys to people's personal lives.

Jane's laptop monitor was split into two distinct windows. Her left half displayed a string of keystrokes entered into the library computer, discreetly recorded by the thumb drive. The right half of the display held a log-in screen, with the password and username boxes already filled.

Her plan had worked. A perfect execution. She had pulled it off. All of it, leaving nobody the wiser. All she had to do was press enter.

Her nail continued to suffer the chewing.

Something in her chastised her. A voice. This was wrong, it said. This was an invasion of privacy.

Jane was aware of all this. Aware that what she had been doing for the past several weeks was simply a modern form of stalking.

And yet, slowly, she found her hand reaching out. With a click, her computer loaded the homepage of Ryder Jackson.

The blue and white page seemed to mock her, its innocent colors standing in contrast of her dark room and shapeless gray clothes.

Ryder. Seventeen years old. Tall, handsome, and everyone's favorite quarterback. He was so perfect he made Jane sick to her stomach.

At least, that's what she told herself. The butterfly feeling in her guts could be interpreted in two ways. She preferred the alternative that didn't involve her having a hopeless crush on Ryder Jackson of all people. But then why was his account the first one she had decided to hack?

She shook her head, the hood of her jacket fluttering with the movement. It had been for purely curiosity-based reasons, she assured the voice. Simple curiosity. Without a doubt. Absolutely.

Ryder Jackson's smiling face stared out at Jane, as if arguing with her. As if he were saying, "Is that truly what you believe?"

"Shut up, meathead," she muttered, her voice hoarse from dehydration. It was the first time she'd spoken in hours. Oh, she very much felt the irony of telling a photograph to shut up.