A Rose to Change a Life

Chapter 18

Bugplaytime

After the bathroom incident we huddled in front of Kean's miserable computer once more. He had to shake it a few times to get it going, though he seemed quite used to it, apparently shaking the beetles out of his laptop was one of his daily routine activities. Devin's younger brother tried to explain to us how a tracking system worked, of course, Elise backed out after he was two sentences in, I kept up longer, but eventually we all gave up and let him to his thing, which consisted of trying to dig up any information on Greg that he could.

Further, we had the suspicion that Greg was purposely tracking Elise, which is how we ended up in her bedroom searching the clothes she had been wearing to their date. Her bedroom was similar to mine, except hers was bigger (obviously) and painted bright orange with blue flowers on them, very retro and flashy. Elise loved to make things interesting, living her own style. Her clothes of that evening consisted of a nice pair of brown slacks and a flowery patterned shirt, I searched the pockets of the trousers, whilst Devin went through the shirt, and Elise through her underwear – very unlikely that he would have hid it there as he never got to see it, but one never knew.  

"Nothing," I said in exasperation, on one hand it was good that we did not find a thing as it made my nerves ease, but on the other hand we were missing out on an opportunity of tracking him like he tracked us. Considering Kean knew how to.

"Nothing as well." Both of them said in unison, we looked at each other, confirming each others fear and took a deep breath. Suddenly, it felt like we were in a mixture of a self-therapy group and a hide-and-seek-hotel. My life was weird, or rather my imagination.

"Gah, I cannot believe I let that sponge head kiss me, yuck. He must have done something,...and here I thought a man would finally like me," she rubbed her hands together, stroking her dress, smoothing imaginary wrinkles. Elise's hands trailed her waist, and stopped, "Wait, wait. There is one place we have not searched yet. Actually, two." We waited for her to continue, but she instead rushed into the foyer, grabbing hold of her jacket – searching it's pockets, coming up empty-handed. None of us was aware of how much our shoulders slumped, except Elise tried one last thing.

"Well, one place where there might be something is... my hair."

"Your hair?" I asked dumbfoundly. She nodded frantically, biting her lip because she was nervous to tell.

"When he kissed me, he... uhm, grabbed my hair to draw me near him."

Wow, and I thought only teens kissed with the whole hair-grabbing-technique, apparently I was wrong. Taking a look at her hair, she definitely had a lot of hair to hide potential technology, it might actually work, but really, it is quite far-fetched (ha!) Devin went over to her, towering over her small frame like a dinosaur over a pebble, he started to comb her hair carefully, searching for anything, reminding me a lot of an ape searching its child's head for lice.

"Found.. something?" He happily exclaimed, "Not sure what yet, but it is something."