Dangerous Boy (13 page)

“What?” I sit forward, lean in to the small laptop screen.

Logan’s user picture dominates my Facebook wall. Comment after comment. All just posted within the last few minutes.

Your profile picture makes you look frigid. And your friend looks way hotter than you.

You should invest in some blinds for your bedroom window, btw. I can watch you from the street.

I meet Allie’s eyes and neither of us speaks. Why would he say that? Is he spying on me?

She pulls up the notifications and I see that he’s been commenting on photos, too.

“Let’s just delete them, okay?” She clicks on the first notification and it brings up a photo from last fall.

Someone put on a little bit of weight
, he wrote.

A lump grows in my throat, and I cover my mouth.

Allie reaches over, rubs my back softly. “It can’t be him, right? Someone hacked his page or something.”

I can’t stop staring at
my boyfriend’
s photo next to such cruel, angry words. Allie deletes the comment and goes to the next one, deleting it before I can see what he wrote.

“It could be his brother,” she says.

I nod, swallowing down the tears. “Yeah. You think?”

“Totally. There’s no way Logan would say that stuff to you. Just no way. And he was just here. Look at the time stamps.
He would have had to literally race home, immediately log on, and start posting these. He wouldn’t have done that.”

I nod, pull my hands away from my face, nodding. “Yeah. You’re right. It’s gotta be Daemon or something.”

“No ‘or something.’ It
must
be him. There’s no other explanation.”

“Right.”

“Let’s just see what else Daemon has been up to.” She clicks on Logan’s—hacked?—profile. The latest activity is simple:

Logan commented on Harper’s wall.

Yeah, he sure did.

Allie scrolls down, then goes back up and clicks on his information tab, then scrolls around again. The whole thing is surprisingly sparse.

“You know, leaving the whole Daemon thing aside, it’s kind of weird that Logan only has eighteen friends,” she says, giving me a skeptical look.

I pull on one of the curls Allie did. It’s already deflating, hanging down around my shoulders. I didn’t have the right hairspray, I guess. “Well, he just moved here.”

She chews on her lip and stares at the computer, then leans forward and scrolls for a while. “But his updates go back months.”

“So?”

“So…he had this page when he lived in Cedar Cove.”

Oh.
The implications of her words finally sink in. I swallow the anxiety rising in my throat. “Who’s on his friends list?”

She clicks on the list and scrolls through them. “Me, you, Adam, Bick…”

I sit forward, cradling my arm as we go over the list, both of us silent as familiar names scroll by. “They’re all from Enumclaw,” I finally say, when she gets to the end. “I don’t get it. Does this mean he didn’t have any friends in Cedar Cove?”

She purses her lips, glancing at the screen before turning back to me. There’s something unreadable in her expression. “Either that…or he unfriended them.”

My stomach hollows out. I hadn’t even considered that.

She goes back to his wall, scanning his updates. Stuff about watching
Fringe
, something about a ball game, a picture update. All normal stuff. Probably not stuff that Daemon did. But nothing to tell us about Logan’s life in Cedar Cove.

I wait with bated breath as she scrolls further down the page, deeper and deeper into Logan’s past.

When she’s back several months, there are several “Likes” on his status updates. She clicks on a few, the mouse hovering over names I don’t recognize, people he’s not friends with anymore.

She clicks back to his wall and scrolls further and further, until other things start popping up in his feed. Friend comments.

Ex
-friend comments, since they’re from names I don’t recognize, people no longer on his friends list.

The first comes from a guy named Spencer saying, “Dude, last weekend was a blast!” followed by a girl saying, “Congrats! You killed it today.”

Allie stops, glancing up at me. I just nod.

She right-clicks on the girl’s name and uses the drop-down menu to open up her profile in a separate tab.

I sit back and watch as she scrolls further, opening up new tabs for a few other people from Logan’s past.

“So he unfriended at least six people?” I ask, furrowing my brow. Why doesn’t he want to be associated with people he was clearly friends with?

The first two girls and one guy all have private profiles, so they’re no help beyond confirming their location—Cedar Cove, Oregon.

The next girl, a brunette with a smile that could melt the ice caps, has an open profile. She’s from Cedar Cove, too. Allie scrolls down a bit to look for any comments from Logan, but we don’t find any.

I lean in again as Allie scrolls back to the top of the page and clicks on the girl’s photos.

There’s an album marked “Fun stuff.” Allie pops it open.

“She’s cute,” Allie says. Then she cringes. We both know this girl might be Logan’s ex-girlfriend. “I mean, kind of.”

I scan over her photos and see mostly female friends and what must be her dog. “Go back to the albums.”

Allie clicks the back button.

“Go to that one,” I say, pointing to the album labeled “mobile uploads.”

And then, sure enough, there he is…Logan. My heart thumps when my gaze lands on his familiar face. Allie and I exchange a look, and she clicks on the thumbnail to enlarge the photo.

When she zooms in, I realize it’s not just a group shot, but a
couples
shot. He has his arm around the brunette. She looks amazing in a slinky silver dress. Tall, lithe, ballerina-like.

My breathing turns shallow as I stare at the place where his fingers touch her bare shoulder, thinking of all the times he’s held me.

I shake my head. This was months ago.
Months
ago. I don’t need to get upset. I shouldn’t get upset. I’m doing this to myself, after all. Digging into his past. I have to be prepared for what I might find. And an ex-girlfriend who he never talks about anymore isn’t exactly
that
terrible…

“I don’t get it,” Allie says, staring down at the photo.

“What?”

“Well.” She turns to me. “The whole point of Facebook is you can keep in contact with people you don’t always see in real life. I mean, my mom friended half her sorority house from twenty years ago. There’s no reason to delete all of your friends just because you move away.”

I search for an answer. “Maybe they all know Daemon. He told me he wanted to distance himself from his brother. Daemon has a pretty bad reputation, you know?”

Allie stares down at the monitor for a moment longer before meeting my eyes. “What if he wanted to distance himself from his
own
reputation?”

I evade her look, instead reading the photo’s caption.
Prom
is all it says. But there are people tagged. Logan isn’t one of them. Why didn’t they tag him? Or did he un-tag himself? If
he did, that must mean that he doesn’t want any of his new friends—including me—to see this photo.

“I don’t know,” I say, my voice soft. None of this makes sense.

“Hmm,” Allie says under her breath. She turns back to the computer, her mouse hovering over the names in the tagged section.

Twenty minutes later, Allie snaps my laptop shut and sits back.

Neither of us speaks for a long stretch of time.

I don’t know if it’s the quasi-concussion I got from the accident or this whole Facebook thing, but my head is pounding harder than ever.

“Okay, so what do we know?” Allie says, finally breaking the silence.

I shrug my good shoulder, avoiding her eyes. I don’t know how to feel right now. Upset? Embarrassed? I just learned more about my boyfriend’s life in Cedar Cove by investigating on Facebook than I have in a month of dating.

“Harper…” Allie urges. “Let’s figure this out.”

I begrudgingly answer, “Okay, so he’s had Facebook for at least a year. He moved here, and then unfriended all of his old friends, untagged himself from all their photos, and deleted their comments.”

“We just don’t know why he’d do that.”

I nod.

“You know,” Allie says, “it could just be really simple. Maybe Daemon did something to them, and maybe
they
unfriended
Logan
because they didn’t want anything to do with his brother.”

Relief whooshes through me. “That makes perfect sense. Logan said Daemon completely screwed things up for him in Cedar Cove. So whatever he did, it extended to Logan’s friendships.”

Allie nods. “Exactly. So what did Daemon do?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know. Logan tried to tell me about him, but I was too ticked off he’d kept Daemon a secret, so I wasn’t listening.”

Allie chews on her bottom lip, staring at the closed laptop. “I think Logan needs to tell you about what happened in Oregon, and then maybe you two should have a sit-down with Daemon.”

I pull the throw-blanket hanging on the couch over my lap, curling up underneath it. “Why?”

“Because obviously Daemon ruined Logan’s relationships before. You two need to sit down with him and make it clear you’re not going anywhere, and that it’s not cool for him to mess with you like he obviously just did on Facebook and like he did the other day at their house.”

I stare down at the orange blanket, picking at the little yarn pieces sticking up all over. “I don’t know. You didn’t see him fawning all over that gross stuff in the basement. I doubt a talk would just solve everything…”

“Harper!” Allie chastises me. “Don’t just come up with excuses. This is a good first step.”

I sigh. “Okay, you think that if we sit down with him in a
cool, collected way, we can reason with him, make sure he understands that Logan and I are together, and he needs to back off?”

“Exactly.”

“Fine, but I seriously don’t know if I want to see him again,” I admit. “He scared the hell out of me before. There’s something wrong with him.”

Allie raises her brows, giving me a
duh
kind of look. “That’s why it needs to be done.”

“All right,” I say, sinking into the sagging couch. I wish it would just swallow me up. I’m not relishing the idea of seeing Daemon again. But if he messed up Logan’s relationship last time, he could do it again. He needs to know this time is different—that I actually want to stick around long enough to have something real with Logan. His harassing me needs to stop.

“I should probably go home,” Allie says, standing. “Want me to put the casserole in the oven for you?”

“Sure,” I say. “My dad will be in soon, and he’ll be hungry.”

She disappears into the kitchen for a moment and then pops up again. “God this weather sucks,” she says. “Your pasture looks like a lake.”

She walks to the door and is just touching the doorknob when a screeching sound—coming from the road outside—tears through the air. She glances back at me and then yanks the door open and steps onto the porch. I toss the blanket off with my good hand and rush after her, cradling my arm, just in time to see a big red pickup fishtail, its taillights shining
bright in the night. It screams through the intersection, sliding right past a large white van.

The van veers hard left, spins around, and skids to a stop next to the ditch. One more foot, and it would have gone in.

“Whoa,” Allie says, breathless. “That was really close. Look how far that van skidded.”

I nod, taking a deep breath to calm myself. I’d been sure I was about to witness a major accident. “He must have blown the stop sign.”

Allie walks across the porch, peering out through the sheets of rain before turning back to me. “He couldn’t have.”

“Why not?” I step up beside her, closer to the veil of rainwater.

“The stop sign is gone.”

W
hen the rose falls out of my locker on Monday, a chill sweeps down my spine. It’s got the same black ribbon as the other day, and again something’s attached to it. I stare down at where it landed on the ground, and consider throwing it in the trashcan without looking at it.

But I can’t. I have to know.

With trembling hands, I slide the thick paper out from the ribbon and unfold it. It’s a picture of me. The curly-haired, made-over picture we just posted to my profile yesterday.

But my eyes are blacked out.

I fling the paper onto the floor, wishing I’d just left it there to begin with, and put a hand against my locker to steady myself, my other useless arm sitting uncomfortably in its sling. Someone printed a picture of me and blacked out my eyes.