Unfriended (25 page)

“I know,” I said. “Because I’m going to try and fix this, and I was hoping that I could get your help.” I looked around at everyone, suddenly feeling panicky. “But none of you can update or post or blog about this or the fact that you saw me,” I said. “Otherwise, Isabel might retaliate.”

“Of course we’re helping,” Turtell said, crumpling up his own paper and tossing it in the path of the truck. Dave threw the controller across to Turtell, who caught it with one hand and began running the truck over his own paper. “No-brainer.”

Mark looked around. “If we’re pulling together another
crew
,” he said, using air quotes around “crew,” and a second too late, “should we call Sarah?”

“You mean just to keep her informed?” I asked, a little puzzled. Last I had heard, Sarah was forcing eight-year-olds to perform Eugene O’Neill. And if this all fell apart, I knew I’d have to get in touch with her—and with everyone else who Isabel had information on—but we weren’t there yet. And if we could figure this out, we might be able to avoid being there altogether.

“No,” Mark said. “She’s back. I guess she had to
leave her camp because of her uncompromising creative vision.”

I had a feeling I knew what that meant, and found myself suppressing a smile. But I was also realizing how out of the loop I was. “Why don’t we just keep this between all of us for the moment?” I asked. Suddenly, I realized that Turtell was the only one who’d pledged his support. “If you guys are in, that is,” I added, with a sinking feeling in my stomach. “I mean, I’m the one that Isabel has the biggest problem with. I’m the one she’s blackmailing.”

Dave shook his head. “Of course I’m in,” he said. “This isn’t just about you, Mad. She’s trying to hurt all of us.”

“
C’est vrai
,” Lisa agreed. Then she turned to me and shook her head. “But you should have told us all from the beginning.”

“Yeah,” Kittson agreed. “Especially me.”

I caught Ruth’s eye and saw her trying to suppress a smile. “But what’s done is done,” she said quickly. “Mad did what she thought was the best thing at the time. And now we can figure out where to go from here.”

“Right,” Mark said emphatically. Then he paused and looked around. “So what happens now?” he asked. “Do we have a plan?”

I glanced at Peyton. I had something more along the lines of a vague idea that I hoped might shape itself into something, but
plan
was probably too strong a word to use at this particular moment. Before I could answer him, Peyton’s phone beeped. She looked down at it, typed
a response, then met my eye and nodded. I took a breath and prepared to explain what I had a feeling would be, for everyone else in the room, an unexpected turn of events. “So here’s the thing,” I started, just as the door to the pool house swung open and Dell stepped inside.

Everyone in the room seemed to freeze, except for Turtell, who steered the mini truck right toward Dell, stopping it just before hitting his ankle, but keeping it close, its engine revving.

“Dell!” Mark yelled, jumping up and pointing at him, as though the rest of us might not have caught this. “Dell is here!”

“
Alors
,” Lisa said, standing up and facing him, crossing her arms over her chest. “You have a lot of nerve, showing up here.” And despite the seriousness of the situation, I had a feeling that she was thrilled to finally be able to say that phrase out loud.

Dell looked at me and sighed. “Really, Madison?” he asked.

“I was getting to it,” I said defensively. “I invited him,” I explained, looking around at my friends and
taking in seven almost-simultaneous shocked reactions.

“Good evening, Peyton,” Dell said in a voice that was much lower than the one he normally used, as he walked up to stand next to where she was sitting on the counter. Peyton narrowed her eyes at him and he took a large step away, but without losing what I’m sure he thought was an ingratiating smile. His attempts at suaveness were somewhat undercut by the fact that he was wearing a bulky black backpack.

“Wait, I’m sorry,” Ruth said, looking from Dell to me. “But what’s happening here?”

“I didn’t know who else I could call,” I explained. “I wasn’t allowed to talk to any of you. And Dell’s on our side.
Aren’t you?
“ I directed this last statement right to him, and Dell jumped, tearing his eyes away from Peyton.

“I am,” he said. He looked around the room, took a small step forward, and cleared his throat. “I wanted to apologize,” he muttered. “I understand Isabel got this information because it was on my computer. And I want to help make things right.”

“Ha!” Mark said, in what was probably the least convincing fake laugh on record. “Like we’re supposed to believe that?”

“Yeah,” Turtell said. He glared at Dell and cracked his knuckles. “Not buying it.”

“We don’t have a choice,” I said, knowing as I said it that it was, for better or worse, absolutely true. “We have to trust him.”

“And let’s look at the facts,” Dell said, ticking them
off on his fingers. “I haven’t gone back on the arrangement we made in May, even though as you can see, I had ample means. I haven’t done anything retaliatory. Also—”

“
Yet
,” Kittson said, arching an eyebrow. “If your little plan had succeeded, I would have lost my rightful crown as prom queen.” She looked around the room, letting the weight of this sentence sink in. “We should all think about that.”

“Seriously?” Peyton asked, looking at Kittson with her eyebrows raised. “That’s what bothers you here?”

“
Also
,” Dell repeated, keeping his list going, “let us not ignore the fact that I was just going about my business when Madison contacted
me
. I didn’t approach her.”

It looked like Dave and Lisa were both on the verge of saying something, and I jumped in before this would turn into a debate. There was no backing out now. “Guys,” I said, “I told him the situation this afternoon. He’s in. And if he wasn’t, he would have told Isabel already, and we would have known he had, because all of our information would be out there.”

“I don’t know,” Ruth said, shaking her head. She looked over at Dell, who held her gaze for a moment before looking down at the floor. “Are we forgetting that he has a slight habit of double-crossing people?”

“Are you forgetting that you have the same habit?” Dell shot back.

“Man,” Peyton said, looking back and forth between them, “Putnam’s certainly gotten a lot more interesting since the last time I was here.”

“I do not believe,” Ruth said, right to Dell, her voice low and angry, “that you are doing this out of the kindness of your heart. What’s in it for you?”

I thought I saw something pass quickly over Dell’s face, but then it was gone, and I couldn’t be sure I’d seen anything at all.

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “But I’m doing it because it’s something I need to do. Nothing more.”

Dell’s words hung in the air, but they didn’t appear to have convinced anyone. Turtell revved the truck a few more times, prompting Dave to signal for him to give the controller back.

“Madison,” Dave said, intercepting the controller flying through the air before it whacked Schuyler on the head, and looking at me gravely, “I just don’t know.”

“I hear what you’re saying,” I said. I looked around at the faces of my friends, all of whom looked much less pleased with me than they had a few minutes before. I was suddenly glad that we’d had our happy reunion before I’d dropped the Dell bombshell. “But the fact is, we need him.”

“For what?” Schuyler asked. She didn’t ask it contemptuously, but like she genuinely wanted to know.

“His computer skills, for one,” I started. “And—”

“Not necessary,” Kittson scoffed. “Anything he can do, I’m sure I can do just as well.”

“Really.” Dell raised an eyebrow at her. “Care to prove that?”

“No,” I said quickly, before we got too far off track.
“The real reason he’s invaluable is because he has access to Isabel. None of the rest of us can get in touch with her without raising her suspicions.”

“Not to mention,” Peyton added, hopping down from the counter and going to sit next to Schuyler on the sofa, crossing her legs underneath her, “from what I understand, he’s the last person that this Isabel girl is going to expect any of you to be talking to, let alone working with. It’s priceless misdirection.”

Everyone was silent for a moment, and then Lisa shook her head. “We’re working
with
Dell,” she said, as though still trying to make herself believe it. “
Un coup de théâtre, non?”

“
Oui
,” I said quickly, even though I had no idea what she meant. I’d found, over time, that it was usually the fastest way to get Lisa to move on and not discuss etymology. I looked around the room. “Guys?”

After a moment, everyone nodded, Ruth just barely. I noticed that her brow was still furrowed. She looked anything but convinced, but I figured I would just talk to her about it later.

“All right, then,” Dell said briskly, “first things first.” He slid his backpack off his shoulders and sat down on the couch next to Mark, who moved away farther than was probably necessary, frowning at him.

“What’s that for?” Kittson asked, watching as Dell pulled a laptop out of his backpack.

“This,” Dell said, booting it up and looking at us over the screen, “is for finding out where she’s keeping this information.”

While Dell hunched over his laptop, typing furiously, I turned on my own computer, which was still acting weird, moving much more slowly than usual. I sighed as I waited for it to boot up, and glanced over at Lisa, who was focused on her phone, typing rapidly. I looked around: Peyton and Schuyler were deep in conversation, Kittson was examining her nails, Turtell and Dave were trying to get the truck to run up the wall, Mark was trying to peer over Dell’s shoulder at what he was typing, and Ruth was getting a water out of the pool house fridge.

Lisa paused in her typing and looked up at me. “It’s Tricia,” she said, holding up her phone. Lisa’s phone beeped, and she looked down at it and sighed. “She wants to know what’s going on over here, since everyone seems to be gathering here, and who exactly is here, and can she come and hang out….”

“Well … no,” Peyton said bluntly. “She can’t. Who is this girl again?”

“Our friend,” Schuyler said. She looked at Lisa’s phone and bit her lip. “I feel bad about not including her, but …” She shrugged and I nodded. While Tricia had probably seen that everyone else had aligned at Dave’s without her, when I’d made out the list for Peyton, I’d limited it to people who’d been through Promgate, rather than bringing in new people who might get in trouble.

“I know she can’t come over,” Lisa said while typing, “but I’m trying to let her know that so she doesn’t get suspicious.”

“But she doesn’t even know Isabel,” Ruth said, leaning against the kitchen counter, bottle of Poland Spring in hand. “So who cares if she gets suspicious?”

“I’m just trying to be extra safe here,” Lisa said. “I mean, they both go to Hartfield. Maybe they have friends of friends in common, and Isabel would be able to see if she posted something.”

I shook my head, realizing how right Isabel had been—our lives were being lived in public. And it was very hard to know where, exactly, information would go. I just hoped we could pull this off, and soon, because I didn’t think we’d be able to keep up this media blackout of certain information—like the fact that I was friends again with seven people that I wasn’t supposed to be—for much longer. And plus, I was beginning to experience serious phone separation anxiety.

“Okay,” Dell said, looking up from his computer. “I’ve been searching my files, and it’s pretty obvious what she’s taken from me. I mean, she didn’t even try to cover her tracks.”

“And you really didn’t notice?” Ruth asked, coming to join us on the couch once again.

“I assumed that since my laptop hadn’t left my
room
that it was safe,” Dell said, a little irritably. “Clearly, I will revise such assumptions in the future.”

“What did she take?” I asked.

“Well, the files that you saw,” he said, typing rapidly. “And …” He typed in silence for another moment, then nodded. “She took the Hartfield security video,” he said, frowning. “She took it from my hard drive.”

“The proof that she has against Nate?” I asked, looking hard at Dell. “That came from you?”

“Yes,” he said, still peering at his screen. “When I heard about the prank, I hacked into the Hartfield security system, just to see if I could. And there was the video, clearly showing who had done it. So I copied it and wiped it from the Hartfield system. I figured that it might be useful leverage, at some point.”

“So it’s a video file?” I asked, and Dell nodded. I tried to get my head around whether there was any salvaging this at all, or if this thing might have already gone viral. “How do we know that she hasn’t made copies of it?”

“Because I encrypted it,” Dell said, looking up from his screen to me. “Your leverage is lost if there are dozens of copies of something. It can’t be copied. And if you try, you transfer a nasty little virus to your computer, as an added bonus.”

“Not bad,” Peyton said in an offhand voice, but she looked fairly impressed. Dell blushed bright red and started typing again, but so fast that I had a feeling it was probably gibberish.

“So if we get this file back from her,” I said, feeling my heart hammering, “then we’ve got the proof back about Nate and the prank. The only copy. Right?”

Dell nodded. “Right. It’s just a matter of getting it back.”

“Yeah,” I said. My own computer had finally booted up, and I opened a blank document, ready to write down some thoughts on how that was going to happen. Just as soon as they came to me.

“Well, the file’s probably on her computer, right?” Dave asked. “So we just get to her computer, and you can take it off. Easy.”

“Let’s find out,” Dell said, typing furiously again. I glanced at Ruth, who just shook her head, looking lost. Ruth was fairly hopeless with computers, which was maybe the universe’s way of balancing things out, since she was fairly brilliant with everything else.

“What do you mean, ‘let’s find out’?” Kittson asked, looking interested in spite of herself, leaning forward along with Mark to look at Dell’s screen.

“I mean,” Dell said, “I have access to her laptop. Just give me a second to pull it up.”

I blinked at Dell, certain I’d heard right, but figuring that I must have misunderstood. “How can you pull it up?” I asked.

A small smile crept over Dell’s face—a genuine smile this time, not the ones that he was trying to impress Peyton with. “Well,” he said, with a small shrug, “I have remote access to her laptop.”

“Does she … know about that?” Mark asked, peering over Dell’s shoulder for a closer look.

“Not as such,” Dell said, his smile growing.

“So how did you do that?” I asked, a little stunned by this turn of events. I had known that Dell was a skilled hacker, but I hadn’t known he was that good.

“There are a number of options,” Dell said. “You can send someone a link, with the software embedded. They download it without realizing, and you get access to monitor their computer remotely in real time.
You can also insert a flash drive with a program on it that copies the contents of their computer. The only downside is if the person installs new spyware or password protections, your access is wiped out. And it can cause computers to run more slowly, so people tend to notice something is wrong.”

I looked down at my own computer, which no longer felt like my familiar pink laptop, but instead, felt like a time bomb. I thought about how much more slowly it had been running lately, and about the flash drive Isabel had given me, and the folder I’d blithely opened.

“Dell,” I said, looking up from my laptop. “I think we may have a problem.”

“You were right,” Dell said grimly, looking up from where he’d been going through my laptop. “Isabel’s gained access to this machine.”

“Oh my God,” I murmured, leaning back against the couch. I felt a little bit sick at the sheer invasion of my privacy, and how far into my life Isabel’s scheme had extended.

“She would have been able to see anything you did,” Dell said. “Constellation, iChatting, even what you wrote on Word documents.”

“iChatting?” Kittson asked, looking right at me.

I nodded, and I saw her turn a little pale and glance at Turtell quickly before looking away. But Isabel had given me the flash drive
after
Kittson had told me about her ill-advised hookup in the Hamptons. Strange. Still,
at least I now knew how Isabel had seen that I’d started to send my friends the warning e-mail.

I racked my brain, trying to think of anything that I might have done on my computer that she would have been able to see. There was my message to my friends, which just showed that I was following her instructions, and my note to Nate, but on the surface, that was fine. And I couldn’t think of anything else that might have implicated me at all. I felt a sudden relief that I hadn’t actually started typing out our plan on my computer—since it would have meant that she would have seen all of it.