I have to stop.
“What do you lie about?” she asks. Every word she speaks isprecise, enunciated perfectly. There is something about her that I cannot look away from—this strange tension between her delicateness and something dark and deep beneath.
“Lots of things,” I say. “What do you lie about?”
She considers me, chin tilted up. “I lie about almost everything,” she confesses. “How I’m doing. If I’m happy. What I’m thinking about. Sometimes I lie so that my mother won’t worry, and sometimes I lie because I like to pretend my life is something different. Sometimes I lie because I like lying, or to practice. I lie about everything and I lie about nothing at all, just for fun. Your turn.”
She said it so plainly. She didn’t promise not to lie to me, I realize, but why would she tell me all of that if she was planning to?
“What do you lie about?” she presses.
“No,” I say. I shake my head. “I told you I would tell you the truth, but that doesn’t mean I’ll tell you everything.”
“Okay,” she says. I was worried she’d be upset, but she accepts this, an understandable limit on our arrangement. She’s quiet; the room is quiet, except for the humming of the machines that keep the air pure and dry and cool. She doesn’t seem to have the same urge as most people to fill up a silence with chatter.
“Is this what we do?” I ask, looking around the room. The walls are stark white; black-and-white photographs of buildings are the only decoration. “Just sit up here and talk? What do you do for fun?” She must be bored out of her skull, trapped up here by herself every day.
“Read, mostly,” she says. “Or hang out with Aubrey. Or snoop.”
“Snoop? How do you manage that from here?” I ask.
She waves me toward the office. I follow, curious and a bit apprehensive, as she goes over to the laptop. She sits down and pulls up a private browser window. A few keystrokes later, AtChat appears on the screen.
“I looked for you on AtChat. Your profile is totally blank,” I say. Then I realize that she isn’t logged in as Delphine Fournier but as someone named Jane Crowley—an administrator account.
“Who’s Jane Crowley?” I ask.
“I think she’s tech support at FellTech,” she says.
It’s the company that makes AtChat. The owner is a legacy, so the school gets a special deal on everything.
“And how do you have her log-in?”
“She came up here to set up my computer and stuff,” Delphine says. “I watched her type it in.”
“So that’s what you mean by ‘snoop’? You look at people’s AtChat pages?”
Delphine clicks through to a profile. On the admin account, there are buttons I’ve never seen before.Journal, one reads.
“Whoa, hold on. Is that the private journal?” I ask.
She nods and clicks. It’s Jennifer Danforth’s profile, and the most recent entry in her journal is all about losing her virginity over the summer to the neighbor’s hot college-aged son. I look away before I get more than the gist of it, cheeks heating up, but Delphine doesn’t seem fazed.
They encourage us to keep those journals. Your private thoughts, all in one place. “The teachers all have access to this?” I demand.
“Not all the teachers. Senior staff,” Delphine replies, backingout of the journal. She looks up at me, untroubled. “And Jane Crowley.”
“And Jane Crowley,” I echo weakly.
“Everything. Private chat logs. Personal files.”
I think of parties that have been busted, contraband confiscated. At least one mental breakdown that no one noticed until suddenly the boy was being sent to in-patient treatment. Did he post something in his journal?
I feel foolish for ever having believed it was private.
“It doesn’t work for everyone. I think they have to have permission from parents for minors, and it stops working when people turn eighteen,” Delphine says. She’s navigating to another profile. Aubrey’s. She opens the journal, but it’s empty. She lets out a sigh. “I know she never uses it, but...”
“Have you heard from her?” I ask. I think of the diary downstairs. Maybe I should say something. But until I understand what those fragmented words mean, I’m not sure telling Delphine about them is the right move.She knows, it said.