Page 52 of Hide and Seek
Itisa camera. I don’t know a ton about surveillance equipment, but this one is exceptionally small, and the little wire dangling off the end of it and wrapped around the hilt of one of the swords looks like an antenna.
A heavy feeling settles in my gut, and I dig a magnifying glass out of my desk drawer. Carefully, I lay the statue on its side and hold the magnifying glass over the camera, shining my flashlight on it.
It looks like there’s some writing on the underside of it, like a series of raised numbers on the black plastic casing. Is that a serial number? Or maybe it’s a product number?
A smart person would rip the camera out and destroy it to make sure their stalker can’t see into their room anymore. But for a smart guy, I tend to do a lot of dumb shit, and that includes not touching the camera and leaving it where it is.
I do, however, set the statue down and face it toward the wall. I have no clue if he’s watching me right now, but I need a few minutes to think before I decide what I’m going to do.
Still reeling from my discovery, I open the web browser on my computer and type in the numbers I saw on the camera to see if it’ll give me more information.
It’s a product code, and the image it brings up is identical to the camera in my statue. I click on the link so I can read the specs.
Unsurprisingly, the camera is a top-of-the-line model with a crap ton of features. The signal range is huge, easily covering the whole campus, so that doesn’t really help narrow down who my stalker is or where he lives. It also has a two-year battery life, automatic night vision, a seventy-two-hour internal memory, a thirty-day cloud memory, a two-way speaker, and a two-way microphone.
The fact that he’s been watching me through the camera doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it should. In fact, it’s a bit vindicating because it proves that I’m not crazy, and the feeling of being watched I’ve been having while in my room alone is real. Hehasbeen watching me, and he’s probably listening to me too.
That should terrify me, or at least piss me off, but it doesn’t. For reasons I’m not ready or willing to explore, it actually makes me feel safe.
I might not know who he is or why he’s watching me, but he’s proven more than once that he doesn’t want to hurt me. At least not yet. He stopped those guys when they attacked me while I was on my run, and he could have done literally anything to me in the woods, and no one would have ever known, but he didn’t hurt me.
I’m not fooling myself into thinking he’s doing this for altruistic reasons or that he’s not at least a little off his rocker if he’s getting his jollies watching me live my boring life, but my instincts are telling me he’s not the one I need to worry about.
That could change, but right now, he’s not a threat compared to the multiple people who seem hell-bent on deleting me from the census. And knowing he’s watching me so closely is weirdly comforting.
Even if he’s not the good guy my brain seems to want him to be, he’s had plenty of chances to hurt me, and he hasn’t. And he stepped in and helped me once. Maybe that was a fluke and he’ll just sit by next time and let the Kings or whoever is after me finish the job, but maybe he won’t.
And if I’m being honest with myself, the fact that he’s put so much effort into watching me is more than a little thrilling.
No one has ever really paid attention to me. I’m that guy who can blend into the background without trying, and no one ever looks at me twice, especially not here.
When I was still in public school, things were different. I wasn’t the invisible guy there. I wasn’t popular or anything, but I had friends.
Then I was forced to go to boarding school, and I went from a small fish in a small pond to a tadpole in the ocean. No one at boarding school would talk to me, not even my roommates, because I was new money. My humble upbringing was considered a mark against my character, and my classmates weren’t shy about telling me exactly what they thought of my family and our jump from barely middle class to the 0.1 percent. In any other scenario, we would be success stories. At boarding school, we were interlopers who didn’t belong in their world.
Things are pretty much the same here at Silvercrest, except instead of everyone knowing how I haven’t always been part of the privilege club that everyone except us first gens were born into, no one has any idea who I am or what my story is.
I don’t talk to people unless I have to, and I don’t offer any information about myself unless directly asked. It’s kept me off the radar, and while it’s preferable to how it was, the outcome is the same. I’m invisible to everyone except those in my immediate vicinity, and even then, I imagine most of my dorm and classmates would have trouble picking me out of a lineup if asked.
If I were to disappear tomorrow, no one except Cipher and Echo would notice until my parents or siblings couldn’t get a hold of me, and considering we don’t talk all that often, it could be weeks before anyone in the real world knew I was missing. I’m a non-entity at this school, and while that’s by design, knowing there’s one person on campus who’d notice I was gone is weirdly exciting.
No, that’s a lie. It’sverythrilling, and it’s the first time in almost five years that I feel special or like I matter.
Shaking my head, I snap myself out of that train of thought and focus on the statue. I should pull the camera out and break it, or at least toss it, but I can’t bring myself to do it.
It’s stupid and reckless, but I don’t want to get rid of it. Not yet.
I’ll just leave it facing the wall until I figure out what I’m going to do. He might still be able to hear me, but what would he really hear? Me swearing at my computer while gaming? My half of my conversations with Echo and Cipher since I always wear headphones when we chat? I don’t talk to anyone else, so it’s not like he’ll be eavesdropping on anything exciting.
My gaze is drawn to the clock puzzle on the other side of my room. Now that I’ve solved the shadow cube clue, my brain is feeling itchy, and I need to figure out what he was trying to say when he changed the time.
Pushing back from my desk, I walk over to my tallboy dresser and peer at the clock face. Four twenty-two. He changed the time to four twenty-two. It’s specific enough that it has to mean something, but what?
Is it a date? Does it have something to do with April twenty-second? It’s not four-twenty, so it’s not a weed reference, and it’s not April twenty-fifth, so he’s not referencing that movie my old babysitter made me watch a half dozen times when I was a kid.
It’s not Easter or any holiday that I can think of, but I pull out my phone to double-check just in case. The corners of my lips tick up in a smile. Something tells me my stalker wasn’t trying to remind me about National Chocolate-Covered Cashew Day, National Kindergarten Day, or National Yellow Bat Day when he set the clue.
That means it’s probably a reference to the time, but why 4:22? Does it mean something to him? Is that when he was born, or is it a reference to something important to him? It’s possible, but it doesn’t seem likely. Why would he give me a clue that means nothing to me? How am I supposed to figure out what it means to him when I have no idea who he is?
