Читать книгу Bad Girls with Perfect Faces - Lynn Weingarten - Страница 12

SASHA

I knew what I was doing was fucked up, but if I was going to do it, I was going to do it right. I picked a name too common for easy Googling (Jake Jones) and a location (a random town about thirty miles away) and wrote an innocuous bio line (“Some random guy”). I told myself my intentions were pure – I just wanted to see how much danger Xavier was in exactly. So I could figure out how to save him. If some part of me already had other more elaborate plans, well, at least I wasn’t aware of it.

I made up a new Jake Jones email address and an Instagram account to link it to, then got some fake followers by signing up for a free trial of some shady music streaming service.

I followed a bunch of accounts to make my following and followers numbers look normal. I uploaded a bunch of close-ups of the white wall of my bedroom, to give myself a reasonable number of posts. I was going to set the account to private anyway, so it’s not like Ivy would be able to see what my pictures were, she just needed to see that I had some, that I was real.

Now all I needed was a photo of a guy. One that didn’t appear online anywhere so it wasn’t reverse image searchable. A guy of about the right age, good-looking but not unbelievably so.

I went upstairs to my bedroom closet, dug around in the back until I found the little digital camera I’d had five summers ago when I got sent to a sleepaway camp that didn’t allow phones while my mom was dating a chef who hated kids. I got the charger, plugged in the camera, flipped it on, and found the perfect picture of a dude in his late teens with dark hair that stuck up in the front, a big pouty, almost feminine, mouth, and a swim-instructor body, which made sense because he was one.

I uploaded the photo, then cropped it so you could see only half the face, half a tongue, and one muscular bicep, and hit save. And then, just like that, Jake was real. My eyes were closing. It was almost four. So I did the thing this was all leading up to: I went to Ivy’s page again, and I clicked “request to follow.”

I took a deep breath. I stood up. The room shifted and I remembered how drunk I still was. I told myself that if I regretted it in the morning, I could just delete the account. I’d delete the account and no one would ever know, and it would be like none of this ever happened.

I got into bed then, and, too exhausted to torture me anymore, my brain was quiet. And finally I went to sleep.