The Boyfriend App (16 page)

No. He couldn’t live there, in that falling-down place. I shook my head to clear it.

Where was Lindsay?

I felt like such a kid, stranded at some house where I didn’t belong, completely alone. No car. No boyfriend. No college. I blinked back tears and checked Public’s home page on my buyPhone. The Boyfriend App had fallen further: number 189. Now the tears pushed past the barrier of my lashes and streamed down my face, coming faster until my shoulders were shaking. I wrapped an arm around my stomach and tried to squeeze away the gulping noises my body was making. It wasn’t fair. None of it was fair. My fingers tightened around my phone. I felt my arm cock back like I was throwing a softball pitch.

“Audrey?” Lindsay called from the porch. “What are you—?”

I didn’t realize what I was doing until my phone was already flying through the air.

CRACK!

My buyPhone slammed into the car battery. The sparks went wild and the screen lit up. The phone jolted and buzzed, and then dropped onto the driveway.

I cursed my temper. I moved to the phone and saw the impact with the battery had fractured the screen. The reflection of my pale skin and messed-up pixie-girl haircut stared back at me through a spiderweb of fault lines in the plastic. Why hadn’t I spent the money on a case? I knelt and felt the cold asphalt through my jeans. The back had popped off. I tried to jam it together but it wouldn’t close.

I should’ve been freaking out about how I was going to afford a new phone. I should’ve been rehearsing how I was going to explain to my mom what I’d done.

Instead, I felt a great sense of warmth and inner calm. And the strangest buzzing noise was coming from my buyPhone.

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

“Audrey?”

I wanted to fix the phone. But I sat there staring at it instead, like it was the answer to all my prayers.

“Audrey?”

I turned to see Lindsay alone on the porch. She looked so beautiful. Standing there with her platinum hair shining and her khaki-colored jacket cinched perfectly at the waist.

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

The noise was so loud I could barely think straight. And I couldn’t stop staring at Lindsay. It was so sweet of her to bring me here to Madame Bernese. So what if the silly woman didn’t have a cure for my college scholarship problems? It was the thought that counted, and Lindsay was always thinking of me. I had the sudden urge to embrace my cousin and tell her just how fond I was of her, how appreciative. I had to get to Lindsay, to tell her how I felt. I loved my cousin
so
much. I jumped up and accidentally kicked my phone beneath Madame Bernese’s Buick.

The buzzing stopped.

I blinked and cocked my head. My thinking suddenly became sharp again, like it did in the computer lab after those first sips of Mountain Dew. I glanced at my cousin. Whatever fleeting affection I’d felt had vanished and now I wanted to kick her for bringing me to Madame Fraud and making me smash my phone.

“What is
wrong
with you?” Lindsay asked, putting a hand on her hip. Her crystal cocktail ring looked like an ice cube.

“What’s wrong with
you
?” I shot back. I felt weird. Like how they explain coming down from a high in those Don’t Do Drugs or Else You’ll Die videos from health class. “This was the stupidest idea ever. I can’t believe you fall for gypsies and crazy crap like this.”

Lindsay’s mouth dropped. “You are so ungrateful!”

“Madame Bernese quoted Danny Beaton,” I said. “Am I supposed to be grateful for that?”

“You’re hopeless,” Lindsay said, looking disgusted. “And I’m tired of trying to help you live up to your potential.”

“Good! I don’t want your help.” I felt words crawl through me, ones I wouldn’t be able to take back. “I just want you to leave me alone.”

“Fine,”
Lindsay said. “Go back to being
alone
all the time. You and your computer. Quite a life you have together.” She didn’t look mad anymore. She looked profoundly sad as she crossed the driveway and put her key in the car door.

“Wait,” I said. I wanted to tell her I was sorry. I wanted to tell her I needed her, that I’d wanted nothing more than her friendship since we were little kids. Instead I said, “I can’t find my phone.” The wind died down until it was only a whisper in the maple trees. I pointed at Madame Bernese’s Buick. “Can you shine Loulou de la Falaise under there?”

Lindsay rolled her eyes. We knelt on opposite sides of the car and Loulou de la Falaise illuminated the gravel beneath. “Got it,” she said, grabbing my phone where it rested next to the front tire.

I stood and glanced at her over the hood. If I was going to apologize, I needed to do it now. “Lindsay, I’m really sorry,” I started to say. But her eyes were half-closed, as if she was meditating.

Still clutching my buyPhone, she raised her eyes to meet mine with a piercing stare. “No,” she said. “
I’m
so sorry. You know how much I love you.”

“I shouldn’t have said that, though,” I said. “I guess I’ve been stressed, and I wanted to win the scholarship so badly, and I let the pressure get to me and I . . .”

Lindsay crossed in front of the car. She stopped inches before me, scratching at her ear. “It’s my fault,” she said dreamily.

Well, that wasn’t true. And her behavior was starting to make me wonder if Madame Bernese was burning something stronger than patchouli.

“I just love you so much,” Lindsay said, taking my hands in hers. I’d never seen her be so affectionate. And then I heard it.

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

The noise was back. It had to be coming from—

I grabbed my phone from Lindsay’s grip and threw it again, hard. It landed fifteen yards away next to a half-dead-looking brown-and-green shrub.

Lindsay took a step back, and screamed.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

.....................................................................

chapter sixteen

I
clapped my hand over her mouth.

“What just happened?” she said into my palm.

I looked at the yellow house and thought of the buzzing. “Bumblebees,” I lied. “Wait here. And don’t scream again.”

Lindsay didn’t protest. She stood next to the Buick with her arms crossed over her chest, shivering. The white-haired woman across the street had finished her cigarette and was beating a Navajo-style rug on the porch railing with a rhythmic
thud, thud, thud.
I was breathless as I crossed the lawn and knelt beside the phone.

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

It wasn’t an ordinary sound. It was like a combination of a high-pitched squeal and a vibrating buzz. I moved closer, but then jumped back just as a burst of complete and utter euphoria flooded my body. It felt like the endorphins that kick in after running for fifteen minutes and pushing past the pain, mixed with the sugar high and caffeine jolt from Mountain Dew, blended with the zing I felt looking at Xander’s lacrosse pics, combined with the warmth that swirled through me when Aidan’s hand held mine, and the rush I felt when his lips touched my cheek.

My mind was working a million miles a minute. Something was wrong with me—at least, temporarily. A strange noise was coming from my phone and it was making me heady and delirious. It was tricking me into feeling something I otherwise wouldn’t—the way I felt when I looked at Lindsay standing on Madame Bernese’s porch.

I stared at my buyPhone. It stuck up straight in the air, the bottom half nestled in the dirt next to the dead shrub.

I had to be mistaken. I’d seen too many science-fiction movies, and now my imagination was getting the better of me.

I crept forward until I heard it again.

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Blood swirled in my knees until they knocked together. A rush of tenderness and well-being covered me like a quilt, and I didn’t think I’d be able to pull myself from its grip. It felt so
good.
I fell to my knees in front of the phone like I’d seen old ladies do at church in front of holy statues.

I was sure now. It was unmistakable.

I was falling in love.

There was no one in sight to become the object of my affection—only Lindsay and the white-haired woman across the street, but my back was turned and I couldn’t see them. Without an object, the falling-in-love feeling was general, nonspecific: a warming that crept from my toes to my fingertips. Pulling myself from the feeling was like stretching saltwater taffy—I resisted until I snapped, stumbling backward until I couldn’t hear the noise anymore. I tried to catch my breath, but now that the feeling was gone, I wanted nothing more than to have it again. I stood there, trembling, both scared of the feeling and craving it.

I crawled over the cold earth as the buzzing got louder and the feeling grew stronger, making my thoughts cloud and swirl together. Images of Aidan filled my brain. His broad shoulders. Full bottom lip. Aidan lowering me to the ground, his hands touching my bare skin, kissing my mouth.

The images sped up, blurring together until I felt like I was going to pass out.

Focus.

I steadied my hands against the shrub. Tiny thorns pricked me and I saw blood on my fingers. I dug into the wet dirt, unearthing my phone and setting free the pungent smell of fertilizer.

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Aidan. His navy-blue eyes staring into mine. Aidan. Aidan. Pulling me against him, his breath warm on my neck.

Almost there.

I brushed mud from my buyPhone and pressed the oval button at the top, shutting down the screen. The buzzing noise stopped.

A motorcycle revved behind me as I sank to my knees. I heard it zoom down the street as I collapsed against the shrub. My thoughts raced. It was real. It was happening. Something in my phone was activating a physical response that mimicked love—not only in my body but in Lindsay’s, too. She’d held my hands and looked dreamily into my eyes—not exactly par for the course in our relationship. Something was seriously wrong—or seriously
right
—with my buyPhone.

Lindsay eyed me from the driveway.

There was no way to explain the places my mind was going—somewhere absurd and fantastical and possibly too good to be true. It was a hunch I wasn’t even sure I could put it into words. I moved across the lawn on shaking legs.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said to my cousin. My fingertips itched. I needed to get to home to my own computer. Fast.

In my bedroom, Hector’s blinking green light was salvation. I locked the door and stared at the screen. I took out my phone and set it next to the computer. I heard my dad’s voice.

A problem is solved one step at a time. So what’s the first step, sweetheart?

My buyPhone lay cracked open, its guts beckoning me to look further. I bent down, squinting, sure that I saw a JTAG port, even if the dimensions weren’t standard. I’d fooled around with JTAG on Hector before and built a USB-to-JTAG adapter, so I wired up a cable and some clips to connect to the buyPhone’s JTAG port. My breath caught as information poured from my phone into my computer. Public must have been arrogant enough to assume no one could open up a buyPhone without making it inoperable.

I searched until I found it: software that created a nonlinear response aliasing into the voiceband of my phone, creating the strange buzzing noise. Public had labeled the software
Inaudible Frequency BuyWare
. So something must have happened when I broke my phone to make the noise audible—either the jolt of electricity from Madame Bernese’s car battery, or the impact on the driveway, or, most likely a combination of the two. Now software Public had meant to be inaudible was audible. Something secret wasn’t so secret anymore.

Now I
knew
.

I found a backdoor into the BuyWare software and scanned recent activity and databases. The BuyWare was only being activated on certain phones. It would make the most sense if BuyWare was installed on all buyPhones, because that way any phone sold could make the buzzing sound. But for whatever reason, BuyWare was only being activated on phones that belonged to added users. That meant only those phones were letting off the sound. I tapped a finger on my mouse. Added users would include spouses and children.

I found the encryption key that allowed for secure transfer of data from users’ buyPhones to Public. Text files of information poured from my phone into Hector. Data flashed across the screen as more and more files were copied over. My mouth dropped as I scanned the data. BuyWare was monitoring the users’ every move, from their whereabouts to websites visited. That data was filtered into a program that rated each user’s degree of what Public labeled
susceptibility to BuyWare
.

I hacked into the database to find the numbers with BuyWare most recently activated: 917-555-6731 belonged to Kim Lee, age seventeen, location coordinates: 40.741237,-74.007085T. Susceptibility: High. 619-555-2381 belonged to Colin Hoggatt, age eighteen, location coordinates: 32.727631,-117.244137. Susceptibility: Midrange. 630-555-3201 belonged to Megan Lucke, sixteen, and so on. . . .

I kept hacking until I was sure: Every phone Public targeted with BuyWare belonged to a teenager. And activation history showed a more aggressive activation of BuyWare on the teens with higher levels of susceptibility.

I entered the coordinates of BuyWare activation and found locations across the continental US from Seattle to Miami. BuyWare was being activated even as I hacked, but I couldn’t find a pattern. It was activated more frequently in big cities, but, of course, that was to be expected. I pulled up the visuals for location coordinate 40.717764,-74.045077, where BuyWare was currently being activated on six separate phones. The location coordinates showed me the corner of Montgomery Street and Grove Street in Jersey City, New Jersey, where, sandwiched between Kanibal Home Boutique and a restaurant called Tacqueria, lived a Public store.