Beneath Her Skin by Gregg Olsen (ebook reader for manga txt) 📗

the back door as she slipped on her jacket and they went outside. Though he was barefoot and wore only jeans and a Green Day T-shirt, he didn’t seem to mind the chill. Hayley pulled her zipper up to her neck, bracing herself for the onslaught of the cold winter air.

“Okay,” he said. “That was weird.”

“Yeah, she looks terrible.”

“I’m not really a hacker, you know that, right? People think because I’m playing with my computer all night that I could crack the da Vinci Code.”

“You’ll figure it out,” she said.

“I guess I can try.”

A large flock of Canada geese flew overhead, honking as they headed away from Port Gamble. Hayley wondered for only a second if Katelyn was somewhere up there too, watching, hoping, urging someone to tell her story.

Hayley looked around before planting a kiss on Colton’s cheek.

“I have faith in you,” she said.

“Nothing like a little pressure.”

She waved at him and walked across the now snow-crunchy yard between their houses. Hayley knew Katelyn’s password, but to say so would be too hard to explain to the boy she really, really liked.

No one, certainly no teenager, was normal or felt they were. Everyone wore a kind of mask that kept people from really seeing what—or who—was inside. Katelyn did. Starla did. And as she walked to her own back porch, Hayley Ryan knew that she and her sister kept things secret too. She didn’t grasp all that they were or what they could do. She knew that even people she cared about—her father, her mother, Colton James—probably never could comprehend it.

After all, it happened to her and her sister, and they couldn’t understand it.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Colton James’s bedroom was one of three in house number 17, a light-yellow one-story with a low roofline that might have had one of the best views of the bay in Port Gamble, but otherwise was not so special. The house wasn’t even really that old, having been barged over by the lumber company from Port Ludlow in the 1920s. His parents had the largest room, the one closest to the only full bathroom in the house. The other bedroom was used by his mom as an office. It had floor-to-ceiling shelving overloaded with catalogs that she’d collected in the years before the Internet became her lifeline to the outside world. Shania James, not surprisingly, did most of her shopping via catalogs. The UPS man and the FedEx lady had made so many trips to the James’ house that both had been to Colton’s birthday parties, family barbecues and other gatherings.

If one hadn’t noticed that Shania James stayed in the house ninety-nine percent of the time, they’d never have thought there was anything strange about her.

Colton’s own room was organized chaos. His often-away fisherman father had installed pegboard above the teenager’s desk. Wires were coiled on hooks, and jars of teeny, tiny computer components hung above the workspace. Colton seldom used those things anymore; they were left over from the days when he built his own computers.

That was then. Now he was all about apps. He focused on coding, design work and learning the business of being an entrepreneur at age fifteen.

To see him hunched over his computer at night, Coke can at the ready, Cheese Nips open and available for serial consumption, was to witness a boy’s true intensity. Code was beautiful to Colton. It was elegant. It was nearly a living, breathing thing.

And yet, Colton James was no geek. He was fit, handsome and could actually talk to adults while looking into their eyes. None of that “are you talking to me or the floor?” for Colton.

Colton’s screen saver was a picture of him and Hayley that Taylor took on her phone when the three of them were out on his father’s boat, the Wanderlust. The quality wasn’t the best, but the look in Hayley’s eyes was priceless to him. It was, he was sure, the look of a girl who really got him.

He scooted his keyboard aside and set Katelyn’s laptop on the desk. He was plugging in the power cord when his phone buzzed.

Hayley: Break the da vinci code yet?

Colton: Just started. Give me 10 secs.

Hayley: ):

Katelyn’s laptop whirred on and Colton put on some music while he waited for the log-on window to pop open. Colton didn’t like the idea of cracking Katelyn’s password so her mother could do some postmortem eavesdropping on her life. Yet, he’d seen the tears in Sandra’s eyes, the longing she had for what was never coming back, and he knew he had no choice. Password cracking was never really that easy. He knew a kid in school who used jailbreak software to crack his mother’s password so he could get into the system and disable the Net Nanny tool that he’d found so humiliating.

“I’m not doing anything that bad,” the kid had said. “Looking at porn is normal. It isn’t like I’m paying for it on their credit card. It’s free. They’re like porn Nazis.”

Colton thought about the last time he’d seen Katelyn. It was in the school cafeteria. She was sitting alone, looking over at the group of Buccaneers cheerleaders and the second-string players who couldn’t manage a ride off campus. Starla was there, the center of it all.

“Hey,” he had said to Katelyn on his way to the trash can.

She nodded.

“You got plans for the holidays?” he asked.

When he played back the conversation he knew that it was a lame attempt to engage someone he no longer really knew.

“Grandparents are coming over. Nothing great. You?”

“We’re going out of town to spend some time with my dad’s family in Portland.”

“That’s nice,” she said. “Your mom going too?”

“Yeah. She’s pretty freaked about it, but my dad’s got a plan.”

Katelyn smiled. “I like your mom.”

Colton appreciated Katelyn just then. He could tell that something was troubling her, but no matter what it was, she still had it within her to be kind to someone.

Hayley texted again.

Hayley: Try team Edward. Just a wild guess.

Colton: lke