Epic Firsts Teen Sampler by Sarah Crossan

Author:Sarah Crossan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: JUVENILE FICTION/Action & Adventure / Survival Stories
Publisher: HarperCollins

CHAPTER THREE

Noa rushed up the stairs. She’d gotten off the T at Copley Station, the closest stop to the Apple Store on Boylston Street. But the store would be closing in fifteen minutes.

She’d kept her head down on the train, but no one seemed to notice her. It was always almost too easy to sneak a ride on the T. Noa made a point of paying when she could, honoring their honor system. Still, it was times like this that the lax security came in handy. The train had brought her past the stop nearest her apartment. When the doors slid open, she’d been tempted to jump out and head to her place. Maybe it was just a fluke that she’d been grabbed while walking away from it; maybe whoever took her didn’t know where she lived. She could take a shower, put on her own clothes. Crawl into bed, even though she didn’t feel tired despite everything that had happened.

Too risky, she decided. Not until she found out more about what was going on.

When she stepped through the doors into the cool white interior of the store, she was enveloped by a wave of calm. Funny how just seeing the giant logo of an apple with a bite out of it did that to her. For most people, home was represented by four walls and a roof. Not for Noa. She preferred a motherboard to a mother, a keyboard to house keys. Nothing was more comforting than the hum of a spinning hard drive.

At this hour, the store was nearly empty. The greeter was a geeky-looking guy in his midtwenties with a pocked face and spiky hair stiff with gel. His smile was strained as he said in a single breath, “Welcome to the Apple store can I help you with something we’re closing in five minutes.”

“Fifteen,” Noa corrected him.

“What?”

“Fifteen. You close at nine.”

He opened his mouth as if to argue, but she’d already moved past him, headed to the laptops bolted to a table at the far end of the room. There were a few other people checking out iPads nearby. No one paid any attention as she started tapping a rapid sequence into the keyboard of a floor model.

A minute later, she logged off and went to the register. A bored-looking clerk handed a bag to the customer ahead of her, then waved her up to the counter.

“My dad ordered me a computer. I’m here to pick it up,” Noa said.

“Name?”

“Latham. Nora Latham.” The Lathams were the fictional foster family she’d invented to fool social services. After a series of less-than-stellar experiences with the foster-care system, Noa had come to the conclusion that she was better off on her own. So she’d established a bank account in their name and filled it with cash earned by her fictional foster father. As far as her clients knew, she was Ted Latham, a brilliant yet reclusive IT consultant. He worked freelance, primarily for a West-Coast-based company named Rocket Science.

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