Liar, Dreamer, Thief by Maria Dong

Author:Maria Dong [DONG, MARIA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2023-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

DEAR KATRINA, THIS IS FOR YOU. I PUNISHED HARRY, AND I’LL GET YOU, TOO.

I can’t move. My stomach churns, questions barraging me like hail. Who the fuck is Harry? And why would Kurt leave me a message on his own wall—how could he have known that I’d see it, that I’d invade the place he stays, the place he sleeps—

And then I remember the wire. My gaze drops down, as if I am on a roller coaster, slowly rattling my way to the top.

The wire curves around the bottom of the wall, hugging it above the baseboard. It exits three feet below the message through a hole that leads back into the living room.

I don’t want to see. I have to see.

I leave the bathroom, counting steps—one, two, three, four. I keep walking until I get to eleven, and then I stop and turn.

The bathroom light is on. The living room is dark. It’s easy to spot the hole, a bright ring of light spilling out around the dark body of the cable, like a solar eclipse in miniature. There’s just enough light, now, to trace the cable’s path straight to the desk, to a rectangular shape that’s dark and slightly raised. A laptop.

The wire plugs into the laptop.

It’s like the snap of the world collapsing on the bridge, all my realms folding into one.

I sprint for the bathroom, my steps thudding across the floor. I grab the tape and tear it off. I’m crying hysterically, when did I start crying, when did I start crying, I can barely see—

I grab the edge of the wire and yank hard. There’s the briefest pause, a moment of resistance, and then the wire falls straight down, pooling like the coil of a serpent, revealing its head at the end, its gleaming eye, a mouth made of mesh. It’s a camera and microphone with a small circle of bathroom-floor vinyl glued to the top, like a tiny fascinator hat.

He was spying on us. On our apartment. All the times I’d frozen up in the bathroom—someone really had been watching me.

I bend over and vomit into the toilet.

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