Point Horror: Identity Theft Part 3

"I'm fine," I said, more gently this time. I wouldn't bother her with this until I knew what, exactly, this was.

"All right." Mom wandered out of the room and closed the door. I didn't even have time to take a shower. Instead, I pulled my hair into a messy bun, pulled a pair of jeans puddled in the corner over my hips, and yanked on an oversized white T-shirt. And then, because my eyes were killing me, I took out my contacts and put on my gla.s.ses. I hoped I looked like tired grad student but knew when I caught a glimpse of myself in my rearview mirror that I looked more like a hot mess. Hayley Kathryn Westin, tired party girl. Just like I appeared on the fake profile.

Once I got to school, I hastily parked in my spot at the far corner near the auditorium. As I sprinted through the doors, I caught sight of six seniors, including Keely, huddled around an iPhone. Before I knew what was happening, Keely and I locked eyes. Then, she turned away, leaning toward Emily. I tried to imagine what they were saying.

Look how easy she is to freak out.

Let's give her a nervous breakdown. Hashtag: funsies!

The imaginary conversations made me run faster, bursting into the main office at eight thirty-seven a.m., gasping until Mrs. Miller, the office secretary, turned from her computer.

"Yes, Hayley?" she asked, her eyebrows rising at the sight of my disheveled self.

"I ... need ... a ... late ... pa.s.s," I heaved, watching the second hand on the office clock jump forward. It was only a few minutes before AP English, and I wanted to get there early to talk to Mrs. Ross and make sure no crucial Yearbook decisions had been made without me.

"No you don't." Mrs. Miller waved me away. "Of course, for most students, we require a parent's note to excuse tardiness, but I think we'll let this one slide. After all, it's nice to know that even Hayley Westin can come down with a case of senioritis."

I didn't bother to correct her. "Thanks," I said miserably, hurrying down the hall to the English wing.

"What's up, Westin?" Matt. I turned, not bothering to break my stride.

"Running late!" I called over my shoulder.

He easily caught up with me, matching my pace.

"What's the rush?"

"I missed the meeting this morning, so I have to ... Mrs. Ross ... I need to explain that I was sick...." I panted, catching my breath.

"Oh ... it wasn't a big thing. Jess led it. I don't think Ross realized you weren't there. She conked out as soon as Jess started dividing the calendar into deadlines."

I stopped in my tracks. "What?" Deadlines?

"Yeah, while you were sleeping off your epic evening at the U, she went ahead and gave everyone September deadlines. Hey, it's the way to do things. Get others to do the grunt work, and leave the glory for you."

I barely heard Matt's philosophical rambling. Jess ran the meeting? I was at the U? I felt like I'd been dropped on some alien stage, unsure of my lines and even whether or not I was in a drama or a comedy.

"What are you talking about?"

"Your Facebook. If you want to rage, you should really think about changing your privacy settings." Matt nodded sagely.

"What did I say I was doing?" I asked, simultaneously not wanting to hear the answer and knowing I needed to.

"Chillin' with some dudes at the U. So you go from no partying at all to, like, partying with the big guys? That's bold."

"Chillin' at the U?" I repeated. I cringed as the words left my mouth. I hated the word chillin' almost as much as the word dope. I'd never use those terms.

Matt nodded. "That's what your status said. So tonight, want to hang at Alyssa's barn? Everyone's going to be there."

I barely heard him. Alyssa's barn was legendary. It was the site of pretty much every makeout, breakup, and scandalous Facebook photo that occurred in high school. I probably couldn't have picked Alyssa out of a lineup, but even I knew what went down in her barn ... and the hayloft ... and the bank of the lake.

"Um ..." If I did go, as myself, how would they post fake status updates? But if I went, then I'd have to face Keely. On her turf. My stomach churned. All I'd had was the PB and J from last night, and I could sense that was approximately ten seconds away from coming back up.

I gagged, clapped my hand over my mouth, and ran toward the bathroom, not caring how it looked or what Matt thought.

"Man, if you don't remember, it must have been a really good time." Matt laughed as I stumbled into the girls' room. "Seriously, come to the barn! I promise it'll make the U parties look lame!" he called to my retreating back.

"Move!" I yelled to a trio of freshmen huddling around the mirror, blocking the stalls.

"Um, say please?" one giggled.

"Shh, that's a senior!" another whispered.

The three of them burst into snorts of laughter as I rested my head on the metal stall door. In there, the air was cooler and I didn't feel like I had to throw up. But I didn't exactly feel good. I'd always had a nervous stomach, and I hated the way it betrayed my nerves. Usually, the nausea would go away once I'd partic.i.p.ated in a debate or given a speech. But now, it seemed like I was stuck with it. I took a few deep breaths, trying to ready myself to go back to cla.s.s.

"She's the girl who parties with frat guys at the U," one of the freshmen said admiringly on her way out. My stomach dropped again.

I stumbled out of the stall and looked at myself in the mirror. Behind my gla.s.ses, my eyes were bloodshot and watery. My face was pale. At least I didn't look like the profile anymore. That was the ironic upside. Profile Hayley was tan, confident, always smiling, a girl with a glint in her eye who made it clear, even to the camera, that she didn't give a d.a.m.n about anything.

Get it together. I'd said it to myself a million times in the past few days, and now it was even more essential. I was comparing myself to someone who didn't exist. Shaking my head, I pulled my shoulders back, marched out of the bathroom, and headed across the hallway to the guidance office.

"Hayley!" Miss Marsted cooed, but I didn't say hi. I walked straight for Mr. Klish's office, not caring if I was interrupting another appointment. I wasn't some random tenth-grader who'd decided he could no longer handle Honors Geometry or a sad junior who wrote depressed poems for the literary journal.

I opened the door and immediately saw the oh-so-familiar logo for Varsity Debate on the jacket slung on the back of the chair.

Adam was already here.

What the h.e.l.l? My mouth felt cottony. Had this been his plan all along? To make me suspect him, then confide in him, and then use my moment of weakness to move ahead in the Ainsworth finals?

"Adam," I croaked.

"Hayley, good, I'm glad you came down!" Mr. Klish grinned.

"I'm sorry?" I said. I felt like I was outside my body, watching everything. This was the guidance office. This was my guidance counselor. This was my academic counterpart. The pieces, separately, made sense, but once they were together, I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do or what I was supposed to think.

"I'd called you down last period, but Dr. Osborn said you weren't in cla.s.s. I'm glad someone gave you the message, and I am delighted to be the first to inform you that both you and Mr. Scott are officially invited to the New Hampshire round of Ainsworth semifinals. Now, this is one of the few times that our school has had one candidate, let alone two, and I am confident you both will do our school proud," he finished, smiling broadly.

"Wait ... what?" I asked. It was taking too long for his words to reach my brain, for them to click into meaning. "I'm ... a finalist?" I whispered. I clutched the back of Adam's chair.

"Yes! And you look like you're going to faint!" Mr. Klish said jovially. He hauled himself from his chair and shuffled to my side. "Take a deep breath." He rested his hand on my shoulder.

Mr. Klish lumbered back to his desk. After shuffling through an enormous pile of papers, he pulled out a single sheet. He pushed his gla.s.ses up the bridge of his nose, scanned the paper, and settled heavily into his chair.

"Now, kids, the semifinals are next weekend in Concord. I'd bring you, but unfortunately, that's when the Renaissance festival is and ..." Mr. Klish shook his head.

"It's fine," Adam said. "We can get there by ourselves."

"Yeah," I murmured, not really paying attention. All I could think of was the profile. Because now that Adam and I were both going to the semifinals, the fake Facebook profile would definitely be found and scrutinized.

"All right. So you two will get yourselves to Concord. They're holding the interviews at the Vintage Plaza downtown. You'll check in, grab one of those minim.u.f.fins they always have at those types of events, get your coffee, maybe you'll have time to read the paper, something to de-stress ..." Mr. Klish babbled.

"And then when does the actual compet.i.tion start?" Adam interrupted.

"Oh! Well, as you know, the semifinals are conducted as an Oxford-style interview, done in front of an audience of your fellow compet.i.tors. You'll share what you know, be charming, and put Bainbridge on the map." He smiled encouragingly at both of us. "Any questions?" he added.

Adam's hand shot into the air. "What did they ask last year?"

Mr. Klish's grin widened even farther. "Excellent question. Well, last year one of the more colorful prompts was to explain how Shakespeare would use social media to interact with his critics, and another topic was whether teenage popularity was innate or could be learned. Any other questions?"

"No," I said, shooting a death stare toward Adam before he could come up with something else. For all I knew, he was just asking inane questions to waste time. After all, the longer the profile was up, the more chances the judges had to see it. "I have something I'd like to discuss in private," I blurted out.

"Okay," Mr. Klish said.

"I'll leave," Adam offered, as though it were a question. As soon as he brushed past me, I took a seat opposite Mr. Klish. I didn't allow my eyes to wander toward Ian-or-Morris, who was gazing down dolefully from the UPenn poster. I didn't want him to have to hear what was happening. He'd be above the high school drama.

"I know you said that the Ainsworth committee would be looking carefully at any online presence." I shifted uncomfortably. "My online ident.i.ty is being impersonated."

Mr. Klish narrowed his eyes. "How so?"

"Well, someone has created a Facebook profile with a picture that looks like me. It's not me. It's clearly a Photoshop job," I said hurriedly. "But it looks like me. And it's not good."

"How is it not you, if the photo is of you?" Mr. Klish's voice was cold, accusatory, and I shrugged miserably. I wanted him to tell me that it didn't matter, that he'd just been trying to scare me yesterday and the Ainsworth committee was entirely made up of people even more computer illiterate than he was. But he didn't.

"I think maybe they were able to Photoshop the picture or ... I don't know. And I don't know who did it. But I have my suspicions." Adam. Keely wouldn't have been smart enough to change the IP address.

"Can you please show me, Miss Westin?" Mr. Klish said, standing up from his chair and stepping aside.

"Of course," I said, typing my name onto his crumb-covered keyboard. He breathed heavily behind my shoulder. Facebook took forever to load on his computer.

But instead of the profile popping up, a blank page with a single sentence appeared: No user exists by this name.

"Maybe it's in another browser," I murmured, quickly typing facebook.com into Firefox. Again, the same message. Mr. Klish leaned even closer and I could smell the scent of stale coffee on his breath. I mashed my lips together, trying not to gag.

"Where is it?" he asked again.

I pushed the chair away from the desk. "I must have made a mistake," I said. "I'm sorry. Sorry!" I grabbed my bag and slung it over my shoulder and hurried out of the office, without saying good-bye to Miss Marsted. Matt's words bubbled back up in my brain: If you can't remember, you must have had a really good night.

A shiver rode up my spine.

What had "Hayley" done last night?

Adam was waiting outside the guidance office, shifting from one foot to the other. I paused. Every fiber of my being wanted to hate Adam, wanted to accuse him, but he looked concerned. Vulnerable.

"Everything okay?" he asked uncertainly.

"Yeah ..." I trailed off, looking up and down the hallway. Empty. "Last night, you saw the profile, right?"

"In the coffee shop, when you showed it to me, of course," he said. "Actually, I looked when I got home, too. She really looks like you, Hayley. But ..." He let the sentence hang, but I knew what he wanted to say. That he didn't do it. And I wanted to believe him, but I couldn't bring myself to say the words. Even if he hadn't, he was still my compet.i.tion, and I had to remember that.

I sighed. "It doesn't matter. It's not there anymore."

Adam wrinkled his nose. "You mean it disappeared?"

"Yeah. It's not there."

"Well, that's good, isn't it?" Adam asked.

I nodded and turned on my heel just as the bell rang. Almost eleven, and I still hadn't gone to cla.s.s. I felt like my brain was ready to burst from my skull. After all the emotional drama of the morning, spending forty minutes talking about the Treaty of Utrecht, or whatever was on the schedule for AP Euro, sounded like a vacation.

"Wait!" Adam called.

"What?" Students were streaming around us and I felt claustrophobic, unsure what people knew about me or were thinking about me. I pressed my back against the wall.

"Want to study together sometime this weekend? For the interview? I mean, we may as well. It could be helpful for both of us."

I thought about it. On one hand, Adam was smart, incisive, and, from years of being debate partners, I knew he could come up with killer on-point criticism. On the other hand, we weren't partners in the Ainsworth. And even if he didn't create the profile, telling him about it showed my weakness. I didn't need to do that again.

"Tonight?" he pressed.

I shook my head. "Not tonight." I was still thinking of Matt's invite to Alyssa's barn. Not like I would go. Or could go. And yet ...

"Tomorrow?" he asked.

I nodded. "Tomorrow's fine. Like seven at the Ugly Mug?"

"Sure," Adam agreed. He pulled out his phone and began punching in the time, as though it was a real appointment and not just a casual study date.

"Listen, Adam ..." I began, then trailed off as I saw Keely, Ingrid, and Emily saunter down the hall. But instead of ignoring me or offering a snide comment, I saw Emily offer the slightest hint of a smile.

"See you tonight," she said under her breath as she walked by.

Clearly, Matt had told them I was coming. And I'd surprise them. I would show up. If I was at Alyssa's, that meant that no one would believe it if the profile did resurface, saying fake Hayley was somewhere else. Somehow, being surrounded by my enemies in their element seemed less scary than sitting alone, in my room, waiting for their next move.

I knew exactly where Alyssa lived - just a mile down the road from me. I'd been to her house before, back when her hayloft was for art projects and not truth-or-dare sessions. Back in second grade, our Girl Scout troop had come to fulfill some type of nature badge requirement. I wasn't sure what we were supposed to learn or do. We'd spent the majority of the afternoon playing hide-and-seek in the hayloft, splashing in the stream that trickled behind Alyssa's house, and trying to make the goats that wandered around the property eat our math textbooks. Back then, we all had the same goal: to have fun. It was so different now.

I recognized Keely's sky-blue Prius in the line of cars along the side of the road. I wasn't exactly sure where I was going, but I saw a few kids were wandering down to a collection of trees where a cooler was half-hidden beneath a bush. Keely was in a far corner with Garret Evans. Kayla and her best friend, Alana, were huddled around one of their phones, and a few guys were sitting in a semicircle outside the barn, playing cards and talking. Their baseball caps were pulled low over their faces, making them impossible to identify.

I self-consciously tugged on my shirt. It was a plain gray V-neck underneath a Bainbridge hoodie. Based on what the pictures of the Photoshopped me was wearing, I thought I'd be underdressed, but everyone was wearing similar outfits. Weird. From the way I'd overheard Keely, Emily, and Ingrid talking about barn parties in the past, I'd a.s.sumed that they were epic. This was tiny. It'd be impossible to talk to Keely without everyone listening.

I stepped back, my foot landing on a branch. At the crack, one of the guys looked up.

Matt.

"Westin, what are you doing here?" he asked quizzically, as if he hadn't invited me here fewer than twelve hours ago. His tone made it sound like we'd run into each other in the guys' locker room or somewhere similarly random.

"Hayley?" Keely pried herself away from Garret and put her hands on her hips.

No backing down.