Pretty Little Things. Jilliane Hoffman
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Название: Pretty Little Things
Автор: Jilliane Hoffman
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Приключения: прочее
isbn: 9780007311620
isbn:
The computer sat on a cluttered desktop. Back when Bobby was in high school, the telephone and good, old-fashioned note-passing were the communication methods of choice. Now it was all about email, texting, IMing, blogging. All you ever wanted to know about most teens could be found either in their cell phones or somewhere on the hard drive of their computer. And, more specifically, usually on a MySpace or Facebook page – social-networking sites which allow subscribers, notoriously teens and young adults, the opportunity to have their own ‘space’ on the World Wide Web. A place where they could post pictures, ‘blog’ their thoughts, voice their worries, pontificate on politics or global warming or yesterday’s hangover, identify their hobbies, list their friends and name their enemies. It was all there – down to addresses, birthdays, telephone numbers, schools, places of work and where they’d be hanging out on Friday night. A treasure trove of information – you just had to know where to look. Which was the problem with most parents – they didn’t have a clue. Technology had stepped on the gas in the last fifteen years and left most of them way behind, still fiddling with the ‘start’ button on their Windows Explorer.
He flipped on the computer and sifted through the pile of papers on the desk as it warmed up: Poems, math problems, science worksheets, a Social Studies test with a big D on it, doodle sheets filled with red hearts. Finding a printout with Elaine’s email address would sure make life a lot easier than a search-and-guess game. Colored pencil drawings of pandas and ferrets decorated the inside of the desk’s hutch. Pretty impressive, Bobby thought, for a kid who’d just turned thirteen. If school continued to bottom out, all hope wasn’t lost; the girl had serious potential as an artist.
No email info in the stack. He opened the browser on her internet engine and pulled down the list of sites visited; www.myspace.com popped up first. That meant it was the last site visited. That meant she had an account. On the MySpace homepage he fiddled with name combinations under the search button. He was pretty good at what he did; after only a couple of tries he found what looked like her under her nickname.
*LAINEY*
| Headline: | VAMPIRES AND FERRETS RULE!!!! |
| Orientation: | Straight |
| Here For: | Friends! |
| Gender: | Female |
| Age: | 16 |
| Location: | Coral Springs, Florida. |
| Profile Updated: | October 22, 2009 |
The wrong age didn’t faze him. To join MySpace you had to promise you were fourteen or older and enter a birthday accordingly. There were no stats, but he’d be willing to guess that a good chunk of the ‘teens’ on MySpace were closer to eleven or twelve. He’d interviewed kids as young as eight or nine who’d had MySpace pages, with profiles that claimed they were thirty-five. He clicked on Lainey’s profile. It wasn’t set to private, which meant anybody surfing MySpace could see it, member or not. Gwen Stefani’s ‘The Sweet Escape’ started to play. Brilliantly colored butterflies served as wallpaper. Pictures of young teenage girls, who he guessed were friends from Ramblewood, decorated the site – laughing, kissing the camera, making goofy faces, giving the finger, trying to look way too sexy for thirteen-year-olds. Cigarettes dangled from the slight fingers of a couple of girls; others toasted the camera with strange-looking drinks. A girl with long, brown, coffee-colored hair was in a few of the group shots. A girl who looked a lot more grown up than the lanky, awkward fifth grader in the photo Bobby held in his hand. Each picture was captioned with insider-jokes:
Molly B. & the ferret bandits!
No one home … LAINBRAIN Bite me, please!!! E and M pre-concert jelly-jollies … Was I just at the bathroom and then at the stairs?
He looked at his notepad: Molly Brosnan, Erica and Melissa Weber, Theresa – Last Name Unknown. He glanced around the room. Vampire movie posters adorned the walls. Sketches of ferrets decorated the inside of her hutch. He definitely had the right site.
Tiny picture icons of Lainey’s favorite movies, rock bands and books covered half of the first page. Blogs, angst and general teenage drama filled the next two. Akin to a lot of MySpace pages, her site read like a diary, supplemented with postings and comments from her fellow MySpace friends. Three pages told Bobby more about Elaine Emerson than her mother could manage to communicate to police over the past eight hours.
‘Whatcha got?’ Zo asked, standing over his shoulder.
‘She’s got a MySpace. Last time she logged in was Thursday, the day before she went to the movies with the unknown friend. Hates school. Can’t stand bro, stepdad’s an asshole, mom’s a bitch and sis is pretty cool. Loves animals and her BFFs. Typical shit. Wishes she could, quote, “just get the hell away from here”. Endquote.’
‘Sounds like that’s just what she did,’ Zo muttered. ‘So much for, “my daughter wouldn’t do that.” Damn, you’re quick. Are we out of here, then?’
‘Not yet. She’s got twenty-four names on her friend space, but only six in her top,’ Bobby said, hitting the print button. MySpace was a membership-only social networking site, which meant that to communicate with somebody on MySpace you had to have an account yourself. Like a magazine, the more subscribers MySpace could boast having, the more it could charge its advertisers. Members were encouraged to continually boost the number of friends in their ‘personal networks’, and the number of friends someone had was automatically posted on the ‘Friend Space’ part of their webpage – like a sophomoric bragging list of sexual conquests. Some members were known to have hundreds, even thousands, of ‘friends’ – most of whom they’d never even chatted with. A lot of friends in Lainey’s network would potentially mean a lot of legwork tracking everyone down if the kid didn’t resurface. ‘Let’s see who Mom can ID from that. And let me look for a more recent picture of our girl.’ Under ‘start’ he ran a Find Files search to look for jpegs – electronic photos – on the computer’s hard drive.
‘Whoa,’ said Zo, as dozens of tiny pictures swarmed the screen.
‘Whoa is right,’ Bobby said as he clicked on one of the images. A picture of a girl dressed in tight jeans and a midriff-baring, see-through, white T-shirt, a sexy smile on her bright, red lips filled the screen. Her long brown hair, the color of coffee ice cream, was blown sleek and straight. Her big, brown, made-up eyes flirted coyly with the camera. Long red fingernails beckoned Bobby and Zo to come a little closer.
‘She sure don’t look thirteen,’ Zo said with a low whistle.
‘That’s the idea,’ Bobby answered. ‘There’s about thirty СКАЧАТЬ