One by One

And there it is. A WhatsApp from six hours ago. And below that, a notification from Snoop. Anon101 is geoclose, whatever that means. Geoclose? I’ve never had a notification like that on my Snoop account.

I have no time to worry about that now though. The question is how I get into the phone. I have three tries before it locks out, and then I’ll have no choice but to go back and get my charger, and wait while my own phone powers up, which will take long enough to make Liz wonder where I am.

I’m racking my brains, trying to remember if Kate ever told me Elliot’s date of birth, and if so whether to try the year, or the day and month, but when I bring up the lock screen, I come up short. It’s not a pin pad, it’s a thumb scanner.

My stomach drops with disappointment, but then I realize what this means, and I experience a different kind of lurch, this one of nauseated horror, as it dawns on me what I have to do next. Oh God. Can I do it? And if I can, what kind of person does that make me?

I glance across at the desk. I force myself to look at the shape I have been trying to ignore, let my eyes skitter across: Elliot. Elliot’s body.

His hand is stretched out across the desk, and I feel my cheeks go hot and then cold and then hot again with a kind of deep piercing shame at what I am about to do. But I have to get inside that phone.

I stand up. I unplug the phone from the block, and I take a step across the room, closer to where Elliot is sprawled. And then another. And then I am standing by his desk, reaching for his hand—his cold, firm hand.

It is a little clammy, though that is mostly due to how cold the room is, and his arm is surprisingly heavy to maneuver, but the rigor has worn off, and it is without too much difficulty that I unfurl his fingers, and hold his long, bony thumb between my fingers, chill and firm as a joint of meat.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper to him. “I’m so, so sorry.”

And then I press the tip against the lock screen.

For a minute nothing happens and I feel a piecing, shooting sense of disappointment. Can the phone somehow tell? Does it work off body warmth? Does it know that this is a dead man, not a living owner?

There is only one way to find out. Feeling even sicker, I put down the phone and rub the cold, clammy tip of Elliot’s thumb between my palms, chafing it roughly, trying to get a little of my own body heat into Elliot’s skin.

It’s surprisingly hard. My hands are cold too, and for a long time, all I can feel is the bone-deep chill of dead flesh against mine. But I persist, huffing on his thumb to try and warm him with my breath, and at last there does seem to be some perceptible difference in temperature. Before it can dissipate, I pick up the phone and press it quickly against the tip, holding my breath.

And then the display lights up, with the hot pink of the Snoop app’s home screen. And I’m inside Elliot’s phone.

I’m about to minimize Snoop and navigate to the text message app, when I stop. There is something really odd about Elliot’s Snoop app.

He is being followed by 1.2 million people. Which is not that surprising, I guess. He’s known to be one of the cofounders of the company, and his Snoop ID is public.

But the weird thing is that he’s following only two people. One of them is Topher—I remember his avatar and ID from when I followed him myself—Xtopher and a photo of him balancing a spoon on his nose, with a little tick to show he’s verified. Snooping Xtopher for 3 years, says the text beside his name. That’s not the weird part.

The weird part is that the other person he’s subscribed to is a totally anonymous user, Anon101. Anon has no picture, and when I click on the blank space where their avatar would have been, to take me through to their profile, there is nothing in their bio either. Go away, is the only line they’ve put in the “About” field, which maybe explains why they have only one follower. That’s it.

But under location, there is an entry. A string of GPS coordinates and a tiny logo saying “beta” in brackets.

This must be the update Elliot was working on before he died—the geosnooping update that he and Topher were so excited about, the one that let them locate Eva. But who is Anon101 and why is Elliot following them? Is Anon Eva? But, no, that’s ridiculous, not with one follower. And besides, I’ve snooped Eva. I can’t remember what her ID was, but I remember her avatar—a snow leopard wearing Ray-Bans.

I click back to the previous screen.

Snooping Anon101 for 2 days says the text beside their name.

Elliot followed Anon101 right before he died.

My stomach is fluttering now, and my thumb hovers above the “Geosnoop (beta)” tab at the top of the menu. I remember that notification on the home screen now—the notification that I swiped aside so carelessly. Anon101 is geoclose.

I press the Geosnoop tab.

In your area: reads the text at the top of the menu. And then, underneath, there is a list of just two people.

Littlemy

Anon101

 

I am Littlemy. Which means… Anon101 must be… Liz.

LIZ



Snoop ID: ANON101

Listening to: Offline

Snoopers: 0

Snoopscribers: 1

There is something wrong. Erin has not come back from her trip to the toilet. She has been gone a long time, but more than that, I can’t hear anything at all. No doors opening. No footsteps on the stairs. No sound of water flushing. Has something happened? Has she fallen asleep?

I lie there chewing my lip, trying to work out what to do. I went after her last time. I was worried when she took so long over changing her top, but now I am not sure if that was a good idea. The panic on her face when she opened the bedroom door and saw me standing there, just about to knock, made me think I had made a mistake. And now I wonder, is that when her manner changed? Maybe she is frightened of me. Perhaps she thinks I’m a stalker.

People have a habit of pulling away from me. It is something I have noticed over the years. It started with the girls at school—they would be friendly at first, and I’d try to make overtures back—and then they would start to cool, for reasons I could never put my finger on. So I would try harder. Make more effort. But the more I tried, the more they seemed to grow cold, until at last everything I did just seemed to make them hate me more.

At primary school, the other girls weren’t subtle about it. Go away, Liz, you’re so weird. I heard it again and again. As we got older, the girls in my class pretended to be kinder, but underneath they were thinking the same things, beneath their Oh, so sorry, we’re saving this seat or My mum says I can only have three girls to the sleepover, really sorry, Liz.

The girls were bad. The boys were worse. The worst of all was Kevin.

Even his name makes me shudder.

I liked Kevin. I thought that he might like me too. He had acne and his breath was a little stale, and he wasn’t particularly handsome. He didn’t seem as unattainable as some of the other boys. I got a book out of the library on how to make boys like you, but it was confusing and contradictory. Laugh at his jokes, it read. So I did. But then Kevin would look at me as if I were crazy and say, “What are you laughing at?”

Give him something to remind him of you. I gave him a pair of mittens I had knitted. I left them in his locker, but he never wore them. Later I found them in lost property.

Engineer chance meetings. I followed him around. I made sure that I was there, leaning against the lockers when he came out of the boys’ toilets. I waited by his bus stop. One day I followed him home.