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pillow on my bed. “I’m speaking from a purely technical standpoint.”
    That was when I glanced at the screen and made this tiny, tiny, we’re talking microscopic, little tooth-sucking noise.
    Marcus was all over it. “What?” He looked up at me like a vulture eyeing prey.
    â€œNothing.” I minimized the screen.
    â€œLike hell.” Marcus leaped off the bed and wrestled the mouse out of my hand. The window I’d been looking at reappeared. “It’s the school’s closed chat room.” He sounded kind of confused.
    â€œYeah, you know. . . .” I tried to make it sound like, Hey, no big deal, lots of people hang out in the school chat room. The fact that I always refer to it as Dorks-dot-com shouldn’t suggest that I never go there myself.
    Marcus looked at me, his hazel eyes boring a hole in my skull. “Why would you hang out here?” It wasn’t really a question. It was more like he was trying to figure it out for himself.
    He looked back at the screen, and we saw it appear at the bottom of the page at the same time:
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    Marcus narrowed his eyes at me. “You sly dog,” he said admiringly. “Have you been chatting Jeffrey up online?”
    â€œNo.” This was the truth.
    â€œNo? You mean you don’t actually talk to him? Then what are you—”
    I shrugged. “Jeffrey hangs out online a lot. I like to see what he has to say.”
    Marcus stared at me. “So you just sit here ‘listening in’ on his conversations?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œOkay, that’s borderline creepy.”
    â€œIt’s covert intelligence-gathering,” I corrected. I could hear the defensiveness in my own voice. “It’s reconnaissance. It’s research so I’ll know what to say to him when the time is right.”
    â€œI said it was creepy ,” Marcus repeated. “I didn’t say it wasn’t brilliant.” He thought for a moment. “But can’t he see that you’re in the chat room?”
    â€œWell, you can change your screen name as much as you want,” I explained. “See? Right now, I’m whoosie1988, but I use a different name every time I log in.”
    â€œIt just gets creepier and more brilliant,” Marcus said.
    â€œThank you.”
    â€œSo—do you know who these other people are?” Marcus asked, squinting at the names that were scrolling across the screen.
    â€œI think a lot of them are from the International Club,” I said.
    â€œInternational Club?” Marcus repeated.
    â€œJeffrey’s Canadian.” As I’d learned from eavesdropping on his conversations.
    â€œCanada? Didn’t we annex that along with Puerto Rico?” Marcus asked. “Who’s Lola227?” he added as the name scrolled across the screen next to the comment <>
    I grimaced. “I’m pretty sure it’s Astrid.”
    â€œOh no, she di-en’t,” Marcus said. “Get in there.”
    â€œAnd say what?”
    â€œSay anything!” Marcus’s eyes glittered, and for a minute, I thought he might just lunge at my keyboard and start typing away himself. “Say hi. Say, ‘I’ll be at Green Up Day if you make it worth my while.’”
    â€œAre you nuts?”
    â€œLook, he doesn’t even know who you are,” Marcus said, pointing to whoosie1988 onscreen. “You could be anyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Melissa Carpenter,” he said, naming this girl in our history class with a serious case of BO who’s always trying to eavesdrop on our conversations. “It’s perfect, don’t you get it? This way if you say something dumb, you can just exit, then come back with a different screen name and try again, and he’ll never even know the difference.”
    My fingers hesitated over the