Social Suicide Read Online Free PDF

jumped into the pool with her laptop and electrocuted herself.”
    I blinked at him, letting this sink in. He had a point. That hardly seemed like an accident. Even if Sydney had been online poolside, what were the chances she’d decide to take a dip with her computer? No one was that stupid, not even Sydney Sanders.
    On the other hand, I was having a hard time wrapping my brain around the idea of Sydney ending her life. Sure, she’d been tweeting some pretty unhappy stuff lately, but there was a huge gulf between saying your life sucked and actually ending it. And if you were going to end it, wouldn’t you want to wait until after you had unburdened yourself to the reporter you were supposed to meet?
    “That just doesn’t make any sense. I mean, why would she kill herself before she—”
    I stopped myself just in time.
    Raley leaned in, his bushy eyebrows moving north. “Before she what?”
    I shut my mouth with a click.
    “Before . . . the homecoming dance,” I finished lamely.
    That seemed to satisfy Raley as he just shrugged. “It’s hard to say what goes through a suicidal person’s mind.”
    I bit my lip. I was pretty sure this person wasn’t suicidal. Which left only one alternative.
    Sydney Sanders’s death was a homicide.
    “It was a homicide,” I told Sam two hours later as I sat cross-legged on my bed.
    “No fluffin’ way!”
    I paused. “Wait—‘fluffin’’?”
    Sam shrugged. “I was getting tired of ‘effing.’ It was too obvious, you know? I’m experimenting with some alternatives.”
    “Well, fluffin’ is . . . creative.” I shook my head. “But, more important, yes way, Sydney was totally murdered.”
    As soon as I’d arrived home in a police cruiser, Mom had jumped into total SMother mode, wigging out that I was with the police (again), hugging me to within an inch of my life when she heard the cop say one of my classmates had been killed (which, honestly, was a little comforting), then totally freaking that I’d been the one to find a dead body. (Again. Which, I had to admit, was totally freaky.) She’d immediately gone into the kitchen and made her version of comfort food, while I’d immediately called Sam and told her she had to come over ASAP. Both Sam and the rice cakes with flaxseed butter had arrived at the same time, and I’d used the comfort fuel to spill the whole story.
    “So,” Sam said, grabbing a rice cake. She held it up to her nose, sniffed, then thought better of it, and placed it back on the plate. “Raley told you Sydney was murdered?”
    “Well, not exactly,” I hedged. “He thinks she committed suicide.”
    While I’d expected Sam to have the same shocked reaction I’d had at the idea, she just slowly nodded. “I can see that.”
    I stared at her. “You’re kidding, right? I mean, we’re talking about a girl who incorporated cheats into her nail-polish design. She was scheming. Underhanded. Remorseless. Not the type to give it all up.”
    “But she was depressed,” Sam pointed out. “She tweeted four times this afternoon alone talking about how miserable she was.”
    “You follow Sydney on Twitter?” I asked.
    Sam nodded. “She was captain of the lacrosse team. We all followed her.”
    “What did she say?” I asked as Sam pulled out her phone. I leaned in to read the screen over her shoulder.
    “Well, the first one was about how it sucks that her homecoming dress is going to waste. The second was about how it sucks that no one is around to call until lunch. One was about how it sucks that we can’t sunbathe anymore ‘’cause of sucky skin cancer,’” she said, scrolling through the tweets. “And the last one was about how much it sucks being alone by the pool on a sunny beautiful day.”
    “That last one,” I said, stabbing a finger at her phone. “When did she write that?”
    “Um . . .” Sam squinted at the readout. “Three-oh-five.”
    I felt a sudden chill run up my spine. “I was outside her place just a