And there, in a small town, in the heart of suburbia, sat a lonely girl.

Her bitten nails tapped feverishly against the laptop keys, the mechanical clicking echoing throughout her otherwise silent bedroom, like crickets in the night.

The space-bar, which was once painted white, had long since faded to a speckled blackness. A blackness much like the lighting of her room.

Jane had been hunched over her laptop since yesterday afternoon, just as she always was. She knew being frozen in that position for so long was bad for her.

Her back hurt. She had skipped dinner. She needed sleep. But she felt none of this. Only excitement, and the gripping touch of guilt.

She adjusted the hood of her jacket, the few moments of rest her hands had felt tonight.

The glow of the screen illuminated her pale face. A worn stuffed toy sat in her lap, a silent witness to her private obsession. Jane's hands paused their endless motion. She chewed on her thumbnail, trying to control the shaking.

Nothing beat this. A rush that she could never reproduce, one that came only in the dead of night, punctuated by moments of indecision and shame. A shameful pleasure. It was the thrill of robbing someone without getting caught.

A thumb drive containing a key-logger, placed in the school's only library terminal, had given her access to every password entered into it. From mundane news website accounts to personal social media accounts, she owned it all. The digital keys to people's personal lives.

Jane's laptop monitor was split into two distinct windows. Her left half displayed a string of keystrokes entered into the library computer, discreetly recorded by the thumb drive. The right half of the display held a log-in screen, with the password and username boxes already filled.

Her plan had worked. A perfect execution. She had pulled it off. All of it, leaving nobody the wiser. All she had to do was press enter.

Her nail continued to suffer the chewing.

Something in her chastised her. A voice. This was wrong, it said. This was an invasion of privacy.

Jane was aware of all this. Aware that what she had been doing for the past several weeks was simply a modern form of stalking.

And yet, slowly, she found her hand reaching out. With a click, her computer loaded the homepage of Ryder Jackson.

The blue and white page seemed to mock her, its innocent colors standing in contrast of her dark room and shapeless gray clothes.

Ryder. Seventeen years old. Tall, handsome, and everyone's favorite quarterback. He was so perfect he made Jane sick to her stomach.

At least, that's what she told herself. The butterfly feeling in her guts could be interpreted in two ways. She preferred the alternative that didn't involve her having a hopeless crush on Ryder Jackson of all people. But then why was his account the first one she had decided to hack?

She shook her head, the hood of her jacket fluttering with the movement. It had been for purely curiosity-based reasons, she assured the voice. Simple curiosity. Without a doubt. Absolutely.

Ryder Jackson's smiling face stared out at Jane, as if arguing with her. As if he were saying, "Is that truly what you believe?"

"Shut up, meathead," she muttered, her voice hoarse from dehydration. It was the first time she'd spoken in hours. Oh, she very much felt the irony of telling a photograph to shut up.

Fingers on the track-pad of her laptop, she scrolled the page downwards. A rising stream of photographs capturing Ryder's life passed through her screen.

Football. Hang-outs with his friends in a carpeted living room. Ryder with both arms around pretty cheerleaders. For a moment, she pictured herself in those photographs, next to Ryder, or perhaps even replacing him. Living the seemingly perfect life that he did, with friends, and romance, and a happy family.

Her stomach was twisting once more, the same sickening feeling that she disliked so much, but Jane could not bring herself to look away. She kept scrolling, drinking in more and more of Ryder. More photos. More comparison, her life against his. More grudging admiration.

She'd been looking into him for weeks, but this was the first time she had seen him in such vivid detail. An irony, considering it was all through her screen.

She jumped in surprise, head turning towards the door. Her thoughts, obsessive as they are, were interrupted by the sound of shattered glass downstairs. 

Mom. Again.

Bare feet padding silently across the carpet, she opened her door as quietly as she could.

The incandescent light from the kitchen made her wince. She'd been in her unlit room too long.

In the hallway, the smell of cheap alcohol was overpowering. Her eyes watered.

Jacket sleeve against her nose, she stepped over the kitchen threshold, carefully avoiding bits of broken glass. One of their two dining chairs was overturned. A brown puddle was slowly spreading between the tiles.

Her mom lay on the floor, not far from what was once an intact bottle of liquor.

She breathed a sigh of relief, or, at least, as much as she dared to breathe. Her mother hadn't hurt herself again, from what she could tell. No blood. That was a positive.

"Oh, mom, not again," she whispered, stooping to collect the larger pieces of glass. They clinked together in her hand, reflecting the pale yellow of the kitchen's lightbulbs.

Her mother stirred, eyes still closed.

"Jane?" her mother asked through a mouth of cotton. Her speech was so slurred that Jane could barely understand her.

"I'm here," Jane said, sweeping the loose shards into a dustpan. More clinking.

"Where's your father?"

Jane froze, dustpan half-emptied into the trash. Her jaw was held taut, her lips pressing together in an expression of barely repressed emotion.

"You're drunk again, mom." A flash of anger burned in Jane's chest. Quickly, she stamped it down. She'd been stamping it down for an entire year now.

Her mother only groaned in response.

Jane shut the trash bin with a metallic click. The floor was far less hazardous to traverse now.

"Come on, let's get you to bed," she said.

Like she had done so many times before, Jane maneuvered her thin arm underneath her mother's armpits, helping her stand. It took a great effort on her part, but she managed to prop her mother into a semi-upright position.

Her mother groaned again. Jane wrinkled her nose. Her breath reeked. Worse, even, than the kitchen.

With deliberate steps, Jane helped her mother stagger through the hallway and into bed.

"There's a bowl if you puke," Jane said softly. There always was.

"Jane?"

"Yeah, mom?" Jane sighed. She'd had enough drama for one night.

"I'm sorry," her mother whispered.

Jane said nothing as she closed the door behind her. She did not even bother to glance back, taking a small amount of pleasure in the vindictiveness of her silence.

The hallway still stunk of alcohol, though she wasn't sure if that was the spill or just how her entire house had started to smell.

She had begun padding back to the kitchen when the picture frame caught her eye. It was an old photograph in a worn down frame, one from before digital cameras were commonplace. An analog relic. It was faded from years of being poorly kept, but the principle subjects were still very much visible.

Her father, ginger hair wild and long, with his arms draped over a much younger Jane. Younger Jane's tiny hands were gripping her father's wrists as she looked at the camera, a gap between her front teeth. Her mother's head was visible over her father's shoulder as she hugged him from behind. Their smiles were radiant.

An off-white wall and untreated wooden slats stood behind the family, in contrast to their red hair.

She couldn't remember where the photo had been taken. On vacation? A restaurant? In the town where they used to live?

Or maybe the background had been edited in. A lie added to create the illusion of completeness.

She looked away, uncomfortable. It had been a long night. A long, emotional night.

The stuffed bear sat in her office chair like a cliché villain, its beady eyes staring at her. Behind it, her screen displayed the page she had left it at.

Ryder Jackson. His private life. His secrets. His smiling, perfect, sickening profile picture gazing back at her.

A red box on the lower corner of her screen indicated that Ryder had a new message from someone named Beatrice Ruth. Several new messages.

Replacing the teddy bear on her lap, Jane maneuvered the cursor and clicked on the box.

And there was that voice again, chastising her. She should stop, it said.

Jane ignored it, instead reading from the message box.

[11:15]Beatrice: hey... u up?

[11:17]Beatrice: ryd... hey

[11:22]Beatrice: I SEE U ONLINE!!

A string of cartoon crying faces and broken hearts followed the pair of messages, flooding that section of her screen.

Clearly, this Beatrice had a close relationship with Ryder. She was prominent in many of Ryder's various pictures.

Jane felt... something.

She squeezed the stuffed toy against her chest, which had begun to feel tight.

What was this feeling?

It hurt. She didn't like it.

Quickly, she shut her laptop screen. Her bedroom, its last source of light extinguished, was now pitch black. Somewhere on the street outside, a lone car roared past her house. A dog barked rhythmically in the distance. The night was otherwise silent.

She didn't know how long she sat there, clutching the toy bear to her chest. But at some point, sleep found her at last.