Кевин Брукс - iBoy

Some of them had their faces covered, so I couldn't make out all of them from the video, but I recognized most of them. Jayden Carroll was there, and a couple of brothers from Addington called Big and Little Jones. There were a few youngish kids — no more than twelve or thir­teen years old — who I didn't know, but I'd seen them around. And Davey Carr was there too. It was Davey who'd taken the iPhone out of Ben's pocket and thrown it out of the window. He was laughing when he did it.

I wanted to delete the video, to erase it from my head. I didn't want it to be there any more ... I didn't want it to exist.

But I couldn't delete it.

Not yet.

I might need it.

Inside my head, I reached out in anger to Carl Patrick's mobile and instantly sent a text from his phone to his girlfriend's, Nadia Moore. leona , I wrote, gotta cu agin soon. ur SO xxxx hot!! trkxxxxx

It was a pathetic thing to do, I knew that. It was petty and stupid and utterly pointless, and it didn't make me I feel the slightest bit better. But what the hell? It didn't make me feel any worse either.

At 03 :41:29 Lucy logged on to her MySpace profile, opened up her blog, and started writing. As far as I could tell, it was the first time she'd ever written anything in her blog. I knew that I shouldn't be spying on her, and I did feel kind of sneaky and ashamed of myself for doing it, but however much guilt I felt, my desire to know how she felt, to know what she was thinking, was that much stronger.

She didn't write very much. i don't know why i'm writing this, she began, cos i know nobody's ever gonna read it, but i think i just need to write down what i'm feeling. i need to tell someone even if it's only me. i feel dead, i hurt, nothing's ever going to be good again, nothing means anything anymore, all the good things are gone.

T was good and it was really nice to see him, he made me feel not so dead for a while, but tonite in the dark it all comes back and i can't see any light anywhere, there's nothing to feel, i want to hurt them, kill them, i hate them, i want them to die, to suffer, but what good would it do? they'll always have done it and i can't make that go away.

I waited for a while to see if she wrote any more, but after about fifteen minutes or so, she logged off MySpace and shut down her laptop. I waited some more, thinking about what I could do, what I should do, what I wanted to do ... and then, at 03:57:33, I closed my eyes, re-entered my cyber-head, and created a MySpace page for myself. It was almost as blank as Lucy's page — i.e. no pictures, no information, etc. — but I did include two favourite films, Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2, because me and Lucy had watched them together once, and under the Music section I put Fall Out Boy and Pennywise, because I knew that Lucy really liked them.

When it came to choosing a name for myself, I thought about it for quite a long time, and eventually — bearing in mind the name that Lucy used on her MySpace profile (aGirl), and the fact that I was, whether I liked it or not, part iPhone and part boy — I settled on the name that one of the Crows had called me earlier that day.

I called myself iBoy.

Lucy's page was set to private, which under normal circumstances meant that only her friends could send her messages (if she'd had any friends). And that meant that if I wanted her to add iBoy as a friend, I'd have to send her a request, wait until she logged on again, hope that she wanted to add me ... and I really didn't want to do all that. And, besides, these weren't normal circum­stances ... and I was iBoy, after all. All I had to do was think about adding myself to her friends, think about customizing the message connection between us, making it totally private, totally instant, and totally restricted to aGirl and iBoy, and then think about sending her a message ... and it was done.

hello aGirl , I wrote/thought/sent, i hope you don't mind me sending you this message, but i read your blog and i know that you didn't really mean anyone to read it, but i just wanted to let you know that if you ever feel like talking to someone, you could always talk to me. i know you don't know me, and i could be anyone, but for what its worth i'm not anyone you shouldn't talk to. i'm not anything really, just a 16-year-old boy who doesn't under­stand what's going on.

anyway, if you want to talk to me that'd be great, but if not, just don't reply or tell me to go away, and i prom­ise you'll never hear from me again.

iBoy

At 04:17:011 learned that my video function was on all the time, filming everything that I saw, and that all I had to do to play anything back was remember it, and then play it.

And between 04:48:22 and 06:51:16 I learned that it's really hard to get to sleep when you know everything there is to know, and that superpowers — no matter how powerful they are — are no help at all when you're crying on your own in the darkness.

I slept for precisely forty-one minutes and two seconds that night (or rather that morning), and it would have been really nice to stay in bed the next day and not do anything. But I was too tired to sleep by then. And, besides, I knew that if I stayed in bed, all I'd do was carry on thinking about things, and I'd just about had enough of thinking for now.

I needed to do something.

I went into the bathroom, turned on the shower, and then — standing naked in front of the mirror — I switched on my iSkin and watched as my whole body began glow­ing and shifting. It was an amazing sensation. The outline of my body — the defining shape of it — became blurred and indistinct, merging into the background, like some kind of weird super/cyber-chameleon, and when I moved, the movements left fleeting trails in the air, making everything seem even blurrier. I stood there for a minute or two, sta­ring at myself, and then — when I couldn't bear the weirdness any more — I switched it all off and got into the shower.

Twenty minutes later, as I was rummaging around in the sitting room, looking for my shoes and my bag and stuff, Gram shuffled in, still wearing her dressing gown and slippers. From the bags under her eyes and the way that she couldn't stop yawning, I guessed that she hadn't slept much either.

"Morning, Tommy," she mumbled, stifling another yawn. "What time is it?"

"About eight," I told her. "Have you seen my bag any­where?"

"What bag?" She rubbed her eyes and looked at me. "What are you doing?"

"My school bag," I said. "I can't find it anywhere."

"School?" she said, starting to wake up now. "What are you talking about? You're not going to school."

"Why not?"

"Oh, come on , Tommy ... you've only just got back from hospital, for God's sake. You were in a coma for seventeen days, and you had major surgery. Or have you forgotten all that?"

I smiled at her. "Forgotten all what?"