Alafair Burke: City of Lies

Megan had closed her laptop the second that Professor Ellen Stein busted her. But that hadn’t stopped Stein from instructing her to stay late after class – an example to all the other seminar students who might have been tempted to ignore the class discussion in favor of more interesting online material.

By the time Stein had finished lecturing her on the importance of group discussion and the empirical research demonstrating the deleterious effects of multitasking on learning, Megan was running late for her biochem lab. She would have blown off a lecture, but the labs counted for 60 percent of her grade and couldn’t be made up. And med schools would care about her biochem grade. No, the lab couldn’t be skipped. And it was impossible to juggle her computer while titrating liquids and triggering chemical reactions over a Bunsen burner.

Now she had finally made it back to her building on Fourteenth Street, three hours after first seeing her name posted on a Web site that promoted itself as the home of the country’s juiciest campus gossip. She walked quickly through the lobby, pressed the elevator call button, and then pushed it several more times as she watched the digital readout on the elevator tick down to the lobby level. As she rode up to the fourth floor, she pulled her laptop and keys from her bag.

She slipped a key into the doorknob – she never bothered with the other locks – and turned. Once inside the apartment, she glanced at what had once been the empty bedroom, the one that now belonged to her roommate.

Megan’s parents had originally justified the purchase of this two-bedroom condo as both an investment while Megan attended college and also a place for them to stay when they visited the city. But with the economy down and Manhattan rents still sky-high, the prospect of additional cash flow outweighed the Gunthers’ desire for a room of their own in the Big Apple: Megan had to tolerate a roommate after all. Heather called the first day the ad hit Craig’s List in May. She was transferring into NYU in the fall and seemed pretty normal, so Megan went with her gut.

The truth was, Heather was easy to tolerate. Today, as on almost every other day, Megan returned home to find Heather’s door closed and the apartment quiet and in exactly the same condition she’d left it. Whether Heather was out or at home, this was the usual state of their shared home. Sometimes Megan wished Heather would come out of her shell and start treating this as her apartment, too, but today she was grateful that her roommate kept to herself.

Inside her own room, she closed the door, flopped down on top of her pale yellow bedspread, and opened her laptop. The connection to her wireless network seemed to take forever. Once the signal was finally established, she opened Internet Explorer, clicked on her history bar, and scrolled down to www.campusjuice.com.

She navigated her way to the NYU message board. All of the posts on the first page were new, entered within the last three hours. She clicked through the board, searching for her name again. What had once appeared on the fifth page of the forum was now on the seventh. The site was clearly getting some use.

She moved the cursor to her hyperlinked name, took a deep breath, and clicked.

11:10 AM – noon? Life and Death Seminar

12:10–3 PM? Bio Chemistry Lab

3–7 PM? Break: Home to 14th Street?

7–8 PM? Spinning at Equinox

The schedule was hers, down to her five-times-weekly cycling classes at the gym. Whoever posted the message obviously knew her comings and goings. They also knew where she lived, or at least which street. The short message was detailed enough to convince her that the final line of the post was no exaggeration:

Megan Gunther, someone is watching

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