Chapter 3

2

I found the old laptop one day in my third year here.

There were a few boxes of junk piled in the corner of the basement―things Cole's men had thrown in when they were moving, calling them "trash nobody wants." I hadn't paid attention to them at first, until one day, out of pure boredom, I opened a box.

Inside was an old Dell laptop, probably from 2005, with half the letters on the keyboard worn off.

I tried pressing the power button.

Nothing happened.

But I wasn't going to give up. I took the laptop apart―using a piece of the iron bed frame as a screwdriver―cleared the dust off the motherboard, reconnected the power cord, and pressed the button again.

The screen lit up.

It flickered, then entered a command-line interface. I typed a few keys, the cursor blinked, and then―

A cached page of a local forum popped up.

The page was primitive, black text on a white background, with the title bar reading "Oak Valley High Class of 2005 Message Board (Archive)." The top post was pinned, dated October 17, 2005.

Poster: KatherineMoon2005.

Title: My life is ruined.

The body had only one sentence:

"My mom died. My dad says I'm a curse. Nobody wants me."

I stared at that name for a long time.

KatherineMoon2005.

That was my first handle, one I registered on a library computer at Oak Valley High when I was seventeen. My mom had just passed away, my dad had dumped me on a distant aunt, and my only pastime after school was going to the library to surf the web.

I used that forum for an entire year.

It closed down later―I remember it was my senior year, the school changed servers, and all the old data was lost.

But why was there a cache of it on this laptop?

I scrolled down to see other posts.

They weren't mine; they were from other people. Someone was talking about prom, someone was complaining about a math teacher, someone was looking for a lost locker key.

Then I saw a reply. The user was KatherineMoon2005.

It was me.

Posted on November 3, 2005.

Content:

"I want to study law. I want to go to New York. I want to make everyone who bullied me watch me win."

I sat in that basement, staring at my seventeen-year-old self on the screen, and the tears started flowing.

Then I noticed something.

There was a button in the bottom right corner of the page: "Reply."

I clicked it.

A text box actually popped up.

I sat stunned for a long time. Then, I started typing.

"Katherine."

I typed and deleted, typed and deleted.

Finally, I just sent one sentence:

"Do not marry a man named Cole Moretti."

I clicked send.

The page refreshed.

Nothing changed. Of course, nothing changed―this was a local cache, not the actual forum server. My "reply" couldn't possibly go back to the internet ten years ago.

I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes.

Forget it.

The next morning―or rather, the time I guessed was morning, since I could only track time by the lightbulb―Cole came down to deliver a meal. It was his only consistent habit.

A few hours before he arrived, I opened the laptop again.

The page was still there.

But I saw something that made my whole body freeze.

Underneath the reply I sent yesterday, "Do not marry a man named Cole Moretti," there was a new reply.

Posted: November 4, 2005.

Poster: KatherineMoon2005.

Content:

"Who is Cole Moretti? How do you know my password? How did you log into my account?"

I stared at the screen, my fingers trembling.

Because that reply wasn't written by me.

It was me from ten years ago―replying to me.