I mean, with these dogs, and especially a dog like a Doberman that has such a long nose and can probably smell your sock when it’s five miles away, you can’t really hide much, unless you get into water, I guess.
Now you’re probably getting the idea here—by my talking so much about whether Dobey would be happy to see me—that I’d sort of formed a plan to go upstairs into the house.
Well, you’re right.
I won’t talk about the morals of it right now, because I figure that whatever assessment you’ve made about my character is probably sort of set in stone by now, and that this going-up-into-her-house idea that I had has sort of cemented your mental picture of me, which was probably never too terrific in the first place.
I’ll just focus on the technicalities.
First of all, I knew the alarm was turned back on. Like I said, I heard it beep right before they all left to get in the car out there, probably Laura’s dad’s nifty Tesla, which I must say is a pretty amazing car. So again I had thought about the hopper window, but come on, if I went out of that, you know the sort of trouble I’d be in.
Because think about it.
These people—Laura and her dad and her whole family—have wads of cash, and they undoubtedly got the whole shebang when they opted for home security, and that means video.
Inside and out.
I mean even out in the yard.
And that made me think how lucky I was, because probably it was infrared like in some spy movie, and even last night they could have seen me, if it had been turned on. If not Laura’s family in the house, then the guy paid to watch the video monitor in his office at whatever security outfit they bought the stuff from. This whole neighborhood security network would be alerted, and neighborhood patrols would come by the second I tripped the system.
They wouldn’t have motion sensors—I was sure of that. Dobey would set them off.
Still, I had to be careful.
So what I was thinking was, yes, I needed to go upstairs.
This was my plan A.
I needed to go up, make friends with Dobey if possible, avoid any and all video cameras, find the alarm control, locate the code that was undoubtedly written right near it—because nobody can ever remember those sorts of codes and they write them in the stupidest places—enter it, and leave.
Or plan B.
Go upstairs, make friends with Dobey, avoid the video, if unable to find said code, wait in a closet or something until somebody comes home, and try to sneak out when the house is again full of people.
I must admit I preferred plan A.
Except for one thing.
I thought maybe, just before leaving, I’d take a look around.
Now you think I’m a creep.
But I have to admit that I was thinking about exactly that—I mean looking around—and not feeling too good about it, because I really did know it was sort of a creepy idea, and an actually creepier thing to do—I mean, you know, sneaking around your ex-girlfriend’s house when she’s not even there.
Believe me, I really did think it was creepy.
But after hearing all that talk in the kitchen, something had sort of happened in my mind. I felt I had never seen Laura for who she really was; in fact, I was sure of it. So I felt pretty curious to get to know a little more of what she was all about, which I might learn if I managed to leave through the upstairs and got to actually see the inside of her house for a second.
I mean just a second.
Okay. I am a creep.
But you know how much in love I was with Laura and how beautiful and wonderful I thought she was and everything. And I must say that being in her house and hearing her upstairs talking had sort of reactivated my feelings for her—I mean these feelings that I’d worked really hard to sort of subdue ever since she’d broken up with me. I don’t want to sound pathetic, because I want you to know I really had made quite an effort to accept it when she broke up with me because I was “just a boy” and was not ever going to “accomplish anything important” in my life like her mom said, or at least was potentially not ever going to accomplish anything important in my life.
Now, I know there’s nothing worse than loving a girl who doesn’t want you anymore. We all know how gross that kind of love is, and degrading and disgusting and weird—I mean, especially a girl who has just grown up, I mean matured, because they can feel very sensitive and uncomfortable about things like that. My mom told me all about it, and I must say I sort of got her point completely.
I knew Laura didn’t love me anymore.
I accepted that.
I had to just get over it.
But all these experiences I’d had sort of concentrated my feelings; I mean sort of reactivated them, like I said.
The truth is, I had the sudden feeling I’d never even really known Laura.
I know that sounds crazy, because for a while we were together almost every day, and we kissed thousands of times, and she even let me get slightly intimate with her when she baby-sat, and I told her I loved her at least a thousand times. And god only knows how many times I said she was wonderful and beautiful—hopefully fewer than I seem to remember.
But being in her house and hearing what I’d heard had really gotten me thinking. I’d figured out that answer, for one thing—she saw I was hiding, and she saw me. And the answer gave me that other question, about whether I’d ever seen her at all.
And that question really bugged me.
Because I hadn’t.
I knew I hadn’t.
She’d seen me, all right. The first night we met. She
