Free Obedience by Will Lavender Page A

her face sun-kissed and a drink in her right hand. Did Summer know Williams? Maybe the photograph was simply random, something Williams had torn from an annual and used.
    Yet-what were the chances of the girl in the photo being Summer?
    Mary forwarded the message to her best friend.
     
    To: [email protected]
    From: [email protected]
    Subject: weird stuff
    Do you know this guy?
    /attached
    Mary
     
    Mary waited. She knew she should be reading City of Glass, but her mind was whirring. She closed her eyes, rubbed her forehead with her fingers trying to-
    Her computer pinged with an incoming message.
     
    To: [email protected]
    From: [email protected]
    Cc: [email protected]
    Subject: Re: weird stuff
    ****ADMINISTRATIVE WARNING****filtertapspace/winchester servelistaccidentaladministrat/firewall/parse/messageblock*****ADMINISTRATIVE WARNING****please do not continue sending these messages, you are outside the limits of the school code****ADMINISTRATIVE WARNING**** ///do not reply to this message!///
     
    What the hell was the “school code”? Mary thought that she may have mistyped Summer’s name, so she tried the same message again. And again, she waited. When the ping didn’t come, she refreshed her screen-still no message. She stood up and walked around her room. It felt good to stretch her legs. She would have to do some yoga tomorrow. Maybe Summer would-
    Her phone rang.
    “Summer?” Mary said.
    “Is this Mary Butler?” said a sharp, even voice on the other end.
    “It is.”
    “Stop,” the man said.
    “Stop what?”
    “You know what. Stop. Stop sending those e-mails.”
    “I don’t know what you’re-”
    “Come off it, Mary. We’re sitting out here in the Gray Brick Building looking at every e-mail that’s sent. With all the shit that’s pirated at this school, they pay us twenty bucks an hour to sit out here all night. But what you’re doing is…”
    “What am I doing?”
    “The picture. I mean, there’s porn and then there’s that. You’re lucky we don’t send this right to the campus police. Or to Dean Orman. It’s just sick. I’m sure you think it’s a joke, I’m sure you and your girls are laughing it up, but we have to do our job.”
    “My professor sent this to me,” she pleaded with the man. “I didn’t know…I didn’t-”
    “Listen, I don’t have time for this. If you don’t want your Internet privileges taken away, I’d delete that picture immediately. Clean it from your hard drive. Good night.” He hung up.
    Mary found the original file again and clicked on it. It would not load this time. All that appeared on her screen were lines of unbroken and meaningless code.

10
    The next day Mary was so shaken by seeing Summer in Williams’s photograph that she almost didn’t go to class. But she needed to ask him what it had meant. The thought crossed her mind that perhaps Williams hadn’t even sent the photo. But there was his name in her in-box. Was he trying to impart some message about Mike? Was he trying to give Mary some kind of inside track?
    It took everything she had to leave her room, but when she was outside she was glad she had decided to go to class. Surprisingly, after the cool morning, it had turned into one of the nicest days of the month, the sun high and white in the sky, the clouds thin as gauze. On the yard in front of Brown Hall, some girls were sunbathing. They were all on their stomachs with textbooks open at their noses, studying for the first set of quizzes that were coming up next week.
    As she was entering Seminary, the girl who sat beside Mary in Williams’s class came out the side entrance. “No class today,” the girl told Mary. “There’s a note on the door.”
    Mary stepped into the dim foyer of Seminary. Normally she would be pleased that her entire afternoon was free-she now had five chapters in
City of Glass
to read-but today she was anxious to discuss the photograph-and that weird phone call, too-with Williams.