Attach ments(21)

<<Beth to Jennifer>> You don’t have to like him to be my friend. As long as you like me, we’re cool.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> I want to like him.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> I shouldn’t have said that about Mitch making you unhappy. I love Mitch.

I’m sorry.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> No, it’s okay. You were right. Mitch does make me unhappy sometimes, and you don’t hold it against him.

Once upon a time at a family reunion   …

<<Beth to Jennifer>> Okay. Well. I met Chris at the Student union  .

<<Jennifer to Beth>> You don’t say.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> We both used to study there between our 9:30 and 11:30 classes.

I had seen him on campus before. He was always wearing this yellow sweatshirt and giant headphones. The kind of headphones that say, “I may not take my clothes seriously. I may not have brushed or even washed my hair today. But I pronounce the word ‘music’ with a capital ‘M.’ Like God.”

Are you rolling your eyes yet?

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Are you kidding? I love love stories. Keep going.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> So I had noticed him before. He had Eddie Vedder hair. Ginger brown, tangly. He was too thin (much thinner than he is now), and there were permanent smudges under his eyes. Like he was too cool to eat or sleep.

I thought he was dreamy.

I called him Headphone Boy. I couldn’t believe my luck when I realized we studied in the union   at the same time.

Wel l , I studied. He would pull a paperback out of his pocket and read. Never a textbook.

Sometimes, he’d just sit there with his eyes closed, listening to music, his legs all jangly and loose. He gave me impure thoughts.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> You’re not stopping there! You can’t stop with “impure thoughts.”

<<Beth to Jennifer>> I have to. Pam just came over. One of the old movie theaters is closing. The Indian Hills. It’s got one of the last Cinerama screens left in the country. I can’t believe they want to close the place. (I’ve seen all four Star Wars movies there. I need to complete the series, damn it.)

Pam wants a story about it by morning. So, I’m actually on deadline. Like a real reporter. I got no time for love stories.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Okay, you’re excused. For now. But you’re finishing this story.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> I will, I promise.





LINCOLN WAS NEVER going to send Jennifer Scribner-Snyder and Beth Fremont a warning. He may as well admit that, to himself. He was never going to send them a warning. Because he liked them. Because he thought they were nice and smart and funny. Really funny—sometimes they made him laugh out loud at his desk. He liked how they teased each other and looked out for each other. He wished that he had a friend at work he could talk to like that.

Okay. So. That’s how it was going to be. He was never going to send them a warning.

Ergo. Therefore. Thus …He technically, ethically, had no reason to keep reading their e-mail.

Lincoln had told himself all along that it was okay to do this job (that it was okay to be a professional snoop and a lurker) as long as there was nothing voyeuristic about it. As long as he didn’t enjoy the snooping and lurking.

But now he was enjoying it. He found himself hoping that Beth and Jennifer’s messages would get picked up by the filter; he found himself smiling every time he saw their names in the WebFence folder. Sometimes, on slow nights, he’d read their messages twice.

It had even occurred to Lincoln once or twice that he could open up their personal folders and read any of their mail, anytime, if he really wanted to.

Not that he wanted to. Not that he ever would. That would be weird.

This was weird, he thought.

He should stop reading their messages. If he was never going to send them a warning, he should stop.





Okay, Lincoln said to himself, I’m stopping.





From: Jennifer Scribner-Snyder

To: Beth Fremont

Sent: Tues, 09/07/1999 9:56 AM

Subject: Nice story.

And on the front page, even. You haven’t lost your chops.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> Why, thank you. It was exciting working with the news editors again.

Everyone’s so intense over there. I felt like Lois Lane.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Normally, you feel like Roger Ebert, right?

Hey, guess who wrote your headline?

<<Beth to Jennifer>> Now that you mention it, it was a very clever headline. Pithy, even. It must have been Chuck.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Funny.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> We make a great team, you and I. We should join forces and …start a newspaper or something.