Gl!tch.OS: And…SEND! They’ll be there tomorrow morning between 6-8am. Gotta love overnight shipping.
Gl!tch.OS: Now about your sprinkler system. I think I’ve almost got it figured out.
WiseWave620: DON’T YOU DARE!
Gl!tch.OS: And… Got it!
CHAPTER 5
WiseWave620: What would you do if you discovered a friend’s secret? If it didn’t matter, if it didn’t affect anything, would you still tell them you know?
* * *
Four Months Later
Happy Birthday to you…
Happy Birthday to you…
Happy Birthday, Oscar…
Happy Birthday to you…
Rose’s off-key singing rang through the kitchen of their latest rental home. Her son, now three years old in the blink of an eye, sat impatiently as he waited for her to finish lighting the candles. He’d been becomingmore vocal over the past couple of months, making Rose wonder if she was a bad mom for missing the old days when he’d sit quietly for hours.
How was he three? Seemed like yesterday that Rose peed on a stick she’d shoplifted from a rundown convenience store. She’d barely been nineteen, a kid herself. And now look at her little boy. So full of life, that toothy smile and eyes as blue as her own.
Oscar took a breath far larger than he needed to before he half blew-half spit all over the candles and icing. It was a good thing she’d thought ahead and bought a pint of butter pecan ice cream for her dessert. Once the candles were out of the way, Oscar could go crazy with the cake. Last year, the concept of a smash cake had failed on her prim and proper two-year-old son. Rose was hoping this year he’d have some fun with it.
Shame gripped her heart as her son attacked his cake, making her eyes water and her chin tremble. Oscar was so happy, such an amazing little boy. But all he had in the world was her. No friends, no cousins, no siblings. There was no one else for him to share this moment with.
As a mother, Rose wanted to believe that she was enough. That she was all her son needed and would need in his life.
But as the cynical realist she was, Rose knew the truth. She was doing Oscar a disservice by hiding him away. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but some day he would need more than just her in his life.
Wiping her eyes, Rose tried to find the joy in the moment and the knowledge that they were both alive, safe, and healthy. She’d worry about tomorrow another day.
* * *
Gl!tch.OS: I’m having a rough day. I’m afraid I won’t be good company tonight. I’ll talk with you tomorrow. Hope you have a good night.
Keys started at his monitor.At Glitch’s message. AtRose’smessage. It had been nearly four months since he discovered her identity. Rose Benson. The same Rose Benson he’d researched what felt like a lifetime ago when her older sister, Ivy, had come barging into the clubhouse with a bound rapist at her feet.
She was dead. Rose Benson was supposed to bedead. Why did dead people keep coming back to life? First Scar, now Rose. Who was next? Elvis? Leonard Nimoy?
He’d kept his mouth shut for four months, but he didn’t know how much longer he could keep doing it. Rose was Poison’ssister. But from everything he could find, Poison had no idea that she was still alive.
It made Keys dive into what he could discover, and from the surface, it looked like Rose was the sort of person the world would have been better without. But Keys knew firsthand how easily those looks could be deceiving.
From primary school all the way up until she was a sophomore in high school, Rose struggled. Low grades, endless teacher complaints, enough suspensions and detentions to fill her own file drawer… She was labeled a troublemaker, and the school gave up on her. Even worse, so did her parents.
Josephine and Zane Benson showed love to their oldest daughter, the one who excelled in physical fitness and grew up to be a decorated SWAT officer, and showed disdain to their youngest daughter, the one who failed numerous classes and ended up falling in with a bad crowd.
Actually, from what Keys could find, Rosewasthe bad crowd. At sixteen, she was caught smoking on school property and supplying alcohol to her classmates. Before the school could expel her, Rose’s parents transferred her to a reform school.
A place where a specific fingerprint started showing up in malware designed to infiltrate pharmacies. Mimicking insurance companies to approve or deny pharmaceutical orders, at sixteen Rose had created a network of fraudulent prescriptions to gainaccess to restricted drugs. It went on for months—until she landed in juvie.
Court records showed that the justice system had no idea that the teen they’d just incarcerated for grand theft of an Alienware Aurora R7 gaming system was responsible for hundreds of thousands of dollars of illegal drug distribution in their area.
