Pocket Full of Posies

Chapter Fourteen

    My computer was a slut.

  Okay, so maybe it’d been my fault; but basically it crashed. I knew I shouldn’t have let the twins use it! They were notoriously awful with technology, and yet the second they’d batted their cute little lashes at me, I’d caved. If only I’d known what kind of chaos they were about to unleash on my poor baby.

  Really, though, it was my fault. I kept having to remind myself of that small detail. The thing was nearly brand new. I’d bought it the month before school started with my graduation money. It wasn’t anything spectacular—a Toshiba—but it was mine and I’d paid for it myself….with money people had given me for surviving high school. But I never had gotten around to installing some protection on the thing, and so when the boys took the entire day surfing YouTube and going on virus-infested sites like Adventure Quest or free TV shows, my laptop completely fizzed out. Even when I tried to use solitaire it started screaming at me.

  So add a crashed computer to my tale of woes! If school wasn’t starting up again in January, I probably wouldn’t have even been half as panicked as I was now. I mean, I was never really on the thing except for school-related searches.

  The running joke was that I was responsible for giving my computer an STD. Yup. Wasn’t entirely sure who’d started that one, but it soon became a fad in the Mallory household. Apparently I hadn’t used any internet condoms and chlamydia being thrust upon my laptop was my great punishment. It was all fun and games except I was the one who was going to have to pay to get it fixed.

  I’d spent the entire day talking to the Office Depot people—mostly because they took that time to place an idiot on the phones who had no business even working there—and then the Toshiba company themselves. What they basically told me was I was screwed. As if I hadn’t already known that. Toshiba gave me this laundry list of things to do to my computer to check to see if it was a hardware problem or a software problem—and in performing these things, it could actually cause a hardware problem. The good thing was my warranty would cover a hardware problem and I’d only have to pay twenty-five bucks to have the thing shipped to them.

  The bad news was, if it was a hardware problem—and with my low funds, I was really hoping it was so it’d be covered—I was going to have to have the whole thing wiped. Like it was brand new. It wasn’t so much that I had so much on there, but rather the thought of having to start from scratch. The few school projects I’d done and pictures I’d downloaded onto my computer could simply be put onto a flashdrive until my lovely Toshiba was well again. But it felt like a complete invasion to me. Did those Toshiba people take extra time out of their lives to poke through my stuff and laugh at the silly pictures of me with Bugsy?

  “You’re being ridiculous,” Liss told me after my rampant discussion about the said laptop. She sat curled up in the office chair reading a book, looking impossibly comfortable. I mean, she was so small she actually was able to fold into the thing, but how in the world could she look so complacent about it? “They’re not gonna go through your things.”

  “How do you know?” I countered.

  Liss looked up from her book—which appeared to be a Jane Austen novel. “Marley, you’re being paranoid. They have better things to do than to go through your personal junk. All they wanna do is fix the thing and get paid. They’re computer geeks.”