What Not to Search

Prologue

Philadelphia, PA, United States 2007

The simple Dell Latitude D620 was a slick black portable window into a world beyond their own. It sat so elegantly against her lap with its fourteen inch screen and its whole 256MB of memory. The laptop was supposed to belong to that of businessmen. It was professional and slick and easy to carry without having to be plugged in all the time. It made for the perfect mobile working device for any esteemable office worker. But this particular Dell Latitude D620 was not for any businessmen. They could come from far and wide knocking on her door and offer up gracious sums of money for the delicate piece of metal in her lap but each time she'd turn those men down because this Dell laptop belonged to thirteen-year-old Carrie Brampton.

To be precise, it only recently belonged to Carrie Brampton but for six months prior it belonged to her father, Daniel Brampton. He was one of those esteemed businessmen who took their laptops in their briefcases so that they could work when on the train. Daniel gave his laptop to Carrie as a birthday present - and also because he bought a newer laptop for himself. It didn't matter who owned it before her, it was Carries now.

The group of two teenagers sat on the carpeted bedroom floor behind Carrie, all eagerly looking over their friend's shoulder as the laptop roared to life and sung its sweet little song like a welcome. Four coloured blocks filled the screen and then prompted her to log in to her user. Daniel's was still on the laptop with a little photo of a chess piece for whatever reason. Carrie clicked on her own, a smiley face, and typed in her password (which is totally not password1234). She hid it secretly from her friends, not catching the eye roll she had gotten. After clicking enter the screen lit up, showing the bright background photo of the Jonas Brothers in all their glory.

"Mom said I had to wait until college before I get any sort of laptop like that." Miranda Price commented first. Carrie was a little over excited about the laptop of her own. She came into school the day before practically singing its praises, excitedly boasting to the class she had a laptop of her very own as if it were unheard of. While Miranda would like to contest her friend and bring her back down a few pegs she still was the only one of them to have a laptop. "She said that they lower your IQ if you stare at them for too long."

"Yeah, and she also said that if you sit too close to the TV you'd go blind." Carrie rolled her eyes, she was just jealous. "But look how cool this thing is. It already comes with games and everything. Oh and look!" Carrie eagerly pressed the home button popping up a bunch of different icons although only one caught her eye and that was the app with the paintbrush. "It's called MS Paint."

"Carrie, you're acting like we haven't seen a computer before." Zoe Shaw said next, giving a sharing mental eyeroll look to Miranda beside her.

"I'm just showing you guys what it does. Look, I started up a blog and everything." A couple of clicks opened up the search page, eagerly she typed in the website name. As if the computer read her mind, it magically opened her up to the bright blog page she had been working on for the past twenty four hours. Glitzy stickers of different types of dogs seemed to be plastered on the screen. The blog was colourful and sparkly with bright clunky pink text saying 'Welcome to my blog!' with about twenty too many exclamation marks. The moment you opened the page a song would play and for Carrie Bradshaw, the song (of course) was Hollywood by The Jonas Brothers.

Carrie turned eagerly back to her friend, looking back to each of them as if wanting to hear what they said. Don't let that be mixed up with wanting to hear their opinion. She didn't care about that. She knew her blog was absolutely amazing, better than all the rest on this site but she liked being praised about it. Her smile faded a bit when neither of them said much else.

"Yeah, looks cool and all. Although have you seen Jamie's blog? She has a video from YouTube that pops up every time you click on her blog. It's so cool. And Jared's Myspace welcomes you with a robotic voice and it even says your user name."