Chapter 12 – An Explanation for the Drama

@gottiewrites 28/08/14

I left a comment on my last chapter, a little prematurely, asking for help. I’m sorry if I upset any of you. I really did need help. I was going to avoid mentioning this, but I can’t just not give you an explanation after my comment yesterday. So here is a very condensed version of what happened last night. Yesterday morning I saw Rob and Nathan leave their house with duffel bags, and assumed they were going away for the night. I decided to use the opportunity to sneak inside. I promise I just wanted to have a quick look around and then leave. I wasn’t going to take anything, move anything, do anything at all. It was a huge mistake. Obviously. I climbed over the gate, then squeezed through a half-open window at the back. There’s a porch roof that extends close enough that I could get inside. I got round the motion-activated security camera on the front gates by ‘delivering’ a bunch of ‘Congratulations on Wrapping Season 2’ balloons to the letter box. The movement of the balloons in the wind kept setting off the motion sensors, and after about fifteen minutes, the little red light on the security camera went out. It had deactivated because of all the false alarms. BOOM. The house itself is kind of bland – they’ve not been living there long enough to have decorated much. There were some framed promotional Loch & Ness posters on the upstairs landing. In the office, I found some bills and papers, and a script for one of the new episodes of Loch & Ness with notes in the margins in Rob’s handwriting. There were framed pages from a fanzine on the wall, hand-typed on yellowing paper. I took a photo and transcribed them – see the footnote at the end.¹ I think they might have been written by Rob’s dad back in the seventies. Then I opened one of the desk drawers and found a laptop. I was completely thrown off my guard here, because it wasn’t just any laptop. It was my laptop. The one that was stolen from my room last week. It had the same stickers on the battered case – Loch & Ness’ magical police department crest, ‘I Am Groot’, the Shadowhunters’ Marks of Raziel – it was definitely my laptop.² I just stared at it for the longest time, unable to believe what I was really seeing. It was so unexpected that it felt like, I don’t know – a break in the matrix? A dream? A weird self-insert fantasy? For a start, I couldn’t understand what it was doing in Rob Henning’s office drawer – or why he would ever want it. I’ve had chance to think about it since then, and I’ve worked out that he must have been the one to steal it from my house. If Rob took my laptop, that must mean that he wanted me to stop posting this blog. Which means two things.

• He’s really dating Nathan

and/or

• He really is @silentwakes, and for some reason he really doesn’t want me posting any more information about the shady business he was doing online.

I don’t know if you will agree with this, but surely he wouldn’t have stolen my laptop just to stop me from posting about his relationship? That’s a pretty major step to take. So, I’m a bit stumped about what he’s so desperate to hide. It must be something really huge if he’s going to so much trouble to conceal it. I’m clearly getting close to a big revelation here. I didn’t have time to work all this out while I was there, of course, but I was still shocked. I must have stopped paying attention to my surroundings, because I was getting the laptop out of the desk drawer when I heard a noise out in the hall. Someone had come home. I’d been too stunned and distracted to even notice. I grabbed the laptop and scrambled under the desk, out of sight. I had seen Rob and Nathan leave the house with suitcases that morning, so I’d thought I’d have the house to myself. I hadn’t even made a plan for what to do if this happened. I just held still and held my breath. Rob opened the office door and came in. He was holding the balloons, so I figure they’d decided to come home early to sort out the security false alarms. That cunning plan clearly backfired on me spectacularly. He sat down at the desk and turned on his desktop. I shuffled right up against the wall, so his knees didn’t knock into me. I was trapped there. If I made a single noise, he would have discovered me. That’s why I posted that comment, asking someone to call for a pizza. I wanted the door to ring so I’d have chance to sneak out of the window. I couldn’t wait for that long, though, so I submitted a blind item to a celebrity gossip site, saying that a selkie-shaped actor had impregnated his banshee colleague. Gossip bloggers are more reliable than god, so the rumour was listed on the website within minutes. Rob’s phone started blowing up with calls a few minutes after that. He left the room to talk to his publicist, so I took the opportunity to escape out of the window like my butt was on fire. And that’s it. Nothing else happened. I didn’t even get a chance to look for the bedrooms to see if they share a bed. – gottie

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Footnotes