But I was exhausted and tanked up on caffeine, so I posted a message. It didn’t matter if it failed to attract anyone, but it was worth a shot. It was vague and short, explaining that I was female （16, I figured that might appeal to some white-knight nerd）， and wanted help to mess with my horrible stepmother. I won’t go into the details of some of the messages I received in the days that followed. Suffice to say, my plea was like honey to a bee. If the honey was a young vulnerable girl and the bee was a fucking swarm of old gross blokes. I replied to the least disgusting messages and blocked everyone else. I spent the next week drip-feeding further details to three users, seeing how they’d react, what they knew about hacking and what they’d want in return. The one I held out least hope for was ColdStoner17, who seemed not to be able to use proper words and replied at the most random times of day, often with gifs which I didn’t understand. I was about to cut him loose when he messaged me at 7 a.m. one day as I was getting ready for work.
Yo, he typed, when we freaking out the old lady then? I fucking hate my stepmom too. This can be like the therapy my dad won’t pay for. The language was basic but the full sentences were a start. I discovered that he was 17 （hence the username）， lived in Iowa with his dad and the aforementioned evil stepmother, and spent a lot of time messing around on the internet when he should be doing his school work. I told him bluntly that it seemed unlikely he’d be a superstar hacker, but apparently I didn’t understand 17-year-olds very well at all. He spent the entire morning bombarding me with all the ways he could infiltrate laptop cameras, mess with baby monitors, and turn off people’s heating. It was mild stuff, but it still sounded more impressive than anything I could attempt, and so instead of binning him off, I engaged with him.
We talked a lot into the night on an encrypted instant messenger, as he told me how lonely he was and I told him fabricated stories about how much I hated my parents. The more we spoke, the more he relaxed and used proper spelling. He told me how much he loved reading, and we bonded over a love of Jack Kerouac （I have never read any Kerouac but Google kept me just about up to speed）。 I deliberately held off on any proper details about my plan, happy to form a relationship with him first, albeit one based on lies and sexist fairy-tale stepmother tropes.
This went on for a few weeks, as I attempted to act like the fictitious 16-year-old he thought I was, while also giving him a confidence boost that I reckoned would help him feel indebted to me. He confided in me about being bullied when he was younger because his parents had got a divorce （I guess Iowa wasn’t the most progressive of places） and he told me about his fears that he’d never get a girlfriend. Despite my attempts to keep it entirely chaste, sometimes I’d wake up to voice notes where he’d sing me little songs about how much I cheered him up, and I’d bat them away with smiley emojis. He was becoming infatuated. I’d forgotten how easy it was to manipulate teenage boys, but it came back to me pretty fast. I felt like I was on the right track with Pete （he told me his real name on day four, I told him that my name was Eve） and decided to press ahead and tell him a little bit more about what I wanted to do to Janine, my terrible stepmother.
I explained that she lived in Monaco （kind of like France, yes） and that she’d turned my dad against me over the years so that we were almost entirely estranged （not a complete lie）。 I wanted to freak her out and teach her a lesson. Did he know anything about smart houses? He knew a little, he said, but came back to me a day later fully clued up on the different methods used by companies who offered smart technology. The kid must have been up all night reading about all the ways you could infiltrate a home like Janine’s, and he was confident that we could get into her hub. The best way would be if we could get a new device into the house – if you can add another item to the system, we can take control of the whole thing. Are you planning a visit any time soon? This threw me. I had hoped that we’d be able to access the home hub without ever having to set foot inside the property and I had no clue as to how I might be able to get into Janine’s apartment without risking everything. I wasn’t a cat burglar and I had no illusions about how well secured it would be. But then, I’d never actually been to Monaco to see how Janine lived for myself. I had some holiday to take, there was no harm in seeing the lie of the land, even if it meant knowing for sure that there was no way to carry out this particular plan.
I told Pete that I was going to be out there in a couple of weeks but wasn’t sure if I’d actually be invited in. She hates me lol, I wrote, and I usually stay with my mum at a hotel and see my dad when she’s not around. It was weak, but if Pete thought this was a weird familial set-up, he didn’t say. Despite nearly being an adult, his family made him go to church twice a week and every day during the holidays, so I guess he didn’t have a great yardstick for what was healthy.