The Big Bad Wolf

LILI OLSEN WAS fourteen and a half years old, going on twenty-four, and she honestly believed she'd heard everything until she hacked into the Wolf's Den. The sick bastards in the well-protected-but-not-protectedenough chat room were all older men, and they were gross and despicable. They liked to talk incessantly about women's private parts and having vile sex with anyone and everything that moved - any age, any gender, human or animal. The men were beyond disgusting; they made her want to puke. Only then it got a lot worse, and Lili wished she had never even heard of the Wolf's Den, never hacked into the highly protected chat room. They might be murderers! And then the leader, Wolf, actually discovered Lili was on the site with them, listening to everything they'd said. So now Lili knew about the murders, and the kidnappings, verything they fantasized about and possibly did. Only she didn't know if any of what she heard was real or not. Was it real? Or were they making it all up? Maybe they were just nasty, sicko bullshitters. Lili almost didn't want to know the truth, and she didn't know what to do about the stuff she'd already overheard. She had hacked onto their site, and that was illegal. If she went to the police, she'd be turning herself in. So she couldn't do that. Could she? Especially if the stuff on the site was just fantasies. So she sat in her room and pondered the unthinkable. Then pondered it again. She felt so bad, so sick to her stomach, so sad, but she was also afraid. They knew she'd hacked onto the Wolf's Den. But did they also know how to find her? If she were them, she'd know how. So were they already on their way to her house? Lili knew she should go to the police. Maybe the FBI. But she couldn't bring herself to do it. She sat frozen. It was as if she were paralyzed. When the doorbell rang she just about jumped out of her skin. "Holy shit, holy mother! It's them!" Lili took a deep breath, then she scurried downstairs to the front door. She looked through the peephole. She could hear her own heart thundering. Domino's Pizza! Jesus! She'd forgotten all about it. It was pizza delivery, not killers, at the front door, and suddenly Lili was giggling to herself. She wasn't going to die after all. She opened the front door.