Bad Idea by Erica Yang Read Free Book Online

spices, sizzling meat. This time, she ate her food
without tasting it, shoving rice from one side of her plate to the
other while Jo made conversation with her mom.
    “What are we watching tonight?” Jo asked.
“Daisy? Are you listening?”
    “Huh?” Daisy shrugged. “I don’t know. What do
you feel like watching?”
    Daisy actually had a whole list of movies and
TV shows she wanted to see, but that was another thing she couldn’t
reveal to Jo. Why did it feel like more and more of her life was
falling into that category lately? She’d thought at first that she
was keeping one thing from her best friend, but that one
thing had started to feel more like everything .
    Jo rattled off a few recent titles, rom-coms
and action movies they’d missed in the theater.
    Daisy nodded along. “I’ll go set it up,” she
said. “Mom, are you watching, too?”
    Her mom shook her head. “Your father should
be home from work soon.”
    Jo grinned and melted at that. Daisy’s dad
wasn’t around much, but when he was, you could practically hear the
romantic music playing in the air of the Mejia house. Daisy’s
parents were crazy about each other, and Jo had always loved being
around that.
    Jo glanced at Daisy, obviously seeking
permission to bask in her mom’s love-glow a little longer.
    “I’ll meet you in there,” Daisy said.
    Since her mom wasn’t watching, Daisy figured
her parents might want the living room to themselves. She went to
her bedroom and turned on the computer. Then she navigated to the
video-streaming website and entered the family password.
    She cursed as soon as she saw the screen,
involuntarily pushing the mouse away from her hand as if that could
take away what she was seeing. “Recommended for you,” the site
proclaimed, right up top. Beneath those bold letters was a series
of titles and movie posters that made her heart pound and her face
get hot. The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love.
Imagine Me & You. But I’m a Cheerleader. The World Unseen. The list went on—far, far too similar to that secret list Daisy had
been keeping to herself.
    She hovered the mouse pointer over one of the
pictures. “Recommended because you watched I Can’t Think
Straight and Faking It .”
    God. At this point, Daisy
half-expected to see even more details on the too-helpful website:
“Recommended because you watched every lesbian kissing scene in Faking It five times each, and the coming out scene in I
Can’t Think Straight approximately five hundred times.”
    It was a good thing Jo hadn’t come in here
with her, or she’d have a lot of explaining to do. Daisy clicked
frantically through options screens, trying to figure out how to
delete viewing history and recommendations data. Why hadn’t she
thought of this before?
    An additional realization settled into her
body, making her stomach feel like she’d eaten an entire slushie on
a cold day. This was the family password. How long had the
website been recommending “lesbian interest” movies? Had her
parents seen this?
    Daisy’s throat closed. She found a reset
button that brought the whole account back to default settings and
pressed it. She thought that deleted her dad’s queue as well as the
information she’d wanted to erase, but that was going to have to be
okay. She could explain a stupid mistake with settings a lot more
easily than she could explain “lesbian interest.”
    Jo walked in just as Daisy made the final
clicks. “What’s up? Are the movies I wanted to watch not available
yet?”
    “I don’t know. I haven’t looked.” Daisy
navigated back to the home screen quickly, hoping to hide her last
few minutes of panic.
    Jo frowned. “Why are you messing with the
options?”
    “Huh? Oh, I just noticed the whole account
was reset. The queue is missing and everything.”
    “Your parents probably did that by accident.
You know how old people are with technology.” Jo’s admiration of
the Mejias’ love affair didn’t