His questions haunted her over the next few days. Why had he done it? What was his perspective?

What wasn't she seeing?

She chewed the same bite of oatmeal over and over again, the silence of the apartment deafening. Abed had all but disappeared again. She hated this. She hated this feeling. This riot of confusion. She hadn't felt this way since-

No.

She put her spoon down resolutely. This was just another problem- a mystery. She could solve mysteries. She just had to be systematic. Pulling a notepad from her bag, she opened it to a fresh page. At the top, she wrote 'The Brent Underjaw Conundrum'' and underlined it. Below that she wrote, "Why did Abed catfish me?" and then underneath that "What is Abed's perspective?".

Abed's perspective. Something about that phrase bothered her. Abed had always insisted he was an observer. The near constant tv watching was his way of understanding the world, of understanding other people. So, maybe to understand Abed's perspective she needed to understand tv?

Annie drummed her fingers on the table.

She needed to do some research. Hurrying to her laptop, she opened the browser and googled "Movies about catfishing" then "Movies where a man pretends to be someone else".

After a solid half an hour, she had a list of movies to investigate.

Catfish. Dave. She's the man. Roxanne. Gattaca. You've got mail. Whatever It Takes. The Truth about Cats and Dogs.

Good thing they still had Jeff's Netflix password.

Eight hours later she had a lapful of notes on index cards and an all over-ache that seemed as deep as her bones. Annie stretched back, reaching for the ceiling with a little squeal. Then she bent over to touch her toes. When she straightened up her stomach rumbled.

Moving slowly, she put water on to boil and set a bag of noodles on the counter beside the stove. While she waited to hear the murmur of boiling water, she laid her notecards out on the table.

At first glance they looked. . . deranged.

A nonsensical hodgepodge of quotes, observations, questions, and even some doodles. Annie plucked the inexpert drawings of flowers and hearts off the table and set them aside. Irrelevant, she thought. Her hand lingered over one card. She had drawn a simple sketch of two drama mask, one smiling, the other frowning. Beside them she had written, 'Sometimes masks reveal'.

Rolling her eyes, she said aloud, "Very profound, Annie," before turning back to the kitchen to dump the noodles into the boiling water. While the timer ticked down three minutes, she took out a bowl and butter.

The phrase nagged at her, 'Masks reveal'. It sounded familiar. She drained the noodles and dumped them into her bowl as the words rolled around in her head. Sitting down at the table she flipped through quotes about masks on her laptop, between bites of noodle. Again and again, she found herself reading a quote by Bao Xingjain, "It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth". And Oscar Wilde, "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell the truth".

Maybe, Abed was trying to tell her a truth?

Annie's eyes moved back to her laptop.

She still had them. All the messages from 'Bruce Underjaw'. She made a face at the screen and at her own ridiculous sentimentality.

But . . . the messages were the next logical place to search for clues.

The girl looked up suddenly, at the small mess of the table. At the safe little cave that was their apartment.

Not here, she thought. Not like this.

She would do it somewhere public where she wouldn't get emotional.

The library. That would do just fine.