This was all on my mind as I wrote The Fever—and though it’s only a piece of the novel, it was a piece that was impossible to ignore. To be a teenager now is to understand, more than ever, that there are very few secrets you can count on keeping. To be a teenager now means you may feel like you have to constantly manage your reputation, your persona. I remember how hard this was to do when I was sixteen or seventeen. Hearing rumors about yourself, true or false or in between. Or even fighting a perception of yourself that you just felt wasn't true. Or desirable. They think I’m X, but I’m really Y and so much more.

But now rumors spread in an instant, with one text message, one Instagram shot. Cameras are everywhere, in every phone. In The Fever, technology has dangerous consequences. While it enables many things, it also generates fear, spreads like its own contagion. And I write this not as a luddite­—I love my smartphone, perhaps too much—but as someone who wanted to explore the dark edges of what certain human uses (and misuses) of technology can bring about. The smart phone isn’t the problem, of course. Nor the technology of the text message. The problem is how they can be used as a weapon, whether intentionally or not.

There’s a moment in The Fever when the teenage Eli Nash, the school’s reluctant hockey star and heartthrob, can’t find his phone. It’s alarming, unsettling and ultimately a powerful relief to him. Like a phantom limb, he keeps reaching for it and it’s not there. As much as I use my own phone now, as much time I spend charging it and typing on it, my head craned over it and sometimes even missing the world, I’m grateful that I lived my teenage years without it. I know myself too well to guess I’d be one of those “together” teens who can take or leave the world of social media, who don’t see their online life as critical and defining. I fear instead I’d be one of the teens who wake up with their phone on their bedside table, even under their covers with them. Who are always plugged in. Always connected.

How about you, and/or the teens in your life?

Megan Abbott is the Edgar® award-winning author of the novels The End of Everything Queenpin, The Song Is You, Die a Little, Bury Me Deep and her latest, Dare Me (July 2012).

Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Salon, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Believer, Los Angeles Review of Books, Detroit Noir, Best Crime and Mystery Stories of the Year, Storyglossia, Queens Noir and The Speed Chronicles.

Born in the Detroit area, she graduated from the University of Michigan and received her Ph.D. from New York University. She has taught at NYU, the State University of New York and the New School University.

She is also the author of a nonfiction book, The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir, and the editor of A Hell of a Woman, an anthology of female crime fiction. She has been nominated for many awards, including three Edgar® Awards, Hammett Prize, the Macavity, Anthony and Barry Awards, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Pushcart Prize.