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“Cyber God Slayer 99,” I whisper gently to him.
“—will restore access to your little play money mommy and daddy give you.”
“Fuck you,” hisses the teenager, struggling to no avail against Ben’s hold. “You ain’t got nothin’ on me. You two are full of shit.”
Ben lets go of Lukas’s shirt and sweeps a hand between the boy’s unsuspecting legs, grabbing hold of something else. Lukas lets out one tiny squeak, his eyes bulging.
Ben presses him to the fence, the teen’s balls gripped tightly through his thin khaki shorts. “Correction: I have your nuts. Both physically and metaphorically. The phone is now mine. The videos are now mine. And you are now mine.” Ben glances over his shoulder at me. “Hey, Cyber. You want to pull out your phone and get ready to send that incriminating message out to the police, and to every single contact our little friend Lukas here knows?”
“W-W-Wait,” stammers the teenager.
My eyes flash just for a second before I shove a hand into my pocket and, fumbling slightly, produce my phone. I straighten my posture, once again assuming the cocky role of super hacker, then hold the phone up demonstratively, like I have any idea what the hell I’m really doing. “Cyber God P-Punk is ready.”
“In ten seconds,” Ben states, “if this dipshit doesn’t hand over the phone, I want you to send out that message.”
“W-W-We could both sell the vids,” Lukas suggests quickly. His words come so fast, spittle comes out with them, his lips as wet as his desperate eyes. “Share the profits. Half, half.”
Ben starts to count. “Ten. Nine. Eight.”
“Thirds, then! Third for you, third for C-Cyber, third for me!”
“Seven. Six. Five. Four.”
“Just ten percent for me! Greedy punks!”
“Three. Two. One.”
“I’LL GIVE YOU THE FUCKING PHONE!” the teenager screams, nearly thrashing against Ben’s hold. “Don’t press that button!!”
Ben, his grip still firm on the boy’s balls, leans into him. “So we have a deal, then?”
“Deal,” blurts Lukas, his bottom lip trembling. “D-D-Deal.”
Ben lets go of him, takes a step back. “Take us to your car.”
With just a quick walk around the corner, Lukas’s ritzy, sleek white, unblemished BMW—literally the least inconspicuous car one might imagine showing up to such an exchange driving in—comes into view. Lukas opens the passenger door, pops the glove box, then pulls out a phone with trembling, sweaty hands.
“Prove it’s the real phone,” commands Ben.
Lukas’s face tightens with anger, but he complies, unlocking the phone with a code, then pulling up the video in question. I’m right at Ben’s side when Lukas shows us the screen: it’s a big thumbnail of a video showing a teenage girl looking into the camera with a finger at her mouth, and she’s wearing just a tiny red slip. There’s no chocolate in the thumbnail, but I imagine that comes later in the video, and neither Ben nor I care to watch it.
Ben pockets the phone, then leans into Lukas so close, Lukas backs against his BMW in fear. “I want you to know, you are very lucky tonight that I’m such good buddies with Cyber here,” Ben tells him, his voice low. “He’s going to honor his promise of unfreezing your accounts … but he’ll still be watching you, Lukas. He’ll keep an eye on your every move. If you fart, he’ll know.”
“Okay, okay, okay, okay,” Lukas squeals, his hands in the air.
I cross my arms again. “Not sure about farting,” I interject, “but he’s definitely shitting himself right now.”
“Now go home and try to do something more productive with your time,” states Ben. “Maybe you can try something that doesn’t involve exploiting your ex-girlfriends’ sexuality, or making dumb deals with total strangers on the internet, or perpetuating every damned Beverly Hills brat stereotype that exists.”
Lukas’s lips quiver when he grumbles, “F-Fuck you. Fuck you both,” then slams shut the passenger door, whips around to the driver’s side, slips inside, then cranks the car into drive. Ben and I step back as he tears off, his obnoxious engine rumbling like the throat of a great white dragon until the darkness of the street swallows him up.
After the teen is long gone, Ben turns to me. There are about a million questions in his eyes, the first of which he asks: “Who in the hell are you, and what did you do with the shy, timid Trevor I left my home with?”
His words warm my heart. I’m still riding the rush all of that action gave me, but to be honest, I’m relieved as hell that I can be myself again. “I don’t even know where any of that came from,” I confess, laughing over my racing heart. “I just … got inspired, had an idea, and went with it.”
“You sure went with it alright,” Ben agrees with half a laugh himself. We start to head back to the car. He slips a hand into his pocket on the way, pulling out the phone. He gives it a little toss. “All that trouble over this hunk of metal and a pair of idiot teens.”
