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While I didn’t particularly like the guy, I didn’t hate him as much as I hated my parents. He had looked out for me since I had just been some skateboarding punk who got in trouble to get my parents’ attention. He had gotten me out of trouble almost as much as Dad’s money had.
After waiting a couple minutes two doors down from his classroom, I walked toward it and looked around quickly to make sure nobody was watching, and then I slipped into the room and locked the door behind me.
“What do you have for me?”
He stood behind his desk and shuffled through some papers, as if he hadn’t just beckoned me to come in and chat with him. “How’s your father?” he asked me nonchalantly, scribbling something down on a blank sheet.
“Don’t know. Don’t give a fuck.”
“He’s home,” Avery said, folding the paper and looking up. “You haven’t seen him?”
“I left that shithole my parents call a home.”
“How’s he feeling about that?” Avery asked, sliding the paper across the desk. He wanted me to read it.
I stepped closer to him and glanced down at his messy handwriting. “Like I said, I don’t care how that fucker feels. I hate them both.”
The note read,Don’t say a word out loud. One of my students who works for the mob bugged the room, thinking I wouldn’t notice.
My eyes widened slightly, but I nodded and slipped the note back to him. While I didn’t want any part of the Redwood mob drama, I was already knee fucking deep into this. They were trying to pin Skylar’s murder on me.
Avery took the sheet, turned it over, and scribbled another couple words down on it. “You should go see him. Your father doesn’t stay in Redwood for a long time. Wasn’t he supposed to be on vacation?”
“In Bali or Greece or some shit,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I don’t know.”
When he slid the note back to me, I glanced down at it and gritted my teeth, wanting this to be over already.
I’m meeting with someone in The Family later this week to find information on who killed Skylar.
After snatching a pen out of my backpack, I took the sheet and wrote,And to get me out of trouble,on it because I didn’t give a fuck who had killed her. I didn’t want my name attached to it at all.
I didn’t care about my reputation at Redwood, but if someone on my YouTube channel found out, my brand would be ruined. What would be worse, someone might target Vera and her family next, like some sort of payback.
Instead of writing a response, Avery nodded, which meant he had nothing else to tell me and wanted me out of here. I slung my backpack over my shoulder and walked out of his classroom without another word.
As I walked to my first period, I pulled some flyers off the lockers and crumpled them in my fist, still trying to figure out how the hell someone had gotten into her Google account to find Vera’s story the other day. I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it all night; I had twisted and turned on the couch.
If someone had hacked either of us—because she had been writing on my computer—then why hadn’t we gotten locked out of our accounts? Our computers? I had no failed password attempts or any recent text messages, asking me for double verification. Vera hadn’t mentioned that anything seemed off about her laptop lately or her emails and online accounts.
I tossed the crumpled paper into the trash and rounded the corner toward my classroom.
A smart hacker would’ve changed our passwords or stolen a bunch of my father’s money, not screenshotted Vera’s smutty romance novel that she had written at my house and blasted it all over Redwood Academy. What would that gain them?
From afar, I caught sight of Poison sauntering out of the principal’s office and down the hallway. I eyed João for a moment, wondering if he could’ve asked Kai—the tech guy in their gang—to do something like this.
But … I thought against it. João wouldn’t do something like that to Vera because if Vera found out, then she wouldn’t watch his sister, which, apparently, he needed her for. Don’t ask me fucking why.
I shook my head. It couldn’t be him.
This blackmail had been taken straight from Google Drive, which meant that it could’ve been taken from a computer or phone that we were already logged in to. We both always had our laptops and phones with us.
The only computer left was … the desktop in my bedroom.
ChapterSeventy
VERA
After I finished up work at the library that afternoon, Blaise grabbed some pizza for dinner and brought me to the skatepark with him. Unlike last time I had come here, there wasn’t anyone, except a few stragglers. But even they were packing up their gear and heading back to their cars.
