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Theo made a noise that he hoped sounded sympathetic.
“Put her on.”
Theo wrapped one hand around the handset and whispered, “You’re up.”
“She?” Auggie hissed.
Theo shrugged.
“It’s bad enough asking me to be a teenager, Theo, but she?”
“Tick-tock, love of my life.”
Auggie yanked the phone from Theo. He went very still for a moment and glared at Theo—the kind of glare, Theo imagined, many a husband fromDatelinehad received just before they shuffled off this mortal coil. Then, in a surprisingly high voice, Auggie said, “Hello?”
That was pretty much all it took. Auggie made a few understanding noises, and then he said, “Wildcats with an eight, got it. Thank you.”
Then, because August Paul Lopez couldn’t ever seem to help himself, he did a schoolgirl giggle and hung up.
“I want the best sex of my life,” Auggie said, stabbing a finger in Theo’s direction.
Theo blinked.
“For a month.”
“Like, non-stop?”
“Oh, you’re a comedian now?”
“I noticed you added a giggle at the end.”
“And I want to be taken out to a nice dinner. And I want you to—to do something nice for my mom. Cut her grass or something.”
“Cut her grass. In California.”
“You owe me, Theo! After that debacle? You owe me big.”
“I thought you were making up for that stuff with Denise.”
“And I want you to do something…inventive. A move. I want you to do a sex move I can tell the Margarita Mommies about.”
“I’m having a hard time telling if you’re serious.”
“I don’t know either, Theo! It depends on how good the sex move is!”
That, Theo decided, was a good point to turn his attention to his laptop. He brought up a new tab and signed into the school’s educational cloud account under his own name, long enough to look up Shaniyah’s user ID. Then he logged out and logged back in, this time using Shaniyah’s ID and the newly reset password.
In her cloud storage, one of the primary folders was labeled LEON PURDUE.
“Hot damn,” Auggie said.
“You should probably use your Shaniyah voice,” Theo suggested. “You know, in case this thing is voice-activated. Oh my Christ, Auggie!”
While Theo checked to see how much hair Auggie had ripped out, Auggie elbowed him out of the way and sat at the laptop. He began to click, browsing the subfolders and files. As Theo discovered—to his disbelief—a complete lack of blood from his savaged scalp, he noticed that the majority of the files were…well, strange. Screenshots of social media accounts that apparently belonged to Leon Purdue. Screenshots of a Spotify playlist. Screenshots of students, some of whom Theo recognized. Stills of Wahredua High School, of a brick bungalow, of a trailer park. The raw material, he decided, of a TikTok investigation—images that Shaniyah could edit into her own work where necessary.
Then Auggie opened another folder. This one held videos. He studied the contents for a moment, and then he clicked on the most recent one.
It began with footage from the Wahredua High School commons, where students were eating lunch. It looked like any other school day, but Theo guessed it had been in the spring, before school let out for the summer. A Black girl with enormous lashes was laughing, looking down and away from the camera, when shouts erupted. The camera swung toward the disturbance. Kids moved outward in an expanding ring, knocking over chairs, bumping into tables, tripping over backpacks. They were all trying to get away from a fight: two boys, one swinging wildly as he came after the other, who was trying to shield himself while retreating. For a moment, it looked like that might be it—Theo had seen enough school fights to know that, for most boys, that initial release of testosterone was usually all the gas they had in the tank, and the fights ended almost as quickly as they began.
