Expelled(19)

“My dad would like the drinking part of it. My dad—” Then Sasha stops and shakes her head. “Never mind.”

“What?” I say.

“Nothing. Let’s not talk, and especially not about him. Let’s just sit here, okay?” Her voice sounds small and tired all of a sudden.

“I’m glad you stayed,” I say, though I still don’t know why you did.

She smiles. Brushes my hand ever so quickly, and then pulls it away. My skin tingles where she touched it. I want to put my arms around her, but I’m paralyzed.

And we sit there—me thinking about Sasha, and Sasha thinking about who knows what—until the sun goes down and the stars come out, one by one by one.





17


The Hamburger Inn’s ceiling is brown with grease, and even the air feels slightly… oleaginous. (That is a word from my PSAT vocabulary list, a test I really studied for—not that my good score matters at all if I can’t clear my name.)

The HI has terrible coffee but great pancakes, and they don’t care if you sit there all morning nursing the same mug of brown sludge. Another bonus: the owners don’t watch the news and have no idea what Twitter is, so they don’t know I’m infamous.

Jude is on his second short stack and his third order of sausage. “So you never told anyone your password, right?”

“I barely told anyone it was my account,” I say. “So obviously I didn’t give out my password. But it’s not just the password thing, remember? Palmieri said that the photo was posted from my school IP address.”

“So someone got access to your computer,” Jude suggests.

“That’s what I thought at first,” I say. “But I didn’t leave it lying around for people to mess with. Either it was in my backpack or I was taking notes on it.” Or, of course, I was using it to post to @ArlingtonConfessions: Pop quiz in pre-calc today #fairwarning #gohomesick.

“Did you ever leave it out when you went to the bathroom?” Jude asks.

I shake my head as I dump more sugar into my mug. I’m trying to make the coffee palatable, but so far it isn’t working. “No, never.”

“Good, because otherwise this case is impossible.” Jude nudges me. “Do you like how I called it a case? I’m going full Sherlock.”

“There are basically two possibilities,” I say. “Either someone sneaked it out of my backpack and replaced it before I noticed or else someone faked my IP address.”

“Both of those sound complicated,” Jude says.

“Yeah. So doesn’t it seem like someone must have really been pissed at me?”

He shrugs. “Yeah, it kind of does.”

“The last tweet I sent was about Tom Thorn getting so wasted that he didn’t recognize his own dad.”

Jude giggles. “That was a good one.”

“So maybe he did it. Maybe he wanted to get even,” I suggest.

Jude contemplates this for a minute. “He does seem like he could hold a grudge. But he’s definitely not the stealthy type. And I was in computer class with him last year, and he can barely turn on a Chromebook.”

“Maybe he had help with that,” I say.

And I can see it in Jude’s eyes: we both think of the exact same person at the exact same time. Jere7my Sharp, misanthropic D&D dungeon master and computer geek extraordinaire.

“I think we’d better go talk to ol’ Jeremy,” I say.

“Jere-seven-my,” Jude corrects. “You prep the questions. I’ll go get Felix’s camera. We’ll collar him at lunch.”

And with that, Jude vanishes, leaving me with the bill. Luckily the HI’s got the cheapest breakfast in town.





18


I text Sasha: Interview #1. Jere7my Sharp. Noon. Merlin’s Palace.

She doesn’t write me back, but by now I don’t expect her to. Either she’ll join us or she won’t, and there’s nothing I can do about it but hope it’s the former.

Although Jude fails to separate Felix from his iPhone 7, he does manage to borrow a sweet little Sony minicam he swears he knows how to operate. He takes a test video as we walk toward Merlin’s Palace, Pinewood’s lone gaming store and unofficial nerd headquarters, which is just a few blocks away from Arlington. Honor roll juniors and seniors are allowed to leave school grounds at lunchtime, and Merlin’s attracts Jere7my like a magnet.

I know this because we used to be friends.

Sure enough, he’s standing in front of the window, looking at a new Magic: The Gathering deck display. He’s small, pale, and slightly undernourished looking. Maybe it’s because he spends all his lunch money at Merlin’s.

“Do you think his mom still dresses him?” someone whispers in my ear.

I whirl around in surprise. It’s Sasha, grinning triumphantly at having snuck up on me.

“Boo,” she says and pokes me in the ribs.

I flush. Try not to stammer. “Glad you could join us,” I say. “Right there is our first POI.”

She raises an eyebrow at me. “Does that mean ‘person of interest’? Nice cop vocab, nerd.” She looks back at Jere7my. “Oh, my God, I don’t know why I called you a nerd. His T-shirt says EAT SLEEP CODE!” she says. “Wow. He’s such a pure central-casting geek he might as well be wearing a pocket protector and a clip-on bow tie.”