Killer Spirit (The Squad 2)

JackOfDiamonds: You liked what you saw so much that you need some privacy? A little alone time? I’m flattered.

I leaned around my computer screen and glared at him again. He pretended not to see me.

JackOfDiamonds: Come on, Ev. Talk to me.

You know you want to.

I was too busy trying to hack into his account to put much thought into it, but lest he get suspicious, I shot off a quick reply.

TaeKleinDo: Do I?

It was short, it was cryptic, and it poked holes in that annoying “I’m so charismatic” confidence of his.

JackOfDiamonds: You probably shouldn’t, but you do.

I hadn’t had any luck guessing his password yet, which meant that Jack was significantly savvier than certain TCIs I could think of.

TaeKleinDo: Why shouldn’t I want to talk to you?

I was still going on autopilot for my side of the conversation, so I didn’t even realize I’d asked him a question until he answered it.

JackOfDiamonds: Because you’re you and I’m me.

That sounded vaguely like an insult.

JackOfDiamonds: And you deserve better.

Now this was a side of Jack I’d never seen before. Smirky confidence? Sure. Subtle self-loathing? That was new.

TaeKleinDo: Most people would say you’re the one who deserves better.

Including, I thought, about a dozen JV cheerleaders I can think of.

JackOfDiamonds: Most people are idiots.

I totally couldn’t argue with that sentiment. And he knew it.

“Mrs. Hanson?” A high-pitched voice next to me broke me from my thoughts. “Can you come help me with the thingamajig?”

I quickly straightened my screen and minimized the chat window. By the time our computer science teacher was standing behind us, I appeared for all intents and purposes to be diligently working on my web page, which, unlike Jack’s, wasn’t so much a tribute to classic rock as it was a page dedicated to encouraging Bayport High spirit.

Can I tell you how much that wasn’t my idea?

“Kiki, what seems to be the problem?”

The girl next to me frowned, and I recognized her as Hayley’s poor excuse for a minion from lunch.

“I can’t get this centered,” she said, pointing to a piece of text on her screen. “And it’s not big enough.”

Considering the fact that we had a handout with the HTML codes for font size and centering on it, Kiki’s statement went a long way to explaining how it was that she’d come to be following Hayley Hoffman’s lead. Obviously, she wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. Or, to put it in cheer terms, the puffiest pom in the JV set.

I waited for Mrs. Hanson to answer the question and marveled at her patience. Five minutes later, she was gone, and I went back to my attempts to hack Jack’s IM.

JackOfDiamonds: Miss me?

I looked at him out of the side of my eyes, but if Jack noticed, he didn’t give any visible reaction.

JackOfDiamonds: Check your email.

I’d just about concluded that Jack was the one person in this entire school who used a random assortment of numbers and letters for his password when I registered the content of his last IM. My email? Why did he want me to check my email?

Somewhat warily, I entered the URL of my Bayport High email account, half expecting some kind of elaborate, sardonic Jack Peyton gesture, but instead, I discovered that I had five new emails, all of which were from Noah.

Beside me, Jack snickered.

I opened up the first email and found a picture of the world’s most adorable puppy wearing a sign around his neck that said VOTE FOR TOBY. SHE LOVES PUPPIES. As best I could tell from the “to” section of the email, Noah had sent this delightful piece of Toby promotion to the entire student body.

Dreading what would pop up next, I hit the next button and waited to see just how badly my brother wanted to die.

Email number two had a kitten. I didn’t get past email number three, which was a public service announcement from the Toby Saved Our Lives Club. If my brother was looking for a way to make me regret ever having defended him and his equally goofy buddies from jock-wielded violence, he’d found it.

I trashed emails four and five before reading them. I could only hope that Noah’s efforts would annoy the rest of the student body as much as they annoyed me. The way I figured it, the Irony Gods owed me that much.

“Mrs. Hanson? I need help with the—”

I cut Kiki off before she could get the rest of the request out of her mouth. “I’ll help her.” The last thing I needed was our teacher standing two feet away while I figured out a way to disable Noah’s Bayport High email account—an action which was now a much higher priority than hacking into Jack’s IM. In any case, whatever I was going to be doing on this computer, chances were it was the kind of thing the administration tended to frown upon, and I didn’t need a member of the faculty staring over my shoulder.

I turned my chair to the side and leaned over to Kiki. “What do you need?” I asked, my voice completely flat.

She gave me a tentative smile. “I like think this would look better in purple, but when I tried the thingy…”

“HTML code,” I corrected.

“Yeah, that. Anyway…”

“You want it to be purple?” I asked, commandeering her keyboard and fixing the code. “What else?”

“Can you show me how to put in a picture?”

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her that pictures were just too hard for me to manage, but the desire to wreak internet havoc on Noah (and an equal desire to get back to my not-quite-a-conversation with Jack) kept me in check. “Sure,” I said. “Where’s the picture?”

She held up her phone.

Fifteen minutes later, I’d transferred the pictures from Kiki’s phone to her computer, and showed her how to upload them to a photo-hosting site. She blinked several times, as if she couldn’t quite believe the miracle before her.

“Which one do you want on the site?” I asked.

“That one.” She pointed, rather than identifying the picture by its number. “See, the site is for this mother-daughter book club, and that’s me and my—”

“Whatever.” I cut her off, but as I captured the URL for the picture in question, I realized that Kiki’s mother looked very, very familiar in a president of the PTA kind of way.

“There,” I said. “Done.”

“Wow,” Kiki said. “You’re really good at that.” She paused, and I flinched, preparing myself for some gratuitous hugging. Instead, Kiki looked down at her hands. “You…ummm…you won’t tell Hayley you helped me, will you?”