We Make Mayhem [boyxboy]

Chapter Twelve

I waited for Friday all week, but when I finally woke up into its gray dawn, it felt like an obstacle to be overcome. I was so ready to hole up at home and not talk to anyone for a couple days, stay away from the people who were doing my head in. Chloe and Noah.

But first, I had to deal with Friday.

I was scrolling through Twitter, putting off getting out of bed, when Chloe texted me.

Chloe: Meet me by your locker when you get to school. We need to talk.

It was seven-fifteen. She was already at school for her early morning student council meeting, which would end at seven forty-five. I pulled myself out of bed, wishing I could die instead.

When I pulled into the student parking lot, Noah Lord's Edison was already there. School didn't start for another twenty minutes. Was Noah in some kind of extracurricular activity right now? Was he maybe in the school's weight room or swimming pool, somewhere I could casually drop by?

I pushed the fact that I desperately wanted to run into him far to the back of my mind. It was too scary.

Chloe stood at my locker at seven-fifty, arms crossed, tapping her foot.

"Let's cut the crap, Riley," she said. "What do you have to tell me about you and Noah Lord?"

Sweat broke out along my hairline. "Um... I..."

Chloe rolled her eyes. "Open your locker."

My fingers fumbled on my combination lock and I fucked up the dial twice before it finally popped open. Something tumbled down from the vents when I swung open the door, landing with a metallic clatter on the floor of the locker. I picked it up.

It was an iron key, the old-fashioned kind you only really see in steampunk art. There was a tag attached to it with a red ribbon. The message on it read:

49°21'12.6"N 123°08'49.0"W

9/10

20:00

I took out my phone and typed the coordinates into Google Maps. A pin dropped onto a street below the Lords' house, just outside the wall at the bottom of their property. The second line was tomorrow's date, and the third looked like military time... so, a location, and a time of tomorrow, Saturday, at eight o'clock.

"Noah Lord put that in your locker this morning," Chloe said. "It's a party invitation, isn't it? He put them in his friends' lockers, too. Want to tell me why he would include you in that exclusive group?"

Noah's "friends" were a group of other super rich kids who he had sat with at lunch the past couple days. I hadn't seen him leave school with any of them or even talk to them much, so they clearly weren't that close yet. He hadn't even followed any of them on social media—not that I was, like, checking or anything.

Him including me—though it made my throat want to close up and my hands shake—didn't tell me that he particularly liked me or knew me well. Just that, out of the five days he had been here, I was one of the people he had connected with. The iron key slipped in my sweaty hands.

I was thrilled.

But I told Chloe, "Doesn't mean shit."

"Whatever. Now that you have it, you can use it for good."

"What do you mean?"

"Let me come with you," Chloe whispered. Her eyes sparkled. "I'll poke around, see if I can find anything juicy. Pretty please?"

"That sounds like the mother of all bad ideas."

"Riley, come on. When are we going to get an opportunity like this ever again? What if I can find some evidence?"

"Evidence of what, Chloe?"

"Decker Lord being a fraud and Temptr being a hoax, obviously."

"Oh, yeah, I'm sure you're going to find his diary where he writes all that out explicitly. Dear Diary, I'm a fraud and my business is a hoax."

Chloe glared. "Fine. I'll sneak in on my own."

"This isn't a game, Chloe. These are real people. I'm not letting you sneak into their house and snoop in their shit."

"The people hurt by Temptr are real, too," Chloe said.

Words I had been meaning to say for months suddenly burst out.

"What people, Chloe? Who do you actually know who has been hurt by this? Your parents aren't splitting up because of Temptr, are they? Why do you give so many fucks about something that doesn't affect you?"

I expected Chloe to scream some of her hashtag slogans at me, but she froze. Color drained from her face. Her eyes looked like she was seeing a ghost. She looked terrified.

"What do you mean by that?" she whispered. "Are your parents...?"

I nodded.

Chloe pressed her hands over her face for a solid thirty seconds. When she drew them back, her face was wet with tears.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"It's not your fault," I said. "But it's not Temptr's fault, either. Plenty of people download it, see what name comes up, and don't get divorced. A healthy couple would have a laugh and carry on. My parents had been drifting apart anyway."

Chloe's eyes searched the ground near our feet. She took a deep, shaky breath and asked, "Does your dad... is he going to pursue his match?"

"How do you know it was my dad who used Temptr?"

"Well, it's always men, isn't it? Your mom wouldn't, she's not the type to—"

"But my dad is the type?"

She winced. "I didn't mean that."

The hall around us was filling up. One of Chloe's friends said hi to her in passing, and she painted on a smile for him. Her eyes still looked sad. The old me would have wrapped her up in my arms and kept her safe from whatever was making her sad, but I knew I couldn't anymore.

"You're wrong, you know," she said. "In a healthy relationship, no one would download the app in the first place."

"Maybe," I said. "But then, isn't it that person's fault for wrecking the relationship? Not Temptr's fault, or Decker Lord's?"

"Maybe the shitty person hits the nuclear button, but Decker Lord sold them the weapons."

That analogy—nuclear button, weapons, the question of guilt—told me a lot. It told me she wasn't becoming less radical. It told me she wasn't letting go of this pet issue, even after learning it was affecting me far more than it was affecting her. And finally, it told me that she didn't care about my feelings.

"I think we need to break up," I said.

Chloe just blinked. No reaction showed on her face. The bell rang and she stepped backward, melting into the crowd, gone in a moment.

I didn't chase her. I didn't even want to.