Auggie moved his fork around his plate. He was losing ground to a grin. “But seriously, Theophilus?”
“Well, dumbass, I grew up using Daniel. But when I came out, things got bad for a while. It felt like the right time to make the switch. New name. New life. New chance.”
“Lot of Bible names in your family.”
“Yep,” Theo said. “Doesn’t matter. It was the right thing for me to do. I’ve never regretted it.”
“I get that,” Auggie said. “It’s nice to be . . . who you feel like you really are, I guess.”
Theo waited.
“I don’t really know, um, what my deal is,” Auggie said, staring at his plate; his fork dragged to a stop. “So it’s not like I’ve had to, you know, tell my family anything.”
“That’s ok.”
“It’s just hard, you know? I’ve got a million girls in my fan base. Fuck, I sound like a fucking asshole. Never mind.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
Theo nodded. He let a moment pass, and then he said, “Do you ever use your family for your content?”
“Oh my God,” Auggie said, the hard line of his shoulders relaxing, and he grinned as he tapped at his phone. “Fer gives these epic monologues, and then I edit them or remix them.”
“That sounds familiar,” Theo said. “Jacob likes to give speeches. Pretty regularly, actually. I think it’s an older brother thing.”
“There’s this one where Fer totally loses his mind,” Auggie said.
“Let’s see,” Theo said.
Auggie started explaining the backstory of the video, and he slid into the seat next to Theo without seeming to realize it.
23
October turned into November. November turned into December. Auggie grabbed minutes of free time to dig through websites and image galleries, looking for anything that might match the half-sign he could see in the pictures of Robert’s apartment. He even went to the library, for the love of God, and had a lame excuse about a history of marketing project. The librarian helped him find a few reference books and an industry magazine for corporate signage, and Auggie spent hours, nights, and weekends digging through the stacks.
At least, he did at the beginning.
As the weeks rolled on, though, and Glasses didn’t make contact again, Auggie found himself losing momentum. From time to time he’d remind himself that Glasses had threatened his family, and then for a week or four days he’d hit the library regularly, working through a few more issues of trade magazines, trying to find anything that might match what he had seen in the photographs. But school interfered with homework and tests and projects and papers. And life interfered with pledging Sigma Sigma and hanging out with his friends and filming crazy-as-shit videos with Orlando and a few other guys. They did one where Auggie pretended to be desperate for Orlando’s friendship, and instead Orlando ignored him and found excuses to play Xbox with Pranav and Chad, and Auggie finally threw himself across their laps to get attention. The video ended with Orlando pushing Auggie off, and the guys leaving to go hang out somewhere else. They broke five hundred thousand likes with that video. Auggie’s agent called three times that week.
And, of course, there was Theo. For the first few weeks after Theo’s birthday, they had been busy running down addresses from Robert’s police record and from internet searches under Robert’s legal name, all of which Theo had somehow gotten from Cart. All the addresses turned out to be dead ends. Auggie had used the pretext of searching for Robert as a way of firmly establishing his right to come and go at Theo’s house whenever Theo was around. Then it settled into a routine: Theo working on his thesis on the sofa, Auggie sprawled next to him and reading or doing homework or managing his accounts.
Every once in a while, random texts with a green bubble would show up on Auggie’s phone, formatted with irritating attention to spelling and grammar: How did your calculus test go?
And Auggie would write back: just say calc.
And Theo would write: Well? How did it go?
Or sometimes a grainy picture would show up, and Auggie would have to squint, and eventually he’d give up and type: is that an octopus in a ballroom gown?
And of course a message would come from Theo at the exact same time, because his timing over text was atrocious, and it would say something like: I think you could use this in one of your videos.
what? like dancing with the stars
It’s an installation at the Norell.
wtf is an installation?
What is dancing with the stars?
They could go for hours like that, with Theo always half a step out of sync, and Auggie grinning harder and harder as the disjointed answers rolled in.
Thanksgiving break was the longest five days of Auggie’s life. It was weird to see Logan and Devin again, but of course, they had to get together and do some reunion videos. Chan floated just under the surface of every conversation. Her thisisurex2 account had blown up, and she was now posting new content that users submitted—pictures, stories, flames—but Auggie still featured regularly as the whipping boy for shitty boyfriends everywhere. Auggie saw her once, at a party Friday night at Jenny Reed’s house, and it only took him a moment to feel the vacuum in the room as everyone got sucked toward her. He ended up standing alone by the foosball table, with everyone else crowded around Chan. Letting himself out through the sliding door, Auggie stood in the brisk chill that passed for an Orange County winter. He thought about going back and getting wasted. He thought about confronting her.
His phone buzzed, and it was a picture from Theo, so blurry that Auggie honestly had no idea what he was seeing.
wtf is that? did u barf?
Got a TV! was Theo’s staggered announcement.
ohmygod is it like six inches or something?
A half-second off: It’s not very big.
Auggie waited, leaning on the rail, having totally forgotten about
