“Conflict?” Auggie said, tugging on the door. He couldn’t even budge it. “What conflict?”
“Grab your backpack and go. Add/drop runs through the third week. You have plenty of time to find another class.”
“Oh, conflict. You’re probably talking about this.” Auggie touched his split lip. “And this.” The bruises near his hairline. “And the fact that you were walking in the middle of the road and just about got me killed.”
“You were driving a stolen car.”
Auggie raised his chin.
“You were drunk,” Theo said.
“So were you. I wonder what your supervisor or administrator or whatever they’re called will think when I tell them about how I almost hit you because you were trashed in the middle of the road. And then you attacked me. Do they keep guys like that on faculty here? It’d make a great news story.”
“Wow,” Theo said. “I felt bad for you. Bad about what happened. I lied to the police for you so you wouldn’t get your ass hauled off to jail. And now you show up here and you’re going to blackmail me?”
“I’m not—”
“Fuck. You. Go tell your fucking story to whoever you fucking want.”
“I’m not trying to blackmail you,” Auggie said, his chest tingling, and then the tingle moving up into his neck, into his face. “Ok, I guess—I didn’t—I just want to stay in the class, ok? I’ve got my whole schedule the way I want it. I’ll earn my grade. I won’t say anything about the other night.”
“You’re making a mistake. You’ll do better in another class, with an instructor where there isn’t a . . . history.”
Auggie met his eyes and waited.
“Fine,” Theo said, dropping his hand from the door. “For your information, this is one of the many reasons I hate freshmen: you think the whole world revolves around you.”
Auggie shrugged, opened the door, and slipped into the classroom. The other students were still silent and watching, all except Pigtails, who was tapping like mad on her phone.
“No phones,” Theo snapped as he took his place at the front of the room. He grabbed a stack of papers and began handing them out while Pigtails shoved her phone in her bag. When Theo reached Auggie, he didn’t even look at him, just thrust the packet in his direction and kept moving.
After handing out the syllabus, Theo stood at the front of the room and read through it. All of it. After about a minute, Auggie’s eyes were drooping; the adrenaline from confronting Theo was dripping out of him, and the morning class meant he’d been up way earlier than he wanted. He was fighting to keep his head off the desk when his phone buzzed in his pocket.
It was loud enough in the quiet room that Theo paused in his reading and glanced up, locking eyes with Auggie.
“Sorry,” Auggie whispered.
But his phone buzzed again. And then again. And then again.
Theo lowered the pages, resting them against one muscled thigh.
“I’ll turn it off,” Auggie said.
“Please.”
Auggie fumbled with the phone and saw that someone he didn’t recognize had tagged him in a post. It was getting comments. A lot of comments.
“Mr.—” Theo paused. “What’s your name?”
Auggie opened the app and saw a video he’d been tagged in. A flutter of dread ran through his stomach. Was it something from the Bid-ness Party? Him doing shots? Him and Orlando? Christ, anything like that could have major fallout for his internet persona. Could it be something with the car and Theo? Nobody could have seen that, right?
“Auggie Lopez,” Pigtail offered. Auggie looked up long enough to give her the snake eye, and she blushed again.
“Auggie,” Theo said, moving down the aisle now. “No phones in the classroom. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, yeah, I’m putting it away.”
The video had finally loaded, and now it played. Auggie stared, not quite believing what he was seeing in the montage: first, a wobbly shot of him behind the wheel of the stolen car from Saturday, obviously drunk, screaming, “I fucking hate you,” at the windshield; then a cut to another clip, with Auggie and Theo standing close together on the road, Theo shouting something indistinguishable on the video; and then a third clip that showed someone being dragged by the arms, a bag over his head, and strangled cry of, “Help!” The final part of the video was just white text on a black background: you just saw a murder.
Auggie was tagged in the comments with his business account, @aplolz. The poster had also tagged @theouponavon, which Augge guessed was Theo Stratford. The post had been made by wroxall_deepthroat. It was the only post from that account.
The comment feed was exploding.
“No phones,” Theo said, taking the phone from Auggie, locking the screen, and putting it in his pocket. “You can have it back at the end of class.”
He held Auggie’s gaze; Auggie stared back, barely seeing him.
you just saw a murder
“As I was saying about revisions,” Theo continued, moving back to the desk at the front of the room.
Auggie didn’t hear anything for the rest of the fifty minutes. When it was over, he took his phone and stumbled out of the room. He thought he should talk to Theo, try to figure out what the hell was going on, but he knew it didn’t matter. The video had already been posted. All he could do now was damage control.
6
Theo got home to find Howie Cartwright on the steps.
“Risers are rotted out,” Cart said. He was out of uniform, wearing athletic shorts and a Budweiser t-shirt with the frogs from that one commercial. With his heel, he tapped the steps. “These things are going to go, and they’re going to go bad.”
“I’ll get around to them.”
“You could break your neck.”
Taking out his keys, Theo moved past Cart and unlocked the front door. He turned on the window unit, and wisps of lukewarm air stirred the dense, sticky heat of the closed-up house. Cart had followed him
