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To TheDramaLlamaThatsYourMama:

Completely for real

To 1IcecreamIncident2:

I hate those fuckers too.

They were out there. It was time for phase two—figuring out where Mason would be.

I moved to sit with my back against the door, so anyone disturbing me would wake me, and I tossed my phone a few feet away, I didn’t want anything incoming from it to mess me up. Then I turned the laptop on, felt it boot and—nothing.

I knew my powers were still there. Just—not working, like a battery that wouldn’t turn. I put my hand against the screen, revved up mentally, felt everything shift and—stop.

Come on, Jessie.

I had to get in, to break into the school system to find Mason’s schedule, otherwise how would I get in the right place? And I needed to do it between now and the next commercial break most likely, there was no way Allie wasn’t going to bother me again tonight.

comeoncomeoncomeon

Everything in me jumped forward? And then dropped.

I was just like Darius’s battery pre-me on lightning-night. Only now I was scared I was going to blow it, which I knew wasn’t helping. If I couldn’t do this, how would tomorrow go?

My phone buzzed.

“What?” I asked it, as Allie tried to come in, whapping the door against my back. “Hey!” I shouted at her, closed the laptop and slung it under my bed in the moment of surprise that that bought me.

“Aren’cha gonna come and watch TV?” she asked, from the fraction of the door that was open.

“Yeah. In a second,” I said, standing up and sweeping up my phone.

I’d gotten another text. This one was all poorly spelled versions ofUR gonna die alone!, as if they’d gotten too excited to type properly. I wasn’t sure what I felt more threatened by, the actual threat, or the implied illiteracy. Then I hopped into ZB, into my message file, typed out a message once and copied and pasted it two more times to spam all three of them:

I really need to know where Mason’s gonna be tomorrow, at 10:55. Help?

There was no proof that the people who’d responded on ZB were real. Some of them—maybe all of them!—might be from the baseball team, trying to figure out what I was doing. But thirty seconds later I got a message back from DramaLlama.

He’ll be in room 501.

I hoped she (or he) was right—but it felt too easy. I messaged back.

Awesome. Thanks.

NP. I’ve spent the last eight months avoiding him.

That…sounded legit. I walked out into the living room with a warm feeling about llamas.

Lacey picked me up the next morning with her ratty backpack from eighth grade in the passenger seat. “I dared hopping on ZB last night.”

“Heh. Thanks.” I picked it up and put it in my lap. If I visited my locker in between every class today, maybe I wouldn’t lose any more notes. Or many-more notes. “As long as you’re not attached to it. I can’t guarantee its safety.”

“Gotcha. Did anyone respond?”

“Yeah.” I told her about the three mystery people, my question, and Llama’s response.

“You think that’s right?”

“I don’t know what else to do if it’s not.”