Just for the Summer(3)

I tilted my head. “Too bad I can’t see his face.”

“Send me that.”

“Why?”

“I’ll reverse image search it.”

“Oh, good thinking. Okay, hold on.”

I sent it to her. She sat back down and started thumbing into her phone, and I went back to finish my food.

“Found him,” Maddy said, after about forty-five seconds.

I gawked. “That fast???”

“The FBI should hire more women. We’re natural investigators. It’s on his Instagram. And it’s definitely him, I see the billboard. I’ll send you the link.”

My phone chirped with the incoming text, but I paused. “Wait. Should we be looking at this? It feels like a violation of his privacy.”

She gave me a look over the top of her phone. “When men stop assaulting women they meet on the internet, we’ll stop creeping on them to make sure they pass the vibe check. And anyway, if he wanted privacy, his account would be private.”

I bobbed my head. “Okay. Good point.”

I clicked on the link, and we both pored over his wall at the same time from our respective phones. He had brown hair, brown eyes, he was clean-shaven. White, dimples. A nice smile, fit—and he was cute. Super cute.

“Are you seeing this?” Maddy said. “This guy definitely flosses.”

“Oh my God, the dog.”

She gasped. “Wow. He really is ugly. Like a tiny gargoyle.”

I tilted my head. “I don’t know. He’s so ugly he’s almost adorable.” The small brown dog was shaggy with floppy ears, a pushed-in snout, and a hard frown. His watery eyes bulged a little. In the picture, Justin was holding him and smiling like a kid who just got what he’d always wanted for Christmas. The caption read: Well, Dog Brad’s got a tapeworm, but at least he didn’t stiff me on rent.

“Brad?” I asked, looking up. “I thought his friend’s name was Chad.”

“He probably changed the names to protect their privacy. Classy. Did you see the comments?” she asked. “Go look.”

I clicked to expand them. Laughing emojis, laughing emojis. Someone named Faith said, “Really, Justin? SMH.” And then a guy named Brad commented, “The next time I come over I’m stealing the stick to your blinds.”

I was laughing over my phone.

“Check out the way the dog looks,” Maddy said.

“What about him?”

“The dog looks comfortable with him. I always look at the animals in pictures, it tells you a lot about the person. Like, I can totally tell when someone borrowed someone’s dog for their profile pic. The dog’s like, ‘Okay, don’t know you but I guess.’ Scroll down,” she said. “See? Look at the one of him on the sofa.”

There was a shot of Justin on a couch. On one side he had an arm wrapped around a little girl who was sleeping curled up against him with her head on his chest. The dog was sleeping on the other side with his chin on Justin’s thigh. The picture was adorable.

“That dog trusts him,” Maddy said. “And that’s a rescue dog, so that means something. They’re usually all skittish and freaked out.” She went quiet again looking at his wall. “Go down further,” Maddy said. “The billboard.”

I scrolled a few pictures down and there it was. The infamous sign. And Justin hadn’t been kidding, it was bad. I already knew what it looked like from Maddy’s Google search but seeing it from the apartment was a whole different thing. It consumed the entire window. “Oh wow. Yeah, Justin’s definitely not the asshole. That’s a lot.”

The picture had been taken from the kitchen, so he could get the entire view. Since it was a studio, it only had the one large sliding glass door, and the whole thing was filled with a grinning, bearded middle-aged man dressed like a king, holding a plunger over a clogged toilet.

“He’s got a bed frame,” Maddy said.

“So?”

“So that’s a green flag. The closer to the floor the bed is, the worse humans they are. Every guy who pretends to forget his wallet on a date a thousand percent sleeps on a futon or a mattress on the floor. I make them send me a picture of their bed before I show up. And I deduct points for sleeping bags as blankets, even if they do have a headboard.”

“Why?”

“Because sleeping bags have floor energy?”

“What if it’s a bunk bed?” I said.

“That is the only circumstance in which my theory doesn’t hold up, but that is also why I require bedroom photos before I meet them.”

“You kill me.”

I zoomed around the photo at the rest of the room. His bed was made with a beige duvet. A neat desk with an elaborate computer set up on it. Three large screens and a keypad and wireless mouse in the middle. There was a tiny dog bed next to the desk and a potted plant in the corner. Artwork on the walls. It was a nice apartment—minus the view. He was obviously clean and had good enough taste.

I scrolled down to look at the rest of his photos. None with girls. Several with what appeared to be his family—a teenage boy who looked like a fifteen-year-old version of Justin, same dimples. A girl who was probably eleven or twelve, and then the little sleeping girl from the couch photo, who couldn’t be more than five. He’d tagged who I assumed was his mom in the pictures and I clicked on her profile, but it was private.