“Educate me. She’s got some kind of show on it.”
“You’re telling me you fell for a YouTuber?” Michael laughed hard enough that he had to reach for another napkin to dab at his eyes.
“You can laugh all you want if you show me how to at least find it.”
Michael held out his hand. “Give me your phone.”
Silas dug it out of his pocket and handed it over. He watched over Michael’s shoulder as his brother navigated to the app. “Well, that was easy.”
“I still don’t know how you can exist in this world without being on some kind of social media.”
“I prefer my socializing to be done in person,” Silas said, raising a hand to his next-door neighbor, who pulled up a stool across the bar. “See? That was an acknowledgment of a fellow human being.”
“On Facebook, we call that a like,” Michael told him. “You can also send mad faces.”
“Ain’t technology a wonder,” Silas said. “In the good old days, we’d just flip someone the bird.”
“Oh, you can do that with emojis,” Michael said, pulling his own phone out, thumbs flying over the screen at expert speeds.
Silas looked at the text that came in. It was a brown hand holding up a middle finger. “Ha! Is that new? How come you never gave me the brown cartoon finger before in a text?”
Michael sighed and looked like he was considering something.
“What? What’s going on in that big brain of yours?”
“You’re not going to be happy,” Michael predicted. He didn’t look too worried about it though.
“Then you have to tell me. Right now or I’ll call up Todd Whitecastle and tell him you’re ready for a rematch on the playground.”
“There’s a second sibling-text group,” his brother said before blowing out a long breath. “Wow, I really do feel better not keeping that secret anymore.”
“What do you mean a second sibling-text group?” Silas demanded, calling up the group message on his phone.
Michael slid his phone over to Silas on the bar.
“What the hell, man?” Silas was offended and impressed. He considered himself to be the glue of his generation. Checking in with his sister, Taylor, on the East Coast. Demanding daily pregnancy updates from their half-sister, Nirina. But here was evidence of an entire conversation with flashing pictures and cartoon eggplants going on without him. “What is this?”
“They’re GIFs and emojis. The ones that don’t move are memes.”
“I feel like you just told me there’s no Santa Claus,” Silas said sadly.
“You’re the one who told me there was no Santa. Your parents didn’t want you believing.”
“So you cut me out of the family?”
Michael was trying not to laugh. “You’re so antitechnology, we didn’t want to overwhelm you,” he said.
“You put me in this message thing right now, and after you show me how to look up the love of my life on YouTube, you’re gonna teach me how to put those moving pictures in shit,” Silas said.
“I think we’re going to need another round,” Michael said to the bartender.
“And maybe some finger steaks,” Silas added.
Over finger steaks and alcohol, the brothers walked carefully through the steps.
“Hang on,” Michael said, looking up with wide eyes. “Maggie Nichols is the future Mrs. Wright?”
“You know her?”
“I watch her show. She flips houses. The one she’s doing now is this beachfront place in Oregon.” Michael scrolled through the long list of videos while he talked.
“Was. Now she’s here,” Silas corrected.
“You’ve got to introduce me, man.”
Silas hadn’t seen Michael this excited over anything since he’d scored tickets to the John Legend concert in Boise. “Okay. Sure.”
Seeing his bafflement, Michael grinned. “You don’t get it. She’s a celebrity. You see this number here?”
Silas leaned in, peering at the screen. “Yeah.”
“That’s the number of people who subscribe to her channel.” At Silas’s frown, Michael rolled his eyes. “It’s the number of people who want to watch every video she uploads.”
“That seems like a lot,” he guessed.
“A million followers is a big deal,” Michael confirmed. “And she’s close. Wait a second. Are you actually going to be on her show?”