Jack whips his head up. “Dude. Keep your clothes on.”
“No, no, I think he should take them off,” Laney says.
“Are you kidding me?” Jack yelps as he points to his computer screen. Jitter yelps too, then dives and tries to hide under the curved couch I’m sitting on. Unfortunately, there’s like an inch of space under the couch, and Jitter, who’s a foot tall even when he’s lying flat on the ground, can’t make it work. He looks at Jack, who’s still making outraged noises, then up at me with his massive puppy dog eyes that silently ask if he can climb into my lap.
“Go sit on Theo so he doesn’t take his clothes off and horrify Jack,” I tell him.
“Love you too, Sabrina,” Theo says while Jitter scurries around the table and climbs up on his lap.
“I’m not worried Theo’s getting naked,” Jack says to me. “Look. Look.” He spins his computer around so we can see a picture of Grey in a suit in some business article. “The guy invented those self-sealing cereal bags and he basically makes bank every year just for licensing out his patent. I fucking love those things. Why? Why? Why does it have to be him?”
“No,” Decker says. “No. Shit. Have we been quietly funding his rise to world domination this whole time by loving Lucky Charms?”
“Two-faced asshat,” Jack mutters.
Decker scowls. “I hate him extra for making me love him without even knowing it before he betrayed me.”
“Oh my god, are you two serious?” Laney says. “Him inventing a better cereal bag is not personal. It’s also not something we can use against him unless they’re bad for the environment or cause weird diseases or something.”
Jack sighs. “Nope. They’re ecologically and environmentally friendly too.”
Theo pinches his lips together and buries his head in Jitter’s fur like he’s afraid they’ll hear him laughing at them. And considering Jitter is massive, it doesn’t take much for Theo to hide behind him.
“It could be personal that he’s converting Bean & Nugget into a bee heaven though,” she says. “That feels personal.”
“It does,” I agree. “How well does he know Chandler? And what about his family? Ugh, I hate this. I want to go talk to his family. Not ask a stupid computer to tell me the news. Computers have no nuance. But it’ll take me a while to get on Zen’s good side. They’re hardcore private. It’s a vibe.”
“I gotcha, Sabrina,” Decker says. “Smartest of the bunch right here, four steps ahead of these doofuses. Guess who started undergrad at Carnegie Mellon?”
I sit straighter. “When?”
“Looks like his junior year corresponded to Chandler’s freshman year.”
Chandler was a legacy admission at Carnegie Mellon. Special treatment because Grandpa went there too. That’s likely how he would know Grey, considering Chandler’s never lived anywhere except here and college, and there’s no indication Grey’s ever been a mountain person.
“What do you mean, started undergrad?” I ask.
“You wanna do this googling yourself, Sabrina?” Jack asks. “Here. I’ll show you how to use a keyboard.”
“She sucks at Google,” Laney says. “Like, she’ll google when does the sun rise? and she’ll get answers about astrological anomalies. It’s a fascinating superpower. Haven’t you ever noticed?”
“Oh, shit, that’s all the time?” Decker whips his phone out.
Yes, it’s all the time. And I’m fine with that, because I prefer—preferred, in my gossiping days, which are numbered—to hear news from people. Not machines. “If you write my internet failures in your character quirk notebook, I swear on my newly reclaimed powers of gossip that you will regret it,” I tell Decker.
He eyes me.
I give him the raised brows of don’t test me on this, even though I would absolutely not spill any secrets that I’m trying to forget I know about him.
“Fine,” he grunts. “But the next time I have writer’s block, I’m remembering you wouldn’t help me.”
“If using someone’s terrible googling powers is what you need to get over writer’s block, you need a new profession.”
Jack snickers. Theo keeps his face buried in my dog’s side while he rubs Jitter’s fur.
And I thrust my fingers into my hair. “Sorry. That was rude,” I mutter.
“No, I think that was spot-on,” Jack interjects.