I looked at him out of the side of my eyes, but if Jack noticed, he didn’t give any visible reaction.
JACKOFDIAMONDS:
Check your email.
I’d just about concluded that Jack was the one person in this entire school who used a random assortment of numbers and letters for his password when I registered the content of his last IM. My email? Why did he want me to check my email?
Somewhat warily, I entered the URL of my Bayport High email account, half expecting some kind of elaborate, sardonic Jack Peyton gesture, but instead, I discovered that I had five new emails, all of which were from Noah.
Beside me, Jack snickered.
I opened up the first email and found a picture of the world’s most adorable puppy wearing a sign around his neck that saidVOTE FOR TOBY.SHE LOVES PUPPIES. As best I could tell from the “to” section of the email, Noah had sent this delightful piece of Toby promotion to the entire student body.
Dreading what would pop up next, I hit the next button and waited to see just how badly my brother wanted to die.
Email number two had a kitten. I didn’t get past email number three, which was a public service announcement from the Toby Saved Our Lives Club. If my brother was looking for a way to make me regret ever having defended him and his equally goofy buddies from jock-wielded violence, he’d found it.
I trashed emails four and five before reading them. I could only hope that Noah’s efforts would annoy the rest of the student body as much as they annoyed me. The way I figured it, the Irony Gods owed me that much.
“Mrs. Hanson? I need help with the—”
I cut Kiki off before she could get the rest of the request out of her mouth. “I’ll help her.” The last thing I needed was our teacher standing two feet away while I figured out a way to disable Noah’s Bayport High email account—an action which was now a much higher priority than hacking into Jack’s IM. In any case, whatever I was going to be doing on this computer, chances were it was the kind of thing the administration tended to frown upon, and I didn’t need a member of the faculty staring over my shoulder.
I turned my chair to the side and leaned over to Kiki. “What do you need?” I asked, my voice completely flat.
She gave me a tentative smile. “I like think this would look better in purple, but when I tried the thingy …”
“HTML code,” I corrected.
“Yeah, that. Anyway …”
“You want it to be purple?” I asked, commandeering her keyboard and fixing the code. “What else?”
“Can you show me how to put in a picture?”
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her that pictures were just too hard for me to manage, but the desire to wreak internet havoc on Noah (and an equal desire to get back to my not-quite-a-conversation with Jack) kept me in check. “Sure,” I said. “Where’s the picture?”
She held up her phone.
Fifteen minutes later, I’d transferred the pictures from Kiki’s phone to her computer, and showed her how to upload them to a photo-hosting site. She blinked several times, as if she couldn’t quite believe the miracle before her.
“Which one do you want on the site?” I asked.
