I pulled it up on my phone. “The Vertex Blueprint: Wealth, Women, and Relentless Drive is peak, man. Absolute fucking peak.It’s peak, Tia. Peak cringe.”
She marched over and grabbed the phone out of my hand. “PrimeAlphaProtocol? Is that Phillip?”
I nodded.
For a second she looked like she would smash my phone into the ground, then she thrust it back at me and stomped away.
Phew. Crisis averted.
“This is why I don’t get it,” I told her. “You don’t seem like the kind of person who would put up with that. The secondhand embarrassment alone is so much.”
“He didn’t used to be like that,” she squeezed out.
“But he is like that now. I figured out why you broke up with him, by the way. It was this.”
I pulled up Emelline Lily’s Insta and found the right pic. In it, a willowy girl with long legs and dark hair posed in a short, black bodycon dress. The dress was strategically cut. Three horizontal slashes stretched over her torso, baring wide sections of her tan chest and flat stomach. She was holding a flute of golden liquid that was likely champagne but could pass for cider if someone freaked out about underage drinking. Her makeup was perfect, her eyebrows were razor-precise, and she held her glass while staring pensively at the evening city from a high-rise balcony. The caption said, “A very long day.”
“This isn’t even a good thirst trap.” I shrugged. “Like she barely tried.”
Tia pummeled the bag, sinking a flurry of punches. The bag danced, bouncing farther and farther down the rail.
“What the fuck did he do?” Ray growled.
I pulled up the comments and showed it to him.
“‘Your body is fire emoji.’” Ray frowned. “A heart. A face with heart eyes. Heart on fire…”
Tia charged at us, her eyes blazing.
“She goes to Heritage, Ray! She sits one row down from me in History. He left that stupid comment about Poppy-Chan, and then he went and slobbered all over her, and the saddest thing is, she doesn’t even fucking know he exists. He’s probably falling all over himself in her DMs, and she is leaving him on read. He’s pathetic. This whole thing is pathetic. He spouts stupid bullshit, he ignores my texts, and now he’s embarrassed me in front of the whole fucking school. He embarrassed himself! Everybody saw it. People are making jokes about me. Someone slapped together a meme. Emelline is a princess, Phillip is a chihuahua with a hard-on, and I’m a troll chasing after both of them.”
Ouch. That was so brutal. And immature as hell for high school. That was the kind of shit that you would expect from middle school kids.
Ray blinked.
“Yes, I broke up with him!” Tia threw her hands in the air. “Happy now? Is that what you wanted to know?”
“Like I said, I already knew you broke up with him. I figured that out. Emelline posted this pic on Friday. It took you till next morning to see the fallout. On Saturday Phillip locked himself in his room. When the housekeeper came to get him for dinner, he screamed at her to leave him alone and slammed the door in her face. Phillip is a gift. Anyway, the housekeeper didn’t hear anyraised voices, which tells me that you dumped him by text and refused to take his calls.”
Tia stared at me.
“Phillip is reading alpha male books, which tell him that alpha males don’t get dumped. He must’ve spent the whole night blowing up your phone and worn you down. You agreed to meet him, because both of you left your houses a little before noon on Sunday. I know that Phillip drove west on I-10. His phone died en route, probably because he spent the whole night texting and didn’t charge it.”
She didn’t interrupt.
“You already broke up with him, so you should be cooling off, but you’re still breathing fire. He did something when you met. Probably something violent and stupid. You came home. He didn’t. His car was found on a small rural road north of the highway. It’s Monday morning now, you didn’t go to school today, and nobody has seen Phillip.”
“Tia, what did you do?” Ray asked.
She raised her hand, and he shut up.
“Poor Phillip,” she ground out. “His family must’ve pulled all the strings, because they’ve got a Prime looking for him. Because he is such a good kid from a respected family.”
She must’ve looked me up at some point.
“Actually, I don’t care too much about Phillip,” I told her. “It’s my job to find him. I care about what happens to you and your family when his family finds out. House warfare is an ugly thing.”
“His family isn’t a House.”
