“Again, sorry,” Adleta says.
Malone continues, “When Wheeler dropped the phone in my lap, I got so paranoid, I put it up my shirt so no one would see it.”
“That’s so hot,” Wheeler says.
Malone laughs and hands him a small black box the size of a deck of cards, the phone-cloning device he borrowed from a friend on H8box.
“And this thing is great. Dangerous but great. It downloaded everything in about a minute,” Malone says.
“So no problems?” I say.
“No problems.”
“And no problems getting the phone back to the stage?” I ask Wheeler.
“Nope.”
“Aww, I feel like I missed all the fun,” Ellie says.
“No, you were great,” Adleta says. “I watched you crying at your table and really thought you were upset. If you hadn’t pulled that off, the plan wouldn’t have worked.”
“Thanks, but next time I want to do something more dangerous.”
“No problem,” I say. “Adleta can Hulk-smash you, and I’ll get to stay in one piece.”
“Deal,” Ellie says.
Having everyone here has calmed me down. From the moment I got home, I’ve imagined answering the front door and Stranko Tasering me before hauling me off to jail, where real criminals perform unspeakable acts on me. Of course, if Stranko does show up, he’ll have to get in line behind my parents, who have grounded me for a week after talking to Mrs. B. I didn’t argue the punishment and kept quiet throughout the you’ve got to use your head better lecture. The only reason they let me have the others over tonight is that I used the magic words: class project. If you haven’t learned yet, starting a sentence with “I have this big class project…” hypnotizes parents to immediately let you do whatever you ask—break curfew, fire a bazooka, buy a monkey online, you name it.
And a quick word on my parents: If you’re hoping for A Child Called “It”–like abuse or emotional scars that’ll have me seeing a team of psychiatrists through adulthood, you’ll be disappointed. My parents are smart, mostly calm, and—I say this with some guilt—trusting. Dad’s a news producer at Channel 4 (“Your home for hometown news!”), and Mom works for an agency finding jobs for people who don’t have them. The worst thing I can say about them is they’ve raised a revenge-driven teenager who’s secretly plotting to ruin lives. But isn’t everyone doing that?
“Did you guys bring what I asked?” Malone says.
We all fish into our pockets for flash drives while on the couch Malone fires up her laptop. Her wallpaper is a girl in black boots, black-and-white striped tights, and a black dress who’s spray-painting “Riots, Not Diets” on a brick wall. All of us, even Adleta, crowd around her.
“Okay, so there’s good news and bad news,” Malone says. “The bad news is there really wasn’t anything helpful in the phone’s memory. A bunch of sports news apps, all the Angry Birds games—which, weird, right?—and zero photos. He’s completely boring.”
“But we saw him take pictures,” Ellie says.
“And he’s on that phone all the time,” Adleta adds.
“Which leads me to the good news,” Malone says. “There’s nothing on his phone because he stores everything in his cloud, and I downloaded everything in there.”
“Have you looked through it yet?” I ask.
“I skimmed it, but I didn’t have the time to read it all. It would take a week.”
“That long?”
“Obsesssive’s the word I’d use to describe it.”
Once the files are transferred, I see what Malone means. On my laptop, the folder labeled Chaos Club expands into five subfolders: History, Evidence, Witnesses, Suspects, and Pictures. A quick scroll through each reveals at least seven hundred files total.
“See what I mean?” Malone says. “It’s way too much for any one person to sift through.”
“I’ll do it,” Ellie says. “I don’t really have the time, but I’ll make it. I want the Chaos Club dead.”
It’s the harshest I’ve ever heard Ellie sound. She must see the look I give her because she says, “No, it’s true. And not just for the water tower, but for last year. I couldn’t care less about them calling my dad a Nazi. I might even agree with them. But kids are still doing that whole Seig Heil thing to me in the hall. Someone even keyed a swastika into my car door last week. We had it buffed out, but the outline is still there. I mean, it’s bad enough being known as a goody-goody, there’s not much I can do about that, but I’m being blamed for something I wasn’t a part of. No one hears the fights I get into with my dad about censorship or how the earth isn’t only six thousand years old or how we should be teaching more than abstinence in health class, but I also have to deal with finding pictures of Hitler in my locker. I blame the Chaos Club for all that.”