But to me, it wasn’t nothing. I’d never skipped a class before. My attendance record was nearly flawless. But what was the worst that could happen? Absences didn’t affect grades until you’d been out a bunch of times, and since I’d never skipped before, no one would assume I was skipping now. I could tell my teachers tomorrow that I’d gotten sick and gone home, and they would believe me. Maybe they wouldn’t even ask for a note. The fact that I’d been honest before would make me a better liar now.
“I’m in,” I said.
We went to Alex’s house and got ourselves set up, her on the big computer screens, me on my laptop. Her room now felt as much like a second home to me as Becca’s had; I no longer superimposed Becca’s love seat and chairs into Alex’s workspace every time I came over. Being around Alex, I realized, made me miss Becca less. She wasn’t a replacement; it was more that I related to what Alex had said about thinking it was enough to have Justin as her only friend. It didn’t have to be that way. I’d been holding back with Alex as if us being truly close was some kind of betrayal of Becca, but there was no need to. That wasn’t how it worked.
“Where should we start?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” she said. “My brain is so full of rage I can’t think. You’re going to have to do the thinking for both of us.”
I was mad too, but it was making me feel focused. Maybe I didn’t need Novalert to get things done; maybe I just needed blind fury. “Well, I’ve got one idea—remember how Mark said that Ms. Davenport went through a divorce and then had to pay for her grandmother’s nursing home and mortgage? I think Mrs. Sinclair is her grandmother. Can you get into some legal databases and find out more about the lawsuit? And the divorce?”
“Definitely,” she said.
“Great. I’ll do the social media thing again and see if there’s anything there.”
“Bonus points for whoever finds the name of her ex first?”
“Yes!” A contest! I loved contests. I had the easier job, I was sure, so this one I could win. I started with Google just to see what I could come up with and found that Ms. Davenport was all over social media; she had accounts on all the major sites. But I quickly found that her privacy settings were locked down, and I could access almost nothing but the occasional photo.
“Brick wall,” I told Alex.
“That was fast.” She was typing as quickly as ever, and all three of her screens had documents on them, some of them with numbers down the left side.
I peered closer and saw that they were from courts. She’d found the lawsuit and the divorce decree, which was from just a couple of years ago. “‘It is therefore ordered that the marriage of Jonathan and Samantha Fisher be dissolved,’” I read. “Jonathan Fisher. He’s the ex. I win!”
“How do you win? I’m the one who found that doc,” Alex protested. “And we don’t even know for sure that it’s them.”
“You might have found it, but you haven’t read it yet.”
“That is totally not how this contest works. Proof first, then the win.”
“Okay, but what should I do about the social media stuff? Can you hack into her accounts?”
She frowned. “I could, but it would take forever, and there’s got to be a better way to find out what we need to know.”
I thought about it for a minute. “I’ll look for pictures where she’s tagged. Everyone screws up their privacy stuff every once in a while, right? And then I’ll see if her ex is online too.”
“Worth a shot,” she said, and turned back to her screens.
I got back online and did a search for pictures, and I hit pay dirt fast: a whole bunch of photos from a couple of years ago and beyond, posted by her ex. And in one of them, Ms. Davenport was wearing a wedding dress.
“We found the right guy,” I said. “I win!”
“You couldn’t have done it if I hadn’t found the divorce stuff,” she said. “I’ll take the draw, though.”
As much as I liked winning, I liked how much fun it was working with her, as a team. “Okay, fine.”
“Excellent. Now let me see him.”
Alex looked over my shoulder and we went through the photos. Ms. Davenport’s husband was good-looking, though he was completely different than what I’d have expected. He had short, neatly styled brown hair and wore suits or business-casual clothes in all the photos. In a way, he kind of looked like my dad. “I’d have thought she’d be married to a hipster,” I said.
“Totally,” Alex said. “And he’s older than I thought.”
We looked at his profile, which was completely open. He was a banker who lived in San Francisco, thirty-five years old, and from what we could tell, he and Ms. Davenport had gotten married eight years ago. The big surprise, though, was seeing his most recent photos. Most of them were pictures of a baby. And not a newborn, either—the baby was a few months old.
“Whoa,” Alex said as we scrolled through his timeline. There was another wedding picture there, from just over a year ago. “So he got married less than a year after the divorce?”
“Looks that way,” I said. “And either the new wife was pregnant already or it happened pretty quick.”