“Why would people do that?”
“That’s how come the prize. We say it’s a marketing thing, we pretend we work for Jeep or something. We say that every week one person who tweets that they’ve seen an SRT8 will win something.”
“Okay … ,” I said. “And you think this will work?”
“I have no idea. But I think it’s the kind of thing the cops would never think of. They’re still operating in the twentieth century.”
“No. They just have systems that let them look up all the SRT8 owners in town.”
“Well, okay,” you said. “Point taken. But this is what we have. It would be better if we had a license plate, of course.”
Something itched at the back of my brain.
“What is it, Cass? You look weird.”
I closed my eyes. “I don’t …”
“You thought of something?”
“Sh,” I said. I had the strangest feeling. Like there was an idea curled up inside my mind and I needed to make it uncurl, open itself, like one of Dad’s millipedes.
You shut up. I opened my eyes and saw the piles of toys, but I wasn’t really seeing them. I was going over everything Julie had said, the whole conversation with me and Agent Horowitz. I knew there was something there. Something that made me think … I don’t know what it made me think.
That Julie might know the license plate, without realizing she did? I didn’t know why I thought that though.
“No,” I said. “I can’t get it. It’s gone.”
That feeling—of something being on the tip of my tongue, as Julie had said—had vanished.
“The license plate?”
“Yeah. It’s making me think of something, but I don’t know what.”
“Helpful.”
“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit,” I said.
“No,” you said. “That’s photobombing.”
“What? What’s photobombing?”
“I despair of you.”
“Whatever.”
“Anyway,” you said eventually, “it could play without the license plate. We make it like one of those online treasure-hunt marketing campaigns. Pretend we’re driving a Jeep SRT8 around the town. First person to spot it each day wins a prize, kind of thing. So we say that they have to tweet #SRT8 and their location. We might see a pattern. Or at least find some people who drive them.”
“If you say so. The whole Twitter thing is your area.”
“Or,” you said, in a tentative tone—your voice a foot gingerly tapping on a frozen lake before venturing onto it. “Or … we could hand it over to the cops.”
“You were the one who was all for investigating on our own.”
“Yeah. But … I don’t know. This feels big.”
“We can’t go to the cops,” I said.
“You don’t trust them?”
“Not that. My dad would find out. They’d tell him. They all eat at the restaurant.”
“Hmm,” you said. “Your dad doesn’t like you hanging out with me, right?”
“My dad doesn’t like a lot of stuff.”
You had been playing with the bag of toys we were sitting on; you took out a stuffed T. rex and started tossing it up and down in the air, catching it by its tail. “So we do it ourselves. Run this Twitter thing. See what comes up.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
Silence. There was that moment—I know you felt it too—there was that moment where the boy and the girl realize they’re sitting next to each other, alone, in a mostly dark warehouse, on a soft surface. One they could sink down into.
Together.
“Um. So which school are you going to?” I said awkwardly.
“What?”
“You said you were going to college. On a swim scholarship.”
“Oh. Brown.”
“Brown? Wow. How good a swimmer are you?”
“I’m okay. That’s why I’m not around at the apartment much. I do a bunch of training, when I’m not working.”
Silence.
“You?” you asked. “College, I mean?”
“I … I guess. I have one year of high school left.”
“Sucks.”
“Yeah.”
Silence. You shifted a little closer to me. I felt our molecules align with each other, like when we were on the couch in the apartment, the electrons synchronizing their spins, reaching out to each other across the distance between atoms.
You looked into my eyes.
You leaned toward me, to kiss me.
And I pulled away, sharply. It was automatic. I … Paris had only just disappeared, and it felt wrong. It felt like betraying her, to be with you like that. I saw the hurt in your eyes immediately, and my heart flipped.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“No,” you said. “It was … I shouldn’t have …”
Your voice frayed into silence.
Unbelievably awkward silence.
Our thousandth awkward moment, give or take.
Then your radio crackled.
“714, what’s your 20?” said a pissed-off sounding voice. “Where’s my goddamn plush?”
“This is 714,” you said, thumbing the radio. “Leaving the warehouse now.”
“Good. Get to Pier Two STAT. Then I want four bags of Pokémon to Pier One.”
“10-4,” you said.
“Out,” said the voice on the other end.