Whistleblower ✓

08 | character building

Outside, the night was dark and quiet.

I didn't have to look at my phone to know that I was too late to make the party at the Baseball House. Ellison only lived about a block and a half from the Rodeo, so I would've been able to hear music if anyone was still raging into the night. I still checked to be sure I hadn't missed anything important, though.

There were three notifications from Andre.

The first was a text that read Come to based bull hose so much free beet.

The second was a Snapchat—a blurry picture of a Hanna, grinning and flipping off the camera with both hands in what looked like a very modern and recently updated kitchen, captioned She beat St Jame!!! Pong queen of three year!!!

The third was a text he'd sent ten minutes ago.

Were gong homed.

Comforted by the knowledge that my friends had ended up having a great night in my unplanned absence, I sat down on the curb between two parked cars and tore open my bag of tacos. Then I did what I always did when stressed.

I ate.

Half of me was terrified that I was wrong about Vaughn, and that I'd just convinced Ellison we should dive head-first into an investigation that might end up being a very shallow pool we'd crack out heads open on the bottom of.

The other half of me feared that the gut feeling I'd had when I saw the poster at Pepito's would prove right.

I inhaled all three of my tacos. It probably took me all of two minutes.

When I was done, I brushed a few chunks of pico de gallo off my lap, stood, and headed home.

❖ ❖ ❖

The apartment Hanna and I had leased was not glamorous.

Between the two of us, we'd had just enough cash to afford a place three blocks east of the Rodeo, where things got as sketchy as they could possibly get in a town as wealthy and sleepy as Garland.

The building was two stories, with one wide hallway down the middle. All the windows on the first floor had bars over them, the intercom had been broken for years, and there was a wasp infestation in the laundry room. Our apartment on the second floor overlooked a gas station and had a busted air conditioning unit that rattled and groaned like a dying animal.

But it was ours, and we loved it.

I heard Andre and Hanna before I even made it to our door. Their voices carried through the paper-thin walls, loud and a little slurred.

"It says two eggs!" Andre was shouting.

"Well I can't take an egg out now, so we're going with it."

I waited a moment, smiling to myself as I listened to them bicker, before I stuck a hand under my shirt to retrieve my key from inside my bra—the only place on my person from which I'd yet to lose anything during a night of partying.

Andre shouted my name as I stepped through the door.

He was sitting in one of the short little Ikea chairs around our rickety dining table, his knees tucked up almost to his chest and a crushed cardboard box of brownie mix in his hands, the back of which he was consulting as if it were a sacred text.

Hanna stood over the counter in our kitchenette, a spatula in her hand and a wreath of ping pong balls that someone had hot glue gunned together perched on her head like a crown.

"Where did you get that?" I asked her.

She flicked her spatula out, splattering one large glob of brownie batter onto the permanently grimy tile floor, and held her chin high.