Tabula Colton

Chapter 16- Julian Cheng

Story Recap: Miguel finds himself in the body of a teenage white boy named Colton owned by Jason Takada, an older muscle-daddy. He finds himself completely addicted to Mr. Takada's touch and love, but the trail of clues leads him to push on and a cell phone provides the biggest bombshell yet.

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"You're a nerd though, aren't you? This should be easy?" I asked Justin.

He frowned at that, but gave the phone a second look. I was desperate to find out what was on it. I'd spent fifteen minutes in the bathroom looking for a way to get into it, but all it showed was a white screen with the words "Say my name, bitch." written.

I finally gave up and decided to wait for Justin to see if he could help me.

"You found this taped under Colton's drawer? It's a super cheap phone. Why the hell does it have this crazy security on it?" Justin asked as he turned it over in his hands.

"I have no idea! It just says 'Say My Name, Bitch'," I said.

As soon as I finished speaking, the phone screen started to dance in blue waves until it finally opened.

"Holy shit, that's it! It was just waiting for you voiceprint. This technology is crazy! That's so rad, dude! Now can we go get lunch? They'll run out of Orange Chicken and we'll have to eat fish sticks," Jason pleaded.

"Fine, fine," I said.

He led me by the hand while I stared at the phone like every other kid in school. Justin seemed totally disinterested in the mystery. I'd filled him in a little, but he just thought I was still recovering from the accident.

There wasn't much on the phone. It had the standard junk phone bloatware plus a banking app and some messages. None of them were from Mr. Takada.

I started to look at them while Justin put two trays down. He beamed triumphantly. He'd scored a plate of orange chicken and fried rice. He asked what I wanted and I just waved my hand dismissively so he ordered me the same.

I wasn't hungry, I wanted to find out what Colton was up to.

The first set of messages was with a guy named Julian Cheng. It's weird to follow a conversation in text messages because it goes in reverse. There were a few messages from him to Colton asking what the fuck was up.

Obviously I hadn't used this phone since the accident so Julian was pretty frantic. I scrolled way down and decided to read the conversation the way it happened.

I picked it up somewhere in the middle, but I quickly gathered that Julian wasn't interested in Colton sexually. Whenever Colton made suggestive comments, Julian ignored them and steered them back to "the plan."

He said they already had enough money and it was time to get out before Mr. Takada caught on. Colton seemed desperate to leave the man.

He wanted to get to San Francisco where Julian had set up a safe place for him to hide out. Who was he hiding from?

Colton said he was working hard in his Japanese class for when it was safe enough to get out of the country. Japan?

I tried hard to search for a Japanese word in my head or some memory from Colton, but I couldn't. All I remembered was that Ohio meant hello or something like that.

So that was why I'd sat through a 50-minute Japanese class this morning. I had no idea what was going on, but the teacher was kind and thought it was related to my accident.

Colton wasn't just trying to learn Mr. Takada's heritage language, he was planning an escape. But an escape from what? None of this made sense.

"Hey man, we need to talk," I texted Julian and looked through the other messages.