“Hey, Tres, what’s the problem?” Nash asked.
“Sorry,” Tres said. “I guess my nerves are kind of frazzled.”
For a second, Brett looked at him like he was some kind of mental defective, but she covered it quickly, patted him on the arm, and went, “We know you miss her, but things will be all right. They’ll find her.”
I wasn’t sure—I hadn’t been around a lot of rich kids—but her sympathy seemed kind of fake.
“I keep thinking about her,” Tres said, mopping up the spilled soda with his napkin. “We had a fight just the other day. I called her—well, something I shouldn’t have.”
“Hey, brothers and sisters have fights,” Nash told him. “It’s natural. When you get her back safe at home, she won’t even remember it.”
Staring at the table, Tres goes, “When we were kids, this one time I got lost and she—” He stopped. His head was bowed, so I couldn’t tell if he was crying, but it seemed likely.
“I know it’s hard,” Nash said. “But think of it this way, Tres—we have Dylan on our side. He’s already doing a better job than the police.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said.
And Nash’s like, “As a matter of fact, Dylan, you need to friend us on Facebook so we can keep in touch. What do you think about that?”
“Uh, sure.”
“Maybe we’ll get together and talk some more about the case for your newspaper article.”
“Really?”
“You bet. And it’d be great if maybe you could send me copies of your articles. That way I could spread them around at school to keep everyone up to date.”
“I could do that,” I said, flattered to think of my writing circulating among the Hollister elite.
“We might even have a party,” Brett said, flashing me that brilliant smile. Before I could follow up on that, she excused herself, saying she had to go talk to somebody on the other side of the tent, but as she stood, she looked down at me and goes, “Nice hat, by the way.”
I watched her walk through the crowd. Maybe she did really like the hat or maybe she thought it was the lamest thing she’d ever seen—I just couldn’t be sure.
CHAPTER 12
After I got home from the search, I had to come clean to my parents about quitting the grocery-store job. They didn’t care so much that I quit the job, but they definitely weren’t happy that I did it on such short notice. Dad was all about how you never knew when you might need a job reference sometime down the line, and Mom was all, “That’s not how we taught you to treat people. You have to have more respect for others than that.”
They were right, of course, and I did feel bad about the job, but I explained how I had to make a choice between sacking groceries and devoting myself to my investigative journalism. The kids who became editors and got all sorts of articles published had to stay after school, I told them. Sure, it was great to make money for right now, but I also had my future career to think about.
That calmed them down. They were glad to see I was taking something seriously for a change. So they switched the lecture over to explaining how all my other school subjects were also important for a journalist, and then, when they started listing the classes I should take in college, my mind drifted off into a mental movie of me cruising up and down in front of my high school in a red ’69 Mustang.
Next Monday at school, I found out my buddy Randy was even less happy with me for quitting the grocery store, and he wasn’t at all impressed with my new emphasis on being an investigative journalist. Seems that since I left, the store was shorthanded, and the extra workload fell on him. That was something I hadn’t thought about. To make it up, I invited him over to help research the Ashton Browning case with me and Audrey.
We congregated in my bedroom, and like a good host I cracked open some Dr Peppers and laid out a bowl of Chex Mix, the Traditional blend. I really like the Bold Party Blend, except the drawback is it lingers on your breath the rest of the day. No amount of teeth-brushing, mouth-washing, or mint-eating can destroy that taste. It’s nuclear.
Now, when the Andromeda Man did research, he had access to all sorts of records—bank accounts, rap sheets, tax files, even parking-ticket info—but me, I had Facebook. So the three of us sat on the floor with our backs against the bed and began poring over the Facebook profiles of some of the Hollister kids I’d hooked up with. I halfway expected Nash, Brett, and Tres to have forgotten who I was already, but no, they friended me right back when I sent in the request. Trix friended me and Audrey both.
Then I used their friends lists to hook up with quite a few people who’d never met me, including Rowan Adams, Ashton’s latest boyfriend. Every one of them friended me right back too. Really, these Hollisterites seemed to be just like kids at my school. They didn’t care if they knew you or not. They just wanted to add as many names as they could to jack up their friends total.
There wasn’t a whole lot to find out from their profiles, just the usual stuff about music, movies, books, that kind of thing. But there were a few interesting tidbits like how Nash was a hotshot wide receiver on the football team, Brett was class treasurer, Tres played the oboe, and Trix didn’t say anything about only being interested in girls. That didn’t deter Audrey, though. Right off, she jotted down a list of books and movies Trix liked, I guess so she could work them into their next conversation.
Randy’s like, “This is boring. I thought we were going to scope out some hot rich babes, not a lesbian girlfriend for Audrey.”