I Still Need ✓

25. I suppose we're all just running out of luck

Right after Eve had her interview, she suddenly received a message from an anonymous number, and that message consisted of but four words. Nothing else.

'I know your DukeCockroach'

Grammatical errors aside, it was downright scary. The person had sent it to her personal phone number, which one could only get from people at school, so someone in our fucking school knew who DukeCockroach was and they were just casually letting her know through a text message. Just the idea that this information would get out scared the shit out of us. It would have horrible consequences for a lot of people, not to mention Eve herself.

She'd tweeted about all her friends, her family, her teachers, kids from other classes, their parents, their siblings, anyone—all rumors she'd known to be true. See, I might pick up some stuff every now and then, but I'm pretty sure Eve had heightened senses and the ability to see through walls or something, because she found out everything about everyone.

I had quickly left Riley and Jenna alone, shouting an apology to them over my shoulder as I sprinted home. I had a disaster to solve. Riley could get her personal support later. But neither me nor Eve had a single clue what to do. We couldn't possibly find out who'd sent the message and we couldn't send anything back. We were screwed.

"You know what's the worst?" she sighed miserably. "I tweeted about Olivia and Mr Rosenberg, remember?"

"Oh, shit," I muttered, running a hand over my face. I'd completely forgotten about that. "Can't you delete the tweet?"

"Hugo, everyone has already seen it! If they find out that all those tweets I posted are about our school, they'll know it's them. There has only been one rumor about a teacher hooking up with a student and that's Mr. Rosenberg and Olivia."

"Fuck. We have to stop this person."

"Well, duh! But how?"

"I don't know," I whined, before realizing something. I jumped up and squeaked, "Wait, Eve!"

"What?"

"Did you post anything about Floyd, Dylan and me?"

"Not directly."

"What do you mean?"

She grabbed her phone and scrolled down to something she'd tweeted quite a while ago. It didn't have as many likes as the others, but there were still hundreds of people that agreed with the statement and dared to repost it.

Duke Cockroach @DukeCockroach · March 17

It's lovely to see that people are not afraid to love more than one person.

I looked back up at her. "That's cute."

She gave me a tiny smile.

"Have they sent anything else yet?"

For the millionth time, she lifted the phone to her face to check her inbox and shook her head. "Nothing. It's just that one message."

So we had no choice but to leave it alone and wait for something else to happen... And after a very restless night, Eve finally got what we waited for. This time, the message said, 'I have a proposal'.

That was it. They didn't specify what the proposal was. They just left us to wonder for hours on end again.

Damnit...

Eve surprised me, when during lunch break, she came to the table my friends and I were sitting at instead of her own friends' table. She simply sat down beside me with a deep frown and hunched shoulders and started picking at her food, not even actually eating it. Just glaring at the cutlery in her hands.