Try it sometime. Get naked with a bunch of people and make a promise or two. You’d be surprised how it sticks. In our case, promises turned into a plan. Holly promised to snatch some pills without her mom noticing. Logan would do the talking and driving, convince Cole to get into his car and make sure he drank the whiskey. I would bring the gear and burn the evidence. We’d cart the body to Meeka’s house, where we’d all dig and we’d all bury. Later, we decided we had to bring our phones and confess, which was the stupidest part of the plan.

  “Those fucking phones,” Meeka says to me now, as we sit on the hood of the Trans Am. “I never would’ve guessed this could happen.”

  I stare at the spot where the blanket had been, where we’d all sat bare-ass and shivering. And then the door opens and there’s Holly and she’s crying.

  “We’re so screwed,” she says.

  “Honey, I’m so sorry I didn’t get back to you last night,” Meeka says. “I lost my phone in the couch cushions and Mom had one of her parties, so I was waitressing for her till midnight. But when I found out this morning, I was on it.”

  Holly balls her fists like she’s about to punch both of us, but instead of punching, she paces. “What’s to figure out? We have to dig him up. We have to burn him. We have to—”

  “No,” Meeka says as she moves to Holly with her hands up and open. “We have to figure out what happened. So when I ask you something, I don’t want you to take it the wrong way.”

  “What?”

  “On your old phone, did you forget to turn off your cloud?”

  “What?”

  “It’s a question for both of you. Did you have a backup on your old phone that went to a cloud?” Meeka asks. “I know we all wiped the data, but did you turn off the backups?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Holly says. “The cell services were all off, transferred to our new phones ages ago.”

  “True,” Meeka says, “but not the Wi-Fi. The Wi-Fi signal reaches the barn. The video could have been automatically uploaded to your cloud, even if the phone didn’t have cell service. And if it’s on your cloud, then someone else could take it off your cloud.”

  My mom likes the Rolling Stones and they have a song called “Get Off of My Cloud” that starts earworming in my head. So yeah, I know the lyrics to some old-ass song, but I don’t have the first fucking clue about clouds. I mean, I know it’s like a virtual place where your files get stored. Backups and all that. But there has to be an actual physical thing somewhere that has all your shit on it, right? Seems right, but I don’t really know for sure.

  I don’t tell the girls that. I just say, “I turned everything off.”

  “Sign into your cloud to be certain,” Meeka says as she pulls out her phone. She taps quickly and then holds it up. “See. Nothing from that day.”

  Holly taps at her own screen like she’s doing Meeka a favor, stabbing her finger and rolling her eyes. She holds up the screen for both of us to see.

  “Check my iCloud stream. October twenty-ninth is all clear. I’m not an idiot.”

  I pretend to sign into mine, but I’m not sure where to start. The two of them watch me, and I try to play it off. “Umm . . .”

  Meeka grabs my phone before I can make a total ass of myself. “What cloud service do you use? And what’s your password?”

  I grab it back. “I’m not giving you my password.”

  “Fine,” she says. “Sign in yourself. Make sure the video isn’t in there.”

  I think I use . . . Dropbox?

  I try my most obvious password. Nope.

  Try another and . . . nothing.

  I’m thinking about resetting the password, when Holly says, “If you’re too stupid to open it, then you’re probably too stupid to have set it up in the first place.”

  That earns her a cold, hard glare, because if she’s stupid enough to say something like that to me, then she’s not smart at all. Besides, my third try at a password—an old one with Gram’s name—works and I’m in. I hold up my phone.

  “Fuck you very much,” I tell Holly.

  She shrugs.

  “What’s on there?” Meeka asks.

  I give the files a glance. “Mostly porn,” I say.

  “Oh Jesus, Grayson,” Holly says.

  “It’s the truth,” I say. “That’s all I’ve ever used this for. To store some porn I wanted to, you know, revisit.”

  Meeka rolls her eyes and asks, “But nothing from that night?”

  “Not a thing,” I tell them. “I’m not the one who fucked up.”

  Meanwhile, Holly is tapping her phone like a maniac. “Well, I’m changing my password anyway. And I suggest you two do the same.”

  A quick breeze blows up some dust and we all turn. The door is open again and this time it’s Logan standing there, all sweaty and red.

  “I got here as soon as I—”

  “Log into your cloud, check your photos on October twenty-ninth,” Holly says. “Then change your damn password!”

  He freezes and squints. “I didn’t share anything, and if you think—”

  “Do it!” Holly screams.

  Logan holds up a hand—a total dick move, like he’s saying “shut up, bitch”—and it’s obvious why he and Holly aren’t a thing anymore. But when he checks his phone, his mood changes.

  “Oh, wait,” he says.

  “What?” Holly asks.

  “There’s that other service,” he says.

  “What other service?” Holly asks.

  Logan puts that hand up again, and checks his phone again, and then his voice sounds like a little boy’s. “Oh crap.”

  “It’s on there?” Meeka asks. “The video?”

  Logan lowers his phone and takes a good long look at his shoelaces. He nods.

  Fuck.

  HOLLY

  NO ONE KNOWS my passwords. No one. There are some things you don’t share, even with the ones you love.

  No one could guess my passwords. No one. They’re random letters and numbers that I always memorize. Do I write them down? Of course I don’t. That’s not something I would ever do.

  Logan, on the other hand, shares his passwords with his girlfriends—I know that firsthand—and he probably has a piece of paper with them taped on his desk, like some grandpa who refers to the internet as the World Wide Web.

  Jesus, Logan.

  “Who has your passwords?” I ask him. “Who have you been sharing your passwords with?”

  “No one,” he says.

  “Not exactly true,” Meeka says, and she turns to me for confirmation.

  “Well, I obviously didn’t do it,” I say. “Is it Esther? She’s part of hack club, isn’t she?”

  “It isn’t Esther,” Logan assures me. “I don’t know her like that. And yeah, I might’ve shared a password or two with you back in the day. But no, I’ve never shared them with anyone else.”

  “No one else?” Meeka asks.

  “Well . . .” Logan says. “No. No one else.”

  “Why the hesitation?” Meeka asks.

  Logan shrugs.

  “Jesus, you didn’t share passwords with Cole, did you?” I say.

  “Cole is gone,” Grayson so helpfully reminds us. “There’s no Cole to worry about anymore.”

  “I didn’t share any passwords with Cole,” Logan says. “But he did recommend it.”

  “A password?” I ask.

  “The cloud service I used,” Logan says. “On my old phone.”

  “What?” I ask, because seriously, what?

  “You were supposed to wipe the old phone,” Grayson says. “Even I knew that.”

  “I wiped all the pics and stuff,” Logan says.

  “But not the apps?” Meeka asks.

  He shrugs and says, “Didn’t seem necessary.”

  Meeka throws her hands up. “Oh well, now fuck us all to—”

  “But I never gave Cole my passwords!” Logan screams. “He only recommended the cloud service. Told me how to install the app. That’s it.”

  “Show us,” I demand.

  “Like I told you, I only had the app on my old phone,” he says. “But . . .”

  “But?” the three of us respond at the same time.

  “There’s a web interface,” Logan says as he holds up his phone to show us a web page.

  And again, at the same time, we all grimace.

  “What the fuck is that?” Grayson says. “That shit looks like something I would make.”

  Okay, I’ll hand it to Grayson. He beat me to the punch. Because this page looks about as unprofessional as it gets. Simply terrible.

  “It’s bare-bones,” Logan tells us. “That’s why it’s free. I didn’t want to pay for some cloud service when I could have one for free. It made sense financially at the time.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Logan,” Meeka says. “It’s called GOTCHYA. How could you think that it’s reputable?”

  “How could you think anything that came from Cole is reputable?” I ask. “Everything associated with that kid was infected. His viruses had viruses.”

  “GOTCHYA worked great. A little slow, but it had twice the storage of Dropbox and it was free. I’m going to be running a nonprofit someday, so these are decisions I take seriously,” Logan says.

  “Here’s the thing,” Meeka says calmly. “Cole always wanted access. And if you fell for one of his—”

  “I didn’t fall for anything!” Logan protests, and he’s on the verge of tears.

  “You did,” Meeka tells him, and she puts a soft hand on his tense shoulder. “And so did I. More than I want to admit. If you ever signed into anything on one of his computers, Cole would keep you logged in. I learned that tidbit a little too late.”

  “And when exactly did you learn that tidbit?” I ask, because that isn’t exactly a tidbit. This is huge. Enormous.

  “A few days before . . . you did it,” Meeka says, whispering the last part. “He was messing with my iTunes and Netflix. Some really passive-aggressive shit. Making playlists with songs about guys who kill their girlfriends, adding super-gross horror movies to my queue. I confronted him. He admitted he’d stolen a ton of data from people. He was proud of it.”

  Are you kidding me? Talk about important information to share with your friends. “Why the hell didn’t you tell us?” I ask.

  Meeka shrugs. “Because I figured he could have all the data in the world, but it wouldn’t make a bit of difference in a few days. You had your plan. You said you were going through with it. It didn’t matter.”

  “Shit,” I blurt out, and suddenly I’m pounding my fist on the hood of her dad’s car. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

  And Grayson adds a “Fuckin’ shit” for good measure.

  Meeka’s head dips and her eyes turn up, like a guilty dog, but she doesn’t apologize.

  I take a deep breath to steady myself. I open my hands, stretch my fingers. “Okay, so Cole could get into Logan’s bootleg cloud. Probably because he had the password. Who cares? That doesn’t matter at this point.”

  “He never had the password!” Logan whines.

  “He probably didn’t need the password,” Meeka says with a sigh. “I’d bet every dollar I have that GOTCHYA isn’t even a real cloud service. Knowing Cole, it’s something he created. He had all sorts of things like that. Little traps. Stuff to amuse himself. He once rigged up a motion detector, or some Bluetooth thingy that could recognize my phone. Whenever I’d walk into his trailer, it’d send me a text. ‘Hey, bae!’ or whatever. He thought it was cute. I made him take it down because I thought it was creepy as fuck.”

  Uh . . . yeah. Über creepy, and totally on brand for Cole. As was conning his “friends.”

  “You said this GOTCHYA cloud was free?” I ask Logan. “How much storage space?”

  “Two terabytes,” he says.

  “That’s the size of a really big hard drive,” I tell him. “My iMac only has a one-terabyte drive, and it’s new.”

  “What are you saying?” Logan asks.

  “She’s saying that all that shit isn’t floating around in the sky,” Grayson says. “It’s sitting somewhere.”

  “Basically,” I add, mildly impressed that Grayson keeps barking up the right trees. “But it’s more complicated than that. Typically, a cloud service shares its information over a few different servers in different locations. And no reputable service would offer that much space for free. Assuming Meeka is right, and this is something Cole set up, then I think it’s probable that there’s a single server somewhere that hosts all of Logan’s files. A honeypot for all his secrets.”

  “Which means someone else must have access to that honeypot,” Meeka adds.

  “Where is the honeypot, then?” Logan asks.

  “I know the first place to check,” Grayson says as he digs into his Carhartt pockets and pulls out a pair of yellow leather wood-chopping gloves. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?” Logan says.

  Grayson slides the gloves over his hands as he says, “Cole’s trailer. We have to see if that thing is still there.”

  “What thing?” we all ask.

  “His Heart.”

  * * *

  • • •

  That trailer. That disgusting trailer.

  The earthy filth, the electric noise. The stench.

  The last time I was inside it, it smelled like pets—multiple pets—but as far as I knew, Cole didn’t have any. He lived alone. Okay, mice were probably there, but they don’t smell that bad. The odor was in the curtains. In the frayed carpet, in his sheets.

  The last time I was inside was a week before Meeka and Cole broke up. She brought me along to help her collect things she’d left behind. She didn’t tell me the breakup was imminent. She didn’t have to. They’d been fighting for weeks, ever since the condom scare. Every time they “got back together,” she did it with the enthusiasm of someone taking the last sips of cold soup.

  Even though Cole didn’t know it, things were through.

  “Laundry day!” Meeka hollered as we busted into the place. She started grabbing any clothes she could find—hers, his—and stuffing them into a trash bag. At the same time, she was stuffing the bag with other things that belonged to her. Or ones she thought should belong to her. Not that Cole noticed. He was sitting on his bed, immersed in a book, the light of his Kindle cast over his bloodshot eyes.

  “Love you, meerkat,” he called out. “Add a little more fabric softener this time if you could. Pretty please with kisses on top.”

  “What’re you reading?” I asked.

  “Everything,” he said, without looking up.

  “As in?”

  “How everything works. What our fragile lil’ world depends on.”

  God, I hate when people read on Kindles. Perhaps you can’t judge a book by a cover, but you can judge a person by one. With Kindles, people can lie about what they’re reading. Or, like Cole—patronize. Why didn’t he just tell me the title of the book? Was he embarrassed? No. It’s because he assumed that I would never know what the book was, let alone understand it.

  “It’s about physics, in other words?” I asked. “Quantum theory? The laws of the universe?”

  Cole shook his head. He pointed to a bright red cube that sat on a table. “You know what that is? It’s my Heart. And it beats because of two simple things. Ones and zeroes, baby. True and false. That might sound simple, but you know what it’s capable of? It’s a cavalry. It turns boys into men and men into warriors. It’s a beacon poised to spark a revolution.”

  “You’re talking . . . video games?” I asked, because honestly that’s what I thought it might be: some special gaming console.

  “You’re so naïve.”

  I threw my hands up in the air. “I’m trying to figure out what the heck you’re talking about, Cole.”

  “You probably think guys like me are cowards, don’t you?”

  “Well, if the VR headset fits,” I said, which made Meeka snort.

  Cole simply sneered and said, “We’re only lying in wait, biding our time. But we’re ready to change the world. And mark my words, we will change the world.”

  “First you’ll have to change your sheets. But good luck with the world too, pal.”

  He turned back to his Kindle. “I don’t need luck. Just the ones and zeroes, the only things a guy can count on these days.”

  The only things? That felt like a slap in the face to Meeka, but I really didn’t care. She was done with him and so was I. No more cryptic rants. No more casual misogyny. My plan was to cut off all ties as soon as the split was official. I didn’t care if Grayson continued to hang out with Cole, because Grayson was always a free agent. But I planned to make sure Logan stayed away. The breakup was an inevitability, so sides had to be chosen. Cemented.

  As soon as her bag was full, Meeka said, “Hate to run.”

  Cole still didn’t look up, but he blew her a kiss. “Thanks, meerkat. I was almost out of undies. Will you be back later?”

  “Sure,” Meeka said, which was the most unsure “sure” in history. Then we were gone.

  The cheap springs snapped the trailer’s door shut like a mousetrap we’d barely escaped. When we reached the car, Meeka heaved the bag into the back of her BMW X5. Then she put her hands on my cheeks and said, “Be thankful for your privilege.”

  That was the last time I was inside the trailer.

  The last time I was even near the trailer was the night we did it.

  And now we’re going back.

  LOGAN

  THE TRAILER STILL GLOWS and hums. It makes my head throb even more than it already did. If someone has been here since Cole stepped out, they haven’t changed anything noticeable. It’s exactly like it always was. When we enter, it’s into chattering and flashing chaos.