Chapter 18

I was still flying so high the next day from the gig, that it took me a while to realize Kat hadn’t come by like she said she would. While I wasn’t upset that I got out of studying, Kat had practically made a religion out of punctuality. I tried to call her a few times, but didn’t get any answer. I almost called Hanna, but by the time I decided something might be wrong, she was at work and I didn’t want to bother her when I didn’t actually know anything. I told myself that it might be unusual for Kat to be late, but that didn’t mean something had happened.

So I waited and paced the small trailer living room, getting more anxious with each lap, playing over potential scenarios in my head. Maybe her dad had come back unexpectedly and realized she’d been going out. Maybe Aaron had decided he wasn’t ready to give her up after all and had gone to her house looking for her. Maybe criminals had heard her dad was out of town and picked her house for a home invasion.

Okay, the last one was a bit of a stretch, but my brain was spiraling out of control as I worried, in between calling her every five minutes and leaving an increasingly manic series of voice mails. I knew what time Hanna got off work and watched the clock, waiting until I could call for help. I had practice with Chef and Willie and an early gig tonight, but there should be enough time for Hanna to come get me and the two of us to swing by Kat’s house and check on her.

“Kat didn’t show up,” I said as soon as Hanna got off work and I called her.

“What?”

“Kat said she was going to come tutor me today, and she never showed. I called a bunch of times, but she didn’t answer.”

“Ohh,” Hanna said, her voice suddenly matching my concern.

“Can you come get me and let’s go check on her?”

“I’m out the door,” she said, hanging up.

I had to hand it to Hanna; in a crisis she didn’t waste time talking or being dramatic. She just went into action. I was sitting on the front steps when Hanna came tearing up to my house. I leapt off the steps, launching myself at her door, and was in the car almost as soon as it came to a stop.

“Any word,” Hanna asked as I got into the car.

“Not yet, let’s...” I started to say when Hanna’s phone dinged.

She’d just started pulling forward and stopped again, pulling out her phone and checking it.

“It’s Katherine. She says she’s fine and she’ll see us later.”

“What? Nothing about why she didn’t show up and why she didn’t answer?”

“Nope. Just she’s fine and she’ll see us later.”

“Should we still go over there, just in case,” I asked.

“No. We heard back from her and she says she’s fine, so let’s just give her some space.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you rush down here.”

“It’s fine. I was worried too, ‘cause this isn’t like her. I take it you need a ride?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you need your stuff,” she said, nodding at my empty lap and hands.

I’d rushed out of the house without my change of clothes for after I worked out with Chef or my guitar.

“Ohh, yeah,” I said, sheepishly. “Sorry, I’m a little jumpy I guess.”

Hanna backed up, pulling in front of my trailer.

“It’s okay. If I were her, I’d be happy to know that I had someone looking out for me like that. Grab your stuff and let’s get going.”

Willie was up on the porch waiting for us when we got to the Blue Ridge.

“Eugene called me,” Willie said when I walked up the steps towards him. “He said you did a hell of a job, although he told me you were going to poach his musicians?”

“I thought you said Seth was going to talk to him,” Hanna said, turning on me.

“He did,” I said, suddenly worried for a whole new reason. “They said they didn’t think it’d be a problem and that they’d ask him, just to be sure. Ahh, I screwed up. I should have done it myself. Stupid mistake. Should I call him and apologize?”

Willie broke into a grin and said, “No, you’re fine. He just wanted me to pull your chain. So the guys you played with were good?”

“Yeah. We worked really well together and Marco, the keyboard player, made some really good suggestions. I hadn’t even thought about needing keys on some of my songs, but they really do add a lot, especially to Country Roads. I wasn’t thinking all three of them though, just the drummer and the keyboard player.”

“The bass player was an ass. He tried to make a move on me, pinning me against a wall and trying to put a hand up my shirt, while Charlie was talking to the other two about joining his band.”

“He did what?!” I demanded.

“Calm down Rambo, I handled him. He’s probably still trying to dig his nuts out of his abdomen.”

Willie chuckled at our byplay and asked, “Are you sure you want to pick the first two guys you played with? I’ve seen a lot of rookie musicians stick with the first guys he meets, instead of taking the time to find the right people.”

“I don’t know; that’s why I wanted them to come up and do a short audition with me for you, so you could see if they were a good pick. I’ve never put a band together, so I’m not sure what I’m looking for, but we worked well together. They made a lot of good suggestions and didn’t get upset when I said no to suggestions I didn’t think would work. Really, our rehearsal was a lot like the rehearsals here, and we got along. Well, except for Rodney the bass player, but they didn’t seem to like him very much either.”

“They did sound good,” Hanna added.

“Okay, if y’all think they might work, I’ll give ‘em a listen. When were you thinking?”

“Next Saturday, before the lunch rush. Seth said he had a gig filling in for a band’s regular drummer Saturday night, so he’s got to get back in time.”

“Yeah, I can make that work. Let them know. What are you going to do about a bass player? You’re going to need one.”

“Seth said he knew a guy.”

“Just be sure before you start doin’ any regular gigs. If you’re gonna make it work for the scout your teacher set up, you’re gonna need to get comfortable on stage together, or it’ll show. You don’t have time to do gigs with guys that aren’t gonna last.”

“I will,” I said, and then we all stopped as a car pulled up hard right in front of the restaurant.

As the dust from the gravel parking lot cleared I was surprised to see it was Kat.

“Is everything okay?” I asked as soon as she ran up the steps.

“Yes, sorry. I know you were worried and I got your messages. All of them.”

Hanna turned and gave me a look and I gave her a ‘what can you do’ shoulder shrug in return.

“It’s fine; it’s nice having people worry about me. Can we go somewhere and sit down and talk?”

“Sure. Does it need to be just me?”

“No, Hanna can come too.”

“I’m too old for whatever drama you kids got cookin’, so take it out back,” Willie said.

I held my tongue until we got through the restaurant and out the back door.

“What happened? I’ve been trying to get a hold of you all day. I was worried sick.”

“I know, and I’m really sorry,” Kat said. “I had to use my phone so I could loop through cell network IPs to keep from getting my login script from getting blocked by DDOS protection most cloud storage companies use.”

“What?” I asked, looking at Hanna.

“Don’t ask me. When she goes all geek-speak, she always loses me.”

“I missed something. What were you doing?”

“I was watching the video of your fight with Aaron,” she said, beaming.

“What? How? Where?” I said, now completely off-kilter.

“Who? When?” Hanna said, smirking at me.

I glared at her. Sometimes her sense of humor flared up at the most inconvenient times.

“Back up to the beginning and explain what you’ve been doing,” I said.

“Okay, so I was thinking it was weird that there was no video of your fight. I mean, I know the school doesn’t have cameras, but every kid has a camera in their phone and starts recording any time anything interesting pops up. Did you know there’s a video out there of you and Harry arguing in the locker room after your last game?”

“Coach’ll flip if he finds out someone was recording in the locker room. They made it clear in the code of conduct we signed that you could get kicked off the team for that.”

“I don’t think that’s her point,” Hanna said.

“Yeah. Okay, so everyone has a phone. So what, there wasn’t anyone in the parking lot when I fought Aaron.”

“Yes, there was. There were four people in the parking lot, besides you, in fact.”

“How could you possibly know that?” I asked.

“I started thinking about it a while ago. Dad was home, so I wasn’t allowed to go out, and I was surfing the internet, kind of bored. Did you know there’s a Reddit board dedicated to our school?”

“A what?”

“Reddit. You don’t use it?”

“I’m going to go out on a limb and assume it’s some kind of website or tech thing. We only have the free Wi-Fi that the community has, and it sucks hard, so I hardly ever use the internet except when I’m at school or Hanna’s house.”

“It’s a place where people post messages and respond to them about ... well, everything. There are different boards you can post on about specific subjects, from like, movies to special interests to towns and so on.”

“And our school has one of these?” I asked.

“Well, the school doesn’t run it. It’s not like a blog or anything. It was probably set up by a student, although it seems unlikely the administration doesn’t know about it. Kids talk about gossip, classes, teachers, post videos. Whatever.”

“Okay, so there’s a place where people from our school post stuff on the internet.”

“You’ve got it. Anyway, I was going through it and I was thinking about all the videos everyone had. It’s like anything even the least bit interesting that happens in school, someone takes a video of it and posts it.”

“And a video of my fight was on there?”

“No, it’s just what got me thinking about it. So I was thinking about it and then started thinking about the parking lot and how it’s never completely empty, even an hour after school gets out. So I ... uhh ... found out whose cell phones were in the parking lot that afternoon when your fight happened.”

“How?” I asked, skeptically. “You didn’t do anything that’ll get you in trouble?”

“No or, at least, not if they don’t catch me.”

“Kat!” I said in warning.

“You’re wasting your breath. She loves this kind of thing. Sometimes when we’re waiting on your practice to end, she’ll go on about the thing she hacked into. I swear it’s her only addiction.”

“It’s not hacking. I mean, not really. I didn’t actually break any encryption on their systems or anything. People are just really bad at passwords. As long as you know someone who has access to a system and has enough of a social media presence, you can usually find out their passwords, especially if they’re in admin or something non-technical. I just found out someone’s login to the back end of the cell system, so it’s not really hacking.”

“It’s probably illegal though,” I said, still not dropping my displeasure.

I didn’t have a problem with people breaking laws, per se. It was more Kat specifically, since if she did something bad enough to end up in jail, it would go very badly.

“Anyway, I followed a bunch of kids’ phone and GPS histories and several were in the parking lot, or pretty close to it, when you had your fight. They aren’t exact, so some of them were probably just inside the building, close enough to get picked up, but not where they could actually see you.”

“Okay, I’m still not clear how that got you a video of the fight.”

“I’m getting there. Once I had a list, I started thinking about where they’d have saved the video if they took it, working backward from most common cloud storage systems to least common. A lot of phones are made by companies that have deals with cloud storage people, so it isn’t all that much work to check and see if these guys have accounts.”

“I’m afraid to even ask how you were able to check their accounts.”

“Like I said, it’s not hard if someone is only a newbie, and has social media. It’s easier with kids in high school and college, since everyone’s connected and shares literally everything in their life online. It’s just a process of elimination. All you have to do is set up the likely parameters and the sites you want to check and have it loop through all of their login systems, trying each one.”

“Which is why your cell phone was busy,” Hanna said.

“Exactly. It took a few days, ‘cause some of them had a ton of files in their storage, and I had to go through all of the videos and pictures by hand. I considered trying to make some kind of algorithm to sort through them, but then I’d have to get a hold of facial recognition software, which would have...”

“Kat,” I said, interrupting her.

“Anyway, I went through all of them, and I found a video of the fight. It wasn’t a great angle, and it lost you when the two of you fell to the ground, but it shows Aaron attacking you first.”

“Why didn’t this kid post it? Everything else in this school gets posted, but the one video I’d need to end this nonsense this kid just filed away and forgot about it.”

“He could have been scared. You might not be intimidated by Aaron, but a lot of kids here are. Everyone knows who his dad is and how he protects Aaron, letting him get away with pretty much everything. Anyone who’s been in the same school as him for a few years knows to avoid him. Hell, even people like Chris Hume, who could kick his ass and was as popular as him, tended to just avoid him instead. It’s why you got under his skin so much, since you stood up to him.”

“Does it matter?” Kat asked. “We have the video now. You can prove you didn’t attack him.”

“You know what ... you’re right,” I said, picking Kat up and swinging her around. “You’re amazing.”

She laughed and threw her arms around me, clinging tight and burying her head in my shoulder. She was still grinning as I put her back down. She hadn’t smiled much since the thing with her dad, so it was great to see her happy again, even if it was only for a few minutes.

“Can you send me the video?”

“Yep,” she said, taking her phone back from Hanna, who’d grabbed it when I’d picked Kat up.

I’d have to use Chef’s computer to forward it on to Mr. Eaves, but this was the first time since the whole lawsuit business started that I actually felt like I could see a way out. Chef came out and chased them off, but not even his gruff, all-business manner during training could ruin the euphoria I was feeling, knowing the whole episode would soon be behind me.

As soon as practice ended I hurried up to Chef’s apartment, with his permission of course, and sent the emails to Mr. Eaves. I knew I’d have to wait for a reply, but knowing it didn’t make the experience feel any less like an eternity. The one-sentence reply I finally got a day later confirming he got it and saying he’d look into it did dampen my enthusiasm quite a bit. To be fair, I wasn’t actually paying him and he had other clients who were, so I probably didn’t rate immediate responses. Besides, he also had to go over the video and verify it, or whatever.

It was just tough to be this close to being done with the whole thing and not be able to do anything proactively. Despite all of the times Chef had lectured me on the need for patience; it wasn’t one of the things I excelled at.

So it was driving me crazy, having to study, go to class, practice with Chef, and basically just live my life, hanging in limbo. Kat tried her best to keep my mind off it by making me study algebra every night after I finished at the Blue Ridge, which I didn’t love but did appreciate at least the thought behind it.

Hanna finally helped pull my head out of my ass on Thursday.

“Either you stop moping or you walk from now on,” she said as we were on the way to school. “I get it, the video’s a big deal, but you sent it to your lawyer. He’ll do what he has to do. You can’t keep being an ass because you’re impatient.”

“I just want him to email me back and tell me ‘this’ll get the case dismissed,’ so I know and can get on with my life.”

“When he can, he will. Chef said he was good, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Then have some faith. We both knew this was the game changer when Kat showed us, so you know the case is going to get dismissed. So what does it matter if he emails you to tell you? You’re not a little kid who needs his hand held through every little thing. This kind of stuff takes time, so just accept it’ll eventually get cleared up and move on. Or walk, it’s your call.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll stop being an ass.”

She was right, of course. I’d even told myself the same thing, but maybe I just needed someone to hit me upside the head and force me to listen.

“On a side note, Kat drove today cause she’s going to take you to the Blue Ridge. I have to go home right after school.”