I was still going on autopilot for my side of the conversation, so I didn’t even realize I’d asked him a question until he answered it.

JackOfDiamonds: Because you’re you and I’m me.

That sounded vaguely like an insult.

JackOfDiamonds: And you deserve better.

Now this was a side of Jack I’d never seen before. Smirky confidence? Sure. Subtle self-loathing? That was new.

TaeKleinDo: Most people would say you’re the one who deserves better.

Including, I thought, about a dozen JV cheerleaders I can think of.

JackOfDiamonds: Most people are idiots.

I totally couldn’t argue with that sentiment. And he knew it.

“Mrs. Hanson?” A high-pitched voice next to me broke me from my thoughts. “Can you come help me with the thingamajig?”

I quickly straightened my screen and minimized the chat window. By the time our computer science teacher was standing behind us, I appeared for all intents and purposes to be diligently working on my web page, which, unlike Jack’s, wasn’t so much a tribute to classic rock as it was a page dedicated to encouraging Bayport High spirit.

Can I tell you how much that wasn’t my idea?

“Kiki, what seems to be the problem?”

The girl next to me frowned, and I recognized her as Hayley’s poor excuse for a minion from lunch.

“I can’t get this centered,” she said, pointing to a piece of text on her screen. “And it’s not big enough.”

Considering the fact that we had a handout with the HTML codes for font size and centering on it, Kiki’s statement went a long way to explaining how it was that she’d come to be following Hayley Hoffman’s lead. Obviously, she wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. Or, to put it in cheer terms, the puffiest pom in the JV set.

I waited for Mrs. Hanson to answer the question and marveled at her patience. Five minutes later, she was gone, and I went back to my attempts to hack Jack’s IM.

JackOfDiamonds: Miss me?

I looked at him out of the side of my eyes, but if Jack noticed, he didn’t give any visible reaction.

JackOfDiamonds: Check your email.

I’d just about concluded that Jack was the one person in this entire school who used a random assortment of numbers and letters for his password when I registered the content of his last IM. My email? Why did he want me to check my email?

Somewhat warily, I entered the URL of my Bayport High email account, half expecting some kind of elaborate, sardonic Jack Peyton gesture, but instead, I discovered that I had five new emails, all of which were from Noah.

Beside me, Jack snickered.

I opened up the first email and found a picture of the world’s most adorable puppy wearing a sign around his neck that said VOTE FOR TOBY. SHE LOVES PUPPIES. As best I could tell from the “to” section of the email, Noah had sent this delightful piece of Toby promotion to the entire student body.

Dreading what would pop up next, I hit the next button and waited to see just how badly my brother wanted to die.

Email number two had a kitten. I didn’t get past email number three, which was a public service announcement from the Toby Saved Our Lives Club. If my brother was looking for a way to make me regret ever having defended him and his equally goofy buddies from jock-wielded violence, he’d found it.

I trashed emails four and five before reading them. I could only hope that Noah’s efforts would annoy the rest of the student body as much as they annoyed me. The way I figured it, the Irony Gods owed me that much.

“Mrs. Hanson? I need help with the—”

I cut Kiki off before she could get the rest of the request out of her mouth. “I’ll help her.” The last thing I needed was our teacher standing two feet away while I figured out a way to disable Noah’s Bayport High email account—an action which was now a much higher priority than hacking into Jack’s IM. In any case, whatever I was going to be doing on this computer, chances were it was the kind of thing the administration tended to frown upon, and I didn’t need a member of the faculty staring over my shoulder.

I turned my chair to the side and leaned over to Kiki. “What do you need?” I asked, my voice completely flat.

She gave me a tentative smile. “I like think this would look better in purple, but when I tried the thingy…”

“HTML code,” I corrected.

“Yeah, that. Anyway…”

“You want it to be purple?” I asked, commandeering her keyboard and fixing the code. “What else?”

“Can you show me how to put in a picture?”

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her that pictures were just too hard for me to manage, but the desire to wreak internet havoc on Noah (and an equal desire to get back to my not-quite-a-conversation with Jack) kept me in check. “Sure,” I said. “Where’s the picture?”

She held up her phone.

Fifteen minutes later, I’d transferred the pictures from Kiki’s phone to her computer, and showed her how to upload them to a photo-hosting site. She blinked several times, as if she couldn’t quite believe the miracle before her.

“Which one do you want on the site?” I asked.

“That one.” She pointed, rather than identifying the picture by its number. “See, the site is for this mother-daughter book club, and that’s me and my—”

“Whatever.” I cut her off, but as I captured the URL for the picture in question, I realized that Kiki’s mother looked very, very familiar in a president of the PTA kind of way.

“There,” I said. “Done.”

“Wow,” Kiki said. “You’re really good at that.” She paused, and I flinched, preparing myself for some gratuitous hugging. Instead, Kiki looked down at her hands. “You…ummm…you won’t tell Hayley you helped me, will you?”

Some thanks. I practically built her entire web page for her, and she was afraid that her new BFF would find out that she’d talked to me. Then again, I vastly preferred her course of action to her mother’s reaction to everything, which was to go all touchy-feely and start talking about what a precious time this was in my life. I was, to say the least, grateful that such actions weren’t hereditary.

“Ummm…Toby?”

I narrowed my eyes at her. “Hayley and I aren’t really on speaking terms. Your secret is safe with me.”

“Cool.” She paused another beat. “So you know what you were saying at lunch about the tumbling requirements for varsity?”

I was officially never helping anyone ever again. I kept my brother from being beaten up, and he dedicated his life to torturing me. I helped a JV cheerleader build a mother-daughter book club website, and she took that as an invitation to grill me about her chances of making varsity. I kissed Jack, and he had the gall to come up with a password I couldn’t figure out on my own.

Okay, maybe that last one was stretching it just a bit.

“Toby?” Kiki prodded. “About the—”

“Hey Keeks,” Jack cut her off, leaning back in his chair to get a better view of the girl in question.

Kiki got really obviously flustered at the attention. Unlike most cheerleaders I’d met, concealing her emotions really wasn’t her strong suit.

“Yes?” she squeaked. Despite her squeaking, she made a masterful attempt at batting her eyelashes at my homecoming date.

“I like your sweater.”

Jack’s compliment left Kiki speechless. Five seconds later, a new message popped up on my IM.

JackOfDiamonds: You’re welcome.

Apparently, I was supposed to thank him for flirting with another girl. Then again, I thought as I logged into my brother’s email account and began messing around with his settings, aforementioned flirtation had distracted Kiki from talking to me, which just confirmed my suspicion that Jack Peyton was the kind of guy who always knew exactly what to give a girl. Some girls liked diamonds. Some girls liked pearls. I liked having someone running interference between the rest of the student body and me.

And, as much as I really, truly, deeply hated to admit it, I liked Jack.

TaeKleinDo: Shut up.

JackOfDiamonds: Yeah, Ev. Love you, too.

When the bell rang a moment later, I wasn’t sure whether I was thankful or disappointed. In fact, the only thing I knew for certain was that I’d wreaked enough havoc on Noah’s email account that he wouldn’t be sending out messages of any kind for a very, very long time.