And even though I know he’s only doing it for profit, for his own interests, the words tumble from my lips anyway: “Thank you...for doing all of this. Really. It—it’s even better than I imagined.”
Maybe it’s just a trick of the light, but I swear I see his ears turn pink.
“I’m glad,” he says quietly, holding my gaze for what seems like a second too long.
I clear my throat and look away, feeling strangely self-conscious all of a sudden. “Right. Anyway, um. What do we do next?”
He responds by pulling another shiny new iPhone out from his pocket. “No one at our school knows this number,” he explains, misreading my expression.
“You have two phones?”
“Three, actually,” he says, his voice matter-of-fact. “One for work, one for personal contacts, and one for myself.”
Whatever rush of gratitude I felt toward him just now immediately evaporates. My fingers curl into fists at my sides. I learned not long after I first came to Airington that comparing myself to people like Henry will only make me miserable, but I still can’t help thinking about the battered phone in my own pocket, how Mama had to work overtime during the Spring Festival just to save enough money to buy it.
“All we need now is to get the word out about the app,” Henry’s saying, opening up a few different social media apps with impressive speed: WeChat for the local kids, Facebook Messenger for ABCs, WhatsApp for Malaysians, Kakao for Koreans.
“They’re not going to believe you if you just say there’s someone who can turn invisible,” I point out. “Especially if you’re messaging them from an anonymous number.”
“No,” he agrees. “Which is why I’m leaving that part out completely. All that matters to them is what the app can help them do, not how it’s done.”
Even though all of this is more or less my idea, now that it’s really happening, I can’t fight back the slow creep of doubt. What if everyone dismisses the app as a joke? What if they report it to the teacher? Or what if—
“Don’t worry,” Henry says without even glancing up, as if he can read my mind.
“I’m not worried,” I grumble. I realize I’ve wrung my fingers into knots, and quickly force them to still at my sides. “How long do you think it’ll take?”
He finishes typing out one last message on Kakao, then reaches for his other phone again. “Give it a minute.”
I try to mimic his calm, his patience, start counting to sixty seconds in my head. I fight to keep my expression neutral, casual, to make it look like we’re only going over some particularly difficult homework questions together. Anything to ward off suspicions from passing students when this thing works.
If this works.
It’s true that news has a way of getting around in a school like ours, but could it really be that easy? That fast?
I only get to forty-five seconds when Henry’s phone buzzes. The blue ghost logo lights up, glowing in quick pulses as if in sync with my rapidly pounding heart. A notification flashes over the screen: One New Message.