This was the first time I’d ever shared this secret with anyone. (Ainsley didn’t count, because she’d followed the whole saga in real time.) As much as I wasn’t exactly Brougham’s biggest fan, it was actually nice to be able to spill it all to someone. Two and a half years was a long time to keep a secret. “I started it at the beginning of ninth grade. I had all this relationship knowledge, but no one to apply it to.” Honestly, I didn’t know if I wanted the rush of being able to help people, or simply to experiment on others to see if these theories had any basis in reality. Maybe it was a bit of both. “And when you’re around the offices after hours as much as I am, it’s not as hard to find … certain information as you’d think, so I happened to find which of the lockers was unassigned, and its combination. Our school still uses hard-copy records for that stuff, go figure, so it was easy enough to just remove number eighty-nine from the assignment sheet. Then one afternoon while I was waiting for my mom, I made some flyers and stuck them in random lockers, saying if they wanted free relationship advice, they could put an anonymous letter into locker eighty-nine with an email address.”

“And people did it?” Brougham asked.

“One person did it. And I guess my advice worked, because they told some friends the flyer was legit, and it snowballed. Later in the year, someone dropped a tip in the locker with a thank-you note, and it occurred to me half the kids at our school were millionaires. Or their parents were, anyway. So I gave people a few weeks’ warning that advice wouldn’t be free anymore by putting it at the bottom of every email. And the whisper network did the rest for me. I started out charging five, now I charge ten. I could probably do even more, but I don’t want business to drop.”

Brougham watched me intensely, not reacting, but not breaking eye contact, either. For the first time, I understood why Ainsley found him attractive. That stare made me feel like I was telling the most interesting story in the world. “But why anonymously?” he asked. “Why don’t you just do what we’re doing with everyone? People would pay.”