“Wait,” he said. “You have Aizel with you, right?”

She held open her bag. Aizel rested on a sweater of some kind. “Of course.”

They walked into the park together and sat down on a patch of barely grass near a cluster of skinny trees with white bark.

Eden put the device on the ground in front of her, then picked it up and pulled a hoodie out of her bag and put it back down on that instead. She said, “You want to show Eli your new trick?”

The device spoke—“Hello, Eli”—using a woman’s voice.

Eli tilted his head, swallowed.

In a male voice, it said, “Eden, you told me we were going to see Marwan, not Eli.”

She said, “Change of plans.”

The device didn’t respond. Eden took a photo of a nearby goat sculpture made of wire. Posted it somewhere. Put her phone in her bag. Took it out again. Eli checked his phone only because she did.

“Why were you going to see Marwan?” he asked.

“Just to check in, I guess,” she said. “I thought he should know about what the device told Ilanka and all. But then I decided I shouldn’t bother him at work.”

Eli knew there was something more to it than that. They liked each other, those two. He was pretty sure of it. Whatever. None of his business. Though it was a little annoying that neither of the girls involved in this whole thing were girls Eli was especially interested in that way.

Eli said, “I think maybe somebody at school had something to do with the egging at the restaurant.”

Eden tilted her head. “Really? Who?”

“I don’t want to name names if I’m wrong.”

“I won’t tell anyone,” she said. “I mean, if you’re wrong.”

“But what if you’re, like, friends with him?”

“I’m not friends with anyone who would do something like that,” she said.

“That guy Christos?”

“Don’t know him.”

“How do we even go to the same school?” he said.

“It’s a big school,” she said. “I saw some graffiti today over on Thirty-First Ave that supposedly just popped up somehow in the middle of the day. Bad.”

“Bad how?”

“White supremacist stuff.”

Eli shook his head. “What is going on in the world?”