Dylan struggled in the trap of his age. He didn’t have to give her the phone. But he wasn’t all the way out of the reach of authority. Not just yet. Everyone in the room knew it. He glanced out the window as if he were hoping to see a meteor on its way through the glass. No one said a thing, and now even the front of the line and the cashier and the girl with the headset and nose ring were all watching. The couple at the table had forgotten their argument.

Carly trembled with the thrill of it and also with some stupid measure of guilt at his agony.

The woman fluttered her fingers and snapped her palm flat again. Dylan rolled his eyes and scoffed in the back of his throat, but he gave up the phone.

She turned it over, lit it awake, and handed it back. “Unlock it.”

“C’mon. I’m sor—”

“No, no, no. Don’t do that. It’s not time to be sorry yet. Unlock it.”

Carly could see only half of Dylan’s expression and none of the woman’s, but whatever he read there made him clench his jaw and jab at the screen. He slapped the phone back into her hand and wheeled away as if he would walk back to his group, who had already pulled an extra step of distance from him.

“Wait,” she commanded.

He did.

She circled around so that they were facing each other again, never taking her eyes from the phone, slow steps, bootheels thocking on the tiles. She ticked a glance at his face to make sure he was watching her. He was. Carly could see her a little better, too. The woman launched the video he’d just taken and turned up the volume. C’mon, Carly, do something awe-some.

Carly’s mouth twitched in the fight against crying. Dylan rolled his eyes again.

The woman tapped the screen. “Okay, well, that’s gone.”

Dylan put his hand out for his phone.

She shook her head. “Not just yet.”

The woman scrolled through his pictures, all her reaction playing out in her rising left eyebrow.

Dylan shrank with every flick of her finger across the screen, going paler until his freckles and two panicked spills of red across his cheeks were all the color left in him.

“Oh. I see. Wow.” She looked up. Calm, Carly saw, and a little rage rippling under it. “Really, Dylan? Do you think we should show this to, I don’t know, your parents? Their parents, maybe?” She studied his photo gallery again. The last passes of her fingers were in a tight-lipped hurry. She looked up and sighed. “You have a real problem, Dylan. Do you know that?”