Page 16 of My Rules for Revenge
“What do you want us to do? Do we go to the principal?” Manny asked.
“We can get proof that she assaulted me, but the worst he’ll do is suspend her for a week. She’s an honor student and the president of that stupid-ass club. I want to be the one to get back at her—hard. We tell him nothing. She rejected me like I was some piece of moldy garbage and humiliated me when I was just trying to put myself out there. This is personal.”
“What do you want to do?” Manny asked.
“Something horrible,” I replied.
“I have an idea. Do you guys remember how I had most of the basketball team for P.E. last year?” Carlos asked.
Manny and I nodded.
“Well, they would always talk about how the girls they ‘talked’ to had nudes on their phones. Sometimes they would straight up send them. Other times, they would convince these girls to show them their pics at games or at parties. Frank Jackson used to talk about it all the time. He has hundreds of nudes. He’s that junior who’s going to play professionally.”
“I like where this is going, Carlos.”
“I’m willing to bet your two-thousand-dollar gaming PC that this girl has nudes on her phone. We just have to find a way to get them, and after that, the possibilities are endless,” Carlos said with certainty.
“What about getting them through the Cloud? We can get them from there. I think. People have done it before,” I suggested.
“I can do it,” Manny volunteered.
Carlos slapped his forehead.
“Duh! We have the best hacker in the county right here.”
“I can do it, but I don’t think it’s a good idea. We could get in serious legal trouble,” Manny expressed.
“Yeah, but can’t you just do what you always do? You hide your footprints,” I pointed out.
Manny sighed and rubbed his hair.
“I can find her email address using the school’s database with my admin privileges. If she uses the same one for her smartphone ID, I can get in. I would have to accumulate all the saved passwords she has on the browsers she uses on school computers. I could also secretly install monitor spy software or a key-logger…”
Manny grew quiet and began whispering to himself. We looked at him like he was a madman. Which he was. The price of brilliance, remember? After a couple of minutes, he stopped and looked me in the eye.
“Are you one hundred percent certain this is the course of action you wish to take against this girl? Once we do this, there’s no going back. Consider this a nuclear launch code. If we press the button, that’s it,” Manny warned.
I didn’t hesitate.
“Let’s do it.”
CHAPTER 4
INDIRA - 1 YEAR EARLIER
When I first enrolled at Brightwood High, I was afraid of the change.
I had transferred high schools because of the distance. My mother wasn’t able to drive me to my previous private school anymore, and we were no longer able to afford it anyway.
I didn’t have friends at my previous school, and I didn’t know how to talk to people very well. I usually kept quiet and focused on my studies.
I quickly started to hate my English class. When I first entered, everyone stared at me like I was a mutant or something. I felt so out of place. I kept my head down and rushed to the back of the class, where a few jocks sat. They wore varsity polo shirts and didn’t take any notes in class—they were definitely jocks.
I sat next to one who was quite tall and muscular. He was sitting down, but his legs barely fit underneath his desk. Helooked like a giant trying to sit on a tiny chair. He had a buzz cut and wore a bright purple windbreaker embedded with the Brightwood Bears logo.
When he finished snickering with his teammates, he turned his attention to me. I tried my best to ignore him, but his piercing eyes were fixed on me. It felt like he was trying to look inside me. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to intimidate me or if he was curious about me.
“Hey, I’m Frank, but my friends call meFrankie. You’re new?” Frankie asked.
