Page 134 of The Confidant
All those times I’d noticed him on his phone and thought he had a secret Internet girlfriend, I should have realized he was typing way too many words for it to be a believable text thread with a flirty girl—I was pretty sure those types of messages involved way more photos versus big walls of text.
And when he’d helped me with most of those emails forDear Elizaafter the state basketball tournament, he’d taken everything to the next level. Several students had even commented a few times about howDear Elizawas going to giveThe Confidanta run for her money if she kept things up.
I shook my head. “You probably had a good laugh to yourself every time I talked aboutThe Confidantand my guesses for who she—” I shook my head. “I mean, whohecould be.”
“It was quite entertaining to see you making those lists of suspects.” He laughed.
“You dork.” I shoved his shoulder. Then I gasped when something else occurred to me. “I bet you loved it when I emailed you for advice about how to fix things with my best friend. Because you had to know it was me.”
“I did hope it was you,” he said, more seriously this time. “But only because I wanted to fix things with you so badly myself.”
“And yet you didn’t respond to my second email.”
“I really thought I did.” He held his hands up defensively. “But I must have forgotten to press send or something when you walked in the library and almost caught me emailing you back.”
“That’s two emails from me that you didn’t respond to.” I tsked and pretended to be disappointed. “It’s almost likeDear Elizareally is better thanThe Confidant.” I narrowed my gaze and gave him a wicked grin.
He rolled his eyes. “Since they’re basically the same person right now.”
“Yeah…I guess you’re right.” I shrugged. “No wonder you missed a few emails. Keeping up two secret identities must be hard.”
“I might be looking forward to retiring fromDear Elizawhen the school year ends, just a little.”
“We can probably just shut that column down,” I said, feeling guilty for having him keep up with something that I started. “We could just make a note in the next issue about howDear Elizahas had a good run, butThe Confidantreally is the queen of advice and that they should just look there.”
“Queenof advice?”
“We have to keep the mystery going somehow, right?” I said. “CallingThe Confidanta king would just make it obvious that it’s you, since you’re the only guy in the whole school who could believably be him.”
“And yet you never figured it out.” He smirked. “I think I may need to report that oversight to the valedictorian committee.”
“Did you really just go there?” My mouth dropped open.
“I totally did.” He chuckled. “Though, Carter and Elyse didn’t figure it out either, so I guess you might still deserve it.”
“I’ve worked my butt off for those grades, so I’m pretty sure I do.”
“Fine, you’ve still got my vote.”
A slow breeze blew a few blossoms from the trees, and I watched them float through the air until they fell to the ground.
But then a new question came to mind, so I turned back to Hunter and said, “So you’re, like, making a lot of money asThe Confidant, aren’t you?”
He seemed to debate on whether to answer my question. With a shrug, he said, “I do okay.”
He did okay? “Which means…?” I raised my eyebrows, waiting for him to expound.
“Let me just preface it by saying that I only reached this income level out of pure desperation. My parents were going to cut me off after high school, and since I didn’t want to live on the streets of New York, I had to get scrappy.”
“You know I wouldn’t have let that happen.”
He raised an eyebrow, unconvinced.
“Okay, so I might not have reacted well when I found out what was going on with you and all the church stuff,” I said. “But…if you were starving and living on the streets this summer, I would have invited you to the soup kitchen and made sure you were fed.”
“The soup kitchen?” His eyes widened. “But not your actual house?”
“They serve pretty good food there,” I said. “And I really don’t know how to cook, so it’s probably a safer bet than anything I could whip up on my own…”
