Chapter 25 And with the last word, Faye

When Faye flipped over her phone, she found she'd been sent the link to the video by a classmate, Frankie, she of the study group, who knew Faye worked at the library.

"Faye!" the message read. "Don't you work at this library? Do you know this fool?"

After she'd declined Frankie's study group invitation, the girl had continued to say hello in class, continued to invite her to things, sometimes even G-chatted her in the middle of class with jokes that were only funny if you were deeply rooted in the study of physics.

Before hitting play on the video, she sat for a time with Frankie's message. She typed and deleted, then typed and deleted, then finally retyped, "It's a crazy story if you want to hear it. Lunch?" Then she hit send before she could think about it for even another second.

The link in Frankie's text wasn't to Kip's original post; that wasn't the one that had thousands of views. It was a repost by someone whose name she didn't recognize that added a skull-and-crossbones emoji and a succinct explanation of the problem with Paris-green books in a split screen with Kip's original.

Faye didn't need the background information, though, and neither did Davey when they got around to watching the clip together, so they focused their attention on Kip. In his video, he was wearing the shirt from that very night, the one that was stiff with dried blood now. He stood, smiling gleefully against a background of brilliant green books. It did make for a handsome setting for an online post. When Faye squinted, she could see that the volume she'd worked on the afternoon before was still on the shelf. He'd snuck into the basement in the early morning and filmed himself before she'd come in. He turned his back to the camera briefly and retrieved a Paris-green copy of Little Women from the shelf. Then he moved to a side profile and ran his thick, wet tongue across the cover before smiling into the camera and saying, "I hate America. I hate Americans. That's disgusting."