Text From the Future: Dump Your Girlfriend novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: The Red Envelope

The airport video had forty thousand views by Wednesday.

Somebody had cut it down to thirty seconds and put a caption on it: "Boyfriend plays the receipts at the departures gate."

My mother found it on her phone while she was making eggs.

She watched it twice with the spatula in her hand.

Then she put the phone face down on the counter and turned the burner off.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"I didn't want you to hear her side first."

She crossed the kitchen and held my face in both hands, hard, for a long time.

"Chelsea's mother has called me twice," she said. "I didn't pick up."

"Good."

"I'm going to keep not picking up."

My father came in from the garage in his freight company jacket, read the caption over her shoulder, and said, "So that's what the shouting on Pruitt Street was."

He poured himself coffee.

"Kingswell, then?"

"Kingswell," I said.

"Good," he said, and went back out.

That was the whole family discussion, and it was the best one I'd ever had.

The enrollment deposit was due Friday.

That morning I sat at my desk with the red envelope in front of me and the portal open on my laptop.

I'd had the envelope for three weeks and hidden it in a physics textbook.

Now it lay on the desk in the open, the Kingswell crest facing up.

I typed in my card number.

My thumb was above the button when the doorbell rang.

Mom's voice came up the stairs. "Malcolm. It's Toby."

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