Chapter 5: From Memory

"No," I said.

"That's what a thief would say."

A girl with purple braids at the back desk snorted.

A guy in a Bellgrave Rowing shirt stopped typing.

My face was burning. I made myself keep looking at Malik.

"Who sent it?"

"No name." He turned the paper over. "Westmere student address. Somebody cared enough to find out where you'd be and who runs this lab."

"Her name is Kayleigh Danvers."

"Doesn't matter who. Matters if it's true."

He tossed the email onto the nearest desk.

"We've got eight weeks until the Keystone Cup qualifier. I don't have time to babysit somebody who's going to walk out with our designs."

"I'm not."

"Prove it."

"How?"

He pulled up a website on the big monitor.

The Shelfswap homepage.

Somebody had put it together fast. The stiff owl from the news was back. The colors were muddy. The buttons didn't line up.

"The email says you claim you designed this," Malik said. "So design it."

"Right now?"

"You got somewhere to be?"

He pointed at the whiteboard.

I picked up a marker.

My hand was shaking so badly the first line wobbled.

I erased it with my palm.

Then I stopped thinking about the room.

I drew the home screen the way I'd drawn it the first time, at Rosetti's, on the back of a paper placemat.

The search bar across the top, shaped like a bookshelf.

Three cards below it, each one a textbook with a price and a little arrow.

The swap button at the bottom, round and fat so a tired thumb could hit it.

And Dewey in the corner, one wing up, the tuft of feathers sticking out on the left.

Then I fixed what they'd broken.

I moved the price above the title, because nobody cares about the title.