“Bien sûr,” Max says, winking at him. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him wink before. He’s trying to lighten the bleak mood that’s overtaken us, and as crestfallen as I am, I appreciate the gesture.
I can’t help but wonder where he’s taking us as we load into the car and drive away from the manor. Felix is chattering away in the backseat, trying to make small talk. It’s obvious that he’s kind of a lonely guy. I get the feeling he’s not used to having people around. I wonder what he does to pass the time these days, now that he’s not working at the school anymore. I turn around in the front passenger seat to face him.
“Felix, what do you do nowadays? I mean, where do you work?” I ask. He blinks at me in complete surprise, then warms to the subject immediately. Next to me in the driver’s seat Max is smiling, clearly pleased that I’m trying to make a connection with his friend. Felix may be weird and more than a little bit obnoxious, but I can tell he’s got a good heart.
“Oh, mostly work-from-home hacker stuff. People hire me to… investigate things. Look into their cheating spouse’s finances, check up on international business transactions, you know. Sensitive stuff, but nothing too top-secret,” he explains, trying to be nonchalant.
“That’s impressive,” I remark. “You’re pretty much a private investigator.”
The faintest blush colors his cheeks. “Yeah, basically. Gotta make a living somehow. Paris is not a cheap city to live in.”
“You wouldn’t change it for the world, though, would you?” I comment. Felix shakes his head incredulously.
“Saperlotte, no! This is the best city on the planet. Even if they raised my rent every single month, I would find a way to stay here,” Felix replies passionately. “I never belonged back in that boring little town where I grew up. This is my home.”
“And I guess now it’s mine, too,” I murmur, turning back around in my seat.
Max shoots me a slightly concerned glance at my shift in tone. I should know better than to try and hide anything from him. He picks up on my homesickness, the twinge of sorrow in my voice. I do love Paris — it’s beautiful and historic, it feels like living in a fairy-tale setting. But it’s still a foreign place to me. The streets don’t feel welcoming and familiar like they do back home in the tiny, quiet town of Toast.
It probably hurt my first impression to be kidnapped my first night here.
“To be fair, you haven’t really gotten the best impression of Paris so far,” Felix comments, reading my thoughts. It’s true. So far, I’ve been drugged, kidnapped, threatened, and my roommate has been stolen to who knows where. My whole life has been turned upside down.
“I hope my parents are okay. I-I’m scared that they’re worried about me,” I say quietly.
Max reaches across the console to take my hand. “Don’t be afraid. I’ve taken care of that,” he says, a little mysteriously.
“What do you mean?” I ask, confused.
Felix pipes up, “Can I tell her?”
Max sighs and nods. “Go ahead.”
“So, we knew your parents would want to hear from you so they wouldn’t freak out and think something was wrong—”
“Because they would be right to think that,” I interject.
“Yeah,” Felix agrees, a little sheepishly. “So, basically, Max had me break into your phone to access your texts. I ran your outgoing messages through a style-simulation software I built and it basically learned how to emulate your way of speaking. Via text, of course.”
“Wait, what?” I stop him, totally bewildered at this point, both by the confusing explanation and the apparent invasion of privacy I had no awareness of until now.
“Okay. Let me break it down for you,” he says, and I choose to ignore the hint of unintentional condescension in his tone. “Everyone has their own way of talking. Everyone sounds a little different. And your parents know you better than anyone, so if I were going to send them messages, I needed them to sound totally convincing. So what I did was take a sample of the texts you sent in the past, run them through my style-copy program on my computer, and it learned how to essentially mimic you. So I’ve been texting your parents en secret, keeping them updated on how things would be going at school… if you were actually going.”
I sit in silence for a long moment, trying to work through how I should feel about this revelation. On the one hand, I’m a little miffed and offended at having my privacy so harshly intruded upon. After all, it kind of crosses a line to have Felix, a near stranger, impersonating me in conversations with my own parents whom he’s never met. But on the other hand, it’s nice to know that my parents have been kept totally out of the loop on this whole messy situation. The last thing I need is for them to worry about me. And knowing how overprotective my father is, he probably would have called the police, Interpol, and the President by now if he had even the slightest inclination to believe I’m in trouble. So really this is for the greater good. Even if it kind of sucks to have it happen this way.