Between the Lines✔ [COMPLETED]

[37] It's Not Your Fault.

Malory

"Did you find anything yet?" I ask, though Kyle is too busy staring at his computer screen and clicking away at his mouse in a hurry to answer me. 

"Nope, how many flash drives have we already been through?" he inquires.

I rub my eyes. "Five, out of nine." I pause from my own search, because it's quite an inconvenience to me seeing as I can't exactly help this process in any way. Anyone who Kyle may see as suspicious or dangerous could be on any one of these flash drives, and they would all be complete strangers to me. I'd just pass their names and say I don't know them. Still, in the period within which Kyle and I have just searched those five flash drives, we were able to co operate through me just calling out the names of those on the two flash drives I plugged into my computer to check. Kyle would say whether or not they matter, and I could click out of their profile and on to the next one. 

We've had no success in finding the inside eye at our school yet.

"Kyle, I was thinking," I say, "It's Tuesday. We split our time up yesterday and checked some of those drives yesterday and spent the next half practicing. Maybe we should just forget about practice altogether this week. It's not like we can't keep up... and we'll get this done much quicker."

"Whatever works better," he says, shrugging.

There's nothing else on the flash drive that I'm just about done with, so I toss it aside and move to the next one. 

It has a silver body and a green cover.

"Moving on to the next one," I tell him. He hums in approval.

When I open it, I see a list of files like on any of the other flash drives, so I begin reading it in my head and recording the names.

There's a Belfont, a Beaunie, a Beetie, a Califa, and a Davidso-

A Davidson.

Kyle Davidson. 

Part of me wants to open the file and discover what's inside.

Part of me doesn't want to know.

I want to trust Kyle, and from where we started to where we are, there's been such a big improvement. Would it be right to open a file, see all he's done and change my opinion of him again? Past demons always come back to try to haunt us, don't they? Kyle wouldn't want me to know those things. He's not proud of them, himself. And what if what I see makes me turn on him? What happens to me then? Should I just tell him that it's got his name?

"Kyle," I say, "I'm calling the names, okay?"

He nods, still scrolling down as he reads the information from the profile on his laptop.

"First one; Daemon Belfont."

"Naw, he's out," Kyle says.

"Hyde Beaunie?"
"Harmless, I think he's in Rome or something."

I call out the entire list, objectively leaving out his name, not believing I'd get caught.

"What's the last name?" Kyle asks me, after a minute of silence. 

"Last?" I ask.

He figured it out.

"There are ten names of every flash drive," Kyle says, "Aren't there? You only called nine."

"You were mentally counting that?" I ask, turning to my computer screen. 

"Is there not a tenth name?" he asks, raising a brow. "If there's not, then that could mean that this is the most recent drive he's used. He hasn't filled it yet."