the Secret Life of Damien Carmichael

12. Tyler's Discovery (part I)

Something was going on between Damien and Oliver, Tyler was sure of it, and he was going to prove it if it was the last thing he did. Carrie would prove an invaluable resource unbeknownst to her, he realized. Carrie knew everything about Damien and Oliver, and she would be the key to their undoing.

The girl's locker room was largely empty by the time he arrived during what should have been his third-period class. There were only a few teachers straggling in the office that overlooked the locker room at large. Not that it would matter, Carrie's locker was tucked away on the far side of the girl's locker room, far beyond the prying eyes of the teachers. She had mentioned once that, had she wanted to make out with her then-girlfriend in the locker rooms, no one would have been any the wiser. Not that she would, she wasn't nearly clever enough, Tyler thought.

Slipping in through the double doors without much effort, Tyler tiptoed towards the back row of lockers, through the blind spot of the gym teachers' office and made his way towards the backmost row of lockers. They were painted a depressing shade of tan that desperately needed a new coat of paint and were stacked in several rows of twenty-four, with twelve on top and twelve on bottom, he had ascertained from careful attention that Carrie's was one of the furthest from the rest, as well as being on the bottom, as she had mentioned on several occasions, having to bend down to unlock her locker or otherwise kneel down entirely. Given this approximation, Tyler knew he could rule out all but two of the lockers. He stared briefly at the lockers in question, deciding to chose the very last one closest to the wall that sat in the corner.

Obtaining her locker combination had been considerably trickier and had required a fair amount of cunning on Tyler's part. Fortunately for him, most of the faculty believed him to be, if a little loud, generally harmless and therefore trustworthy. He had managed to convince a member of the staff working in Administrative Services to look up her locker combination.

"It's just that my sister asked me if I could grab her phone out of her locker, it's kind of an emergency and it can't wait," he had said, frantically, managing to look worried and innocent. The woman behind the desk who looked, barely older than Tyler himself, nodded and began typing several things into the computer. In a matter of moments, Tyler had her locker combination and had been on his way. Officially the lockers weren't numbered or assigned, students simply picked their locker at the beginning of the year and tended to stick with it. They were supposed to, in theory, report those numbers to their teachers who would in turn report those numbers to the administrative office should random locker searches ever be required, but few teachers actually bothered to collect such information, and even fewer students willingly gave it.

Tyler leaned down turning the lock by hand, 21, 19, 7, he smirked, pulling open her locker and extracted Carrie's phone from her backpack that had been stuffed haphazardly into it. Shaking his head Tyler slipped the phone into his pocket and stuffed her backpack back where he had found it, half closing her locker door, making sure to leave the lock undone. Turning on his heel, he snuck back out of the girl's locker room, unnoticed, and across the grassy field, towards the Castle and the class he'd skipped to get there.

Getting Carrie's phone had been the easy part, figuring out her passcode had been decidedly more difficult. He could, in theory, ask their parents the code to his sister's phone, claiming to be concerned for Carrie's safety, though no doubt their parents would text Carrie, worried themselves rather than taking Tyler's word at face value. Pulling the phone out of his back pocket, Tyler pressed the home button in search of information. The only thing he had managed to ascertain however was that the code was a series of six digits, and according to the manufacturer's website, this particular combination meant that there were no less than a million different possibilities.