While We're Young by K. L. Walther

Author:K. L. Walther [Walther, K. L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2025-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

I gave it twenty minutes. Twenty minutes, long enough for Unger to walk out to her reserved parking spot, unlock and climb into her obnoxious Escalade, start its engine, queue up whatever travesty her Spotify playlist was, only to then remember that she forgot something in her office. Twenty minutes, long enough to return to the office, grab whatever she’d forgotten, and give an encore farewell to her colleagues before she made her exit again and got into her already running car, pressed play on her music, and drove off.

Twenty minutes, yeah.

Mrs. Flamporis laughed when I made my fourth visit. Class was very much in session, but she didn’t ask why I wasn’t in mine. “James!” She put down her nail polish. “Come on, pretty soon you’ll be calling this office home!”

“Funny you should say that,” I said, and gestured to Principal Unger’s office. “I actually left my sweatshirt in Principal Unger’s HQ, and was wondering if I could grab it?”

“Of course,” Mrs. Flamporis said, blowing on her red nails. Hopefully it was only her first coat. I needed all the time I could get. “Go right ahead. I’ve always said the air-conditioning here is too much…”

Luckily, the rest of the outer office was empty. Mr. Cowan was probably in the computer lab, dealing with yet another IT issue, while Vice Principal Navani was out doing whatever it was vice principals did. Evaluating gym classes? I wondered. Any excuse to flirt with Mr. Murphy?

I glanced back to make sure Mrs. Flamporis had refocused on her nails.

Affirmative.

So I silently slipped into Unger’s office. I didn’t flip on the lights or anything, instead dropping to my knees and sneaking over to the filing cabinet. The bottom drawer was locked; Unger had probably given VP Navani the key to return students’ phones after school, but that didn’t deter me. I didn’t need a proper key. One of Grace’s bobby pins would do just as well.

A, B, C, D, E, F, G…, I hummed to myself as I fiddled with the pin, my fingers fumbling only a bit. The lock clicked and popped off when I’d hit X.

X marked the spot.

I pulled open the drawer to find a buzzing, beeping, chiming, and vibrating stash of iPhones and Androids. How could Unger think with this noise? Each phone had been labeled with a Post-it Note, students’ names written in villainous cursive.

“Fucking brilliant.” I sighed. It wasn’t that I disliked cursive handwriting; it was that I disliked Unger’s cursive. It was the kind of cursive you had to squint at for a good three seconds in order to decode it.

I quickly started sorting through phones:

Leah Brennan.

Connor McCallister.

Alayna Howard.

Jacob Bluestein.

Madeline Fisher-Michaels.

And then:

That Little Twerp!

“Twerp?” I muttered, rolling my eyes and ripping off the pink piece of paper before shutting the filing cabinet and relocking the drawer. “What decade are we in, Principal?”

I stuffed the pink note in my jeans’ pocket but couldn’t resist quickly checking my phone. Find My Friends, I thought, because finally—finally—I could use the app to find out Grace’s location.

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