Page 6 of Talk to Me

By the time I got back to the dorm and had laid my dinner out on my desk, the incident in the quad was replaying in my mind. I had planned to read a few chapters to get a head start on a few subjects, but I couldn’t get the scene out of my head. What would possess two people to shout something so rude at a stranger who was minding his business? Granted, squatting by the tree and taking a phone call was a bit weird, but he hadn’t been harming anyone.

Being weird isn’t a sin in and of itself. I don’t think. I haven’t been to church in years. My family isn’t exactly what you’d call religious.

I’d made my way through my fries and half of my burger before I pulled out my phone. Frowning to myself for doing something that was against my nature, I opened the Peepers app Collin had installed on my phone after lunch.

“What was that guy’s name?” I wondered out loud.

The half burger was in my right hand and my phone was in my left, my thumb hovering over the screen. All I could remember from my conversation with Collin was something about two gays from some other university. The guy’s name—or his ex-boyfriend’s name—was simply lost in my brain.

It’s funny, how studious I am, and how well I perform on tests, yet have no skill for retaining information about pop culture. Anything on the subject goes in one ear and out the other. I can watch a movie and not being able to recall the name the next day. Don’t even ask me which actors were in it. Name a famous model? Not on my life. A social media influencer? No clue.

I wracked my brain for what seemed like forever before it occurred to me that I could text Collin for the answer. However, I knew that a response would take hours—if I got one at all. Since he was with his latest love interest, I might not even hear from him until Sunday evening.

Right as I was about to give up, the name came to me.

Theo!

That was it. His last name, the name of his boyfriend, and anything else Collin had told me was lost to time. But I had his first name. It would have to do.

I clicked on the little magnifying glass icon on the screen, assuming it was a search option, and found that I was correct. Typing in “Theo,” I didn’t hold out much hope. However, as soon as I typed in his first name, the search immediately hit gold.

Theo Hendrix. That was the first option. Recognizing this name as the one Collin had given me earlier, I jerked in my seat, pleasantly surprised. Obviously, the guy was popular—or at least renowned—if he was the first result in a search of his first name. Then again, “Theo” wasn’t an incredibly popular name. How many users on Peepers could be called “Theo?”

If it’s for the gays, dozens, I thought to myself with a chuckle.

I clicked on the result and waited a mere second before I was directed to the account for Theo Hendrix. When his profile icon and bio popped up, I recognized him immediately from class. Except he was wearing a cream-colored shirt in his profile picture and his hair was a bit shorter than it was currently.

My eyes scanned the screen of little boxes under his profile data, realizing that each box was a video thumbnail. I quickly realized that each little box had a tag in the bottom right-hand corner of each thumbnail. The text in each tag told the users how long ago it had a been since the video had been uploaded.

2 days.

1 day.

6 weeks.

My eyes danced along the screen, wondering which video to select. It took an embarrassingly long time for me to realize they were in chronological order. My eyes went back to the first video and went straight to the tag.

Ten minutes.

Smiling, I clicked on the video thumbnail. I took a bite from my burger as the video loaded and I was greeted with the smiling face of Theo Hendrix. Obviously taken at nighttime, an orangish glow of a sodium lamp above him, I realized he had been taking a video by the tree. He hadn’t been squatting by the tree to take a phone call, he had been making a video for Peepers.

“Hey, everyone,” he said into the camera, his hair rustling in the light breeze. “Look at this guy.”

The camera spun and I was treated to a view of a squirrel standing on its hind legs in front of him, its back to the tree. It had a piece of bread in its little hands, munching away like a crackhead as Theo filmed it. Obviously, he had met the squirrel and given it something to eat without scaring it away. The squirrel was on screen a few moments longer, its head twisting and turning, assessing the danger level at all times, its mouth constantly gnawing at the bread.

“He’s my first friend I’ve made here at Midway,” Theo said as he turned the camera back to himself. “Maybe my only friend.”

Theo chuckled as he looked into the camera, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. I frowned as I bit into my burger again.

“Maybe if I’m nice, he can introduce me to more—”

The video ended abruptly.

The furrow in my brow deepened as I wondered what had happened. Had I clicked something in the app to stop the video? It took a moment for me to realize that Theo had actually stopped the video in the middle of his sentence and uploaded it.

Finally, it occurred to me, that was probably when the jerks walking by had screamed at him. Obviously, he couldn’t edit that out, but he didn’t want to waste the squirrel video, either. I sighed and clicked on the comments, wondering how many people had already seen it.

The first comment made me cringe.