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ass.
    “Hello, spawn!” I coo at Kayla’s baby brother as he waddles into her room. He burps at me.
    “It looks like you guys speak the same language,” Kayla quips.
    “Where was that sass when Jack was making you cry at Avery’s party?”
    “Uh, hello? He’s my crush? I’m not going to sass him.”
    “Flash ‘em the sass before you flash ‘em the ass.”
    “What kind of saying is that?” She laughs.
    “Grandma-saying. She’s the head of the motorcycle gang at her nursing home.”
    I amuse myself for a few minutes by showing her brother how to blow spit bubbles. Kayla’s still a little beat up over the fact Jack kissed me, for real this time, and I’ve spent the past hour assuring her it was nothing, but she still won’t believe me.
    “Everybody’s saying you looked shocked. Like, a good shocked. And what the hell is that?” She points at my hand. I hold up the snakeskin-patterned wallet.
    “Oh this? I just, uh, picked it up.”
    “It looks like something from a corny cowboy movie.”
    Her brother squeals and pulls my hair. I blacklist him.
    “Hey, don’t call my wallet corny. Do you have a snakeskin wallet? No. Even if you did, yours would be uncool, whereas mine was both free and satisfying, by which I mean I stole it from my nemesis’ butt pocket while he was macking on me.”
    “You stole Jack Hunter’s wallet?” Kayla’s eyes bug out. I wave it in front of her with a smirk.
    “What, you think I’d go down without a fight? Wanna see what’s inside?”
    Her curiosity wars visibly with her crush, but curiosity kills all types of cats, including people. She scoots next to me. I peel it open and expect some sort of unholy glow to come from within like in cartoons, but all that comes out is a piece of lint and the smell of pine. Inside is Jack’s ID – him glaring at the camera intensely.
    “He’s so hot,” Kayla sighs. “He even takes good ID photos.”
    “That’s a sure sign of being an alien. Or plastic surgery. Possibly both.”
    “Look at the age!”
    I peer at the age stamped on the ID and frown. March 20 th , 1989. There’s no way he’s that old.
    “That’s not his birthday,” Kayla insists. “It’s January 9 th , 1994.”
    I give her a long, meaningful look and she flushes. Fake ID – fine. We all gotta buy booze and get into clubs somehow. It’s pretty standard. I rifle through the rest of the wallet – five bucks cash, some change, a library card because he’s a nerd, some receipts for chicken and milk and measuring tape. Pretty basic high school kid stuff, but surprisingly tame coming from the wallet of a guy who talks like an Einstein clone and looks like an underwear ad. I was expecting loads of condoms and maybe a line of molly.
    Kayla’s brother screams in my ear for candy. I tell him the plants in the yard need watering and he immediately trundles towards the kitchen spewing spit bubbles.
    “Look!” Kayla grabs something from the wallet. It’s a stack of business cards. Or, at least I think they’re business cards. But they don’t actually have any business addresses on them, so they can’t be business cards. They’re a deep black with a single red stripe on the bottom, with the same name and same phone number in dangerously svelte red text;
    Jaden 894-354-3310
    “Jaden must’ve really liked Jack to give him this many cards,” Kayla muses. She’s so dense sometimes.
    “They’re his, Kayla. He’s passing them out. That’s why he has so many.”
    Her mouth makes a little ‘o’. “But…but his name isn’t Jaden.”
    “It’s a pseudonym.”
    “Why would he need one?”
    “It’s probably for a job.”
    She nods. I bite my lip and torture my brain into thinking more clearly. I take a single business card and put the rest back, handing the wallet to her.
    “Here. You can do the honors of returning that. He’s probably stressing its gone – this is your chance to tip the scales in your favor. Even if the scales are made of misogynism and