CHAPTER ELEVEN

I’ll say this for my parents: They can be jerks, but they’re not total jerks. When I get grounded, I can keep my phone and my laptop. I can still go online too. I spent the next couple hours doing research. There had to be a way of proving that I hadn’t doctored those photos. If I could just get Principal Juarez to believe me on that point, he’d have no choice but to admit that Ms. Opal really had cheated.

Turns out there’s an entire branch of forensics devoted to this stuff. I always thought of forensics as crime-scene analysis, like you see on TV: blood spatters, hair, DNA, that kind of thing. But digital forensics is all about getting evidence from computers, phones, tablets—and digital cameras.

Digital forensics technicians can trace and recover e-mails, device locations, text message histories, you name it. Stuff you think you’ve deleted is almost always still in your device, buried somewhere. And the technicians can analyze photos to see whether they’ve been manipulated. Cutting-edge stuff, not easy to do but possible.

A little more digging turned up three companies in the state that specialized in digital forensics. Two of them were a hundred miles away. But the third, McNamara Digital Forensics, had an office in my town. Their website specifically mentioned image analysis. Jackpot.

I went to bed at one in the morning, feeling hopeful. But I couldn’t fall asleep. I kept picturing Nat the way I’d last seen her, avoiding my gaze like she didn’t even know me. I guess she didn’t—at least not the way I thought she did. Was it wrong to expect her to believe me, no matter what she thought about Ms. Opal? No matter what her cheerleader friends said about me?

I tried to imagine what I would think if things were the other way around. What if Nat was telling me something I couldn’t quite believe? Would I have trusted her? I thought so. I hoped so. What if Vince told me she was lying, though? What then?

I didn’t know for sure. I’d known Vince a lot longer than I’d known Nat—years longer. Sure, I was crazy about Nat, but I trusted Vince like nobody else in the world. It would be hard to ignore him if he had a strong belief about something important.

But would I just dump Nat without even hearing her out? And by text? No. I’d never do that, no matter what she did.

Maybe, if I could prove my innocence, Nat would change her mind about me. But either way, something had shifted between us.

After tossing and turning for I don’t know how long, I finally drifted off. I dreamed about the news reporter interviewing my parents. My dad said he’d never had such a disappointing son. (That didn’t make sense because I’m his only kid, but that’s dreamland for you.) And my mom sang a song about swimming in circles.

I woke up at five o’clock, more tired than I’d been the night before. I had a feeling I wouldn’t be getting much rest until all this was over.