The Seat Exchange

Chapter 7

I stood at the end of Easton's bed as he struggled to figure out why every single device we owned got booted off our WiFi network. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, a pair of blue light lenses perched on the edge of his nose. The only sources of light were his laptop screen and the open bedroom door. In our rush to figure out what the fuck was going on, we omitted flicking on the light-fixture overhead.

Standing by the foot of the queen mattress, I scrutinised the coding posters that Easton had stuck to his wall. This was not how I imagined spending my night. I wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it all. Here we were, hosting one of the biggest parties of the year so far, and we had no music.

"Are you sure this isn't a service issue?" I asked as Easton's fingers flew across his keyboard. My hands were clasped behind the back of my neck, trying to resist the urge to call a technician out. Stat.

He shook his head. "No," he replied, brow furrowed as he read the pop-up on his screen for the third time. "This definitely isn't a server issue."

Easton shimmied weight onto one leg, digging his phone out of his pocket. I waited for him to elaborate—fill me in on the reason he thought our party had been left without music. Instead, he wordlessly scrolled across his phone screen.

"Then what's going on?" I asked when I couldn't take the silence any longer.

"I don't know, but whatever it was, it shut the WiFi and is making it so that I can't reconnect. I'm going to have to hotspot my laptop to see if I can get back on."

"Does this mean someone purposefully locked us out? This isn't some sort of fluke?"

Easton's dark eyes met mine for a moment, the glare from his laptop reflecting in his glasses. "It's a script. From what I can tell, someone used it to override our network and issue a reconnect packet every five seconds which makes it impossible to log back on."

"I'll pretend like I know what that means," I muttered.

He gave me a blank expression. "You click connect. Big rectangle pops up."

I rolled my eyes, folding my arms across my chest as Easton went back to trying to rectify the problem. All of that was way too technical for me—definitely something I was sure Charlie knew nothing about either. Yet I had a sinking suspicion that her name was written all over this little problem we were having. The corner of my mouth twitched in amusement.

"Got it!" Easton exclaimed, just as my brain started to short circuit from trying to make sense of the coding memes on the wall.

"Thank God," I sighed.

But the relief was short-lived. As soon as Easton announced his victory, the speakers exploded with an unfamiliar—unwelcome—sound.

It hit me like a slap-shot to the face. Our usual playlist had been replaced by high pitched children's music that blared through the Hockey House. A rumble of annoyance could be heard from the main floor all the way up to Easton's bedroom.

"Seriously, man?" I asked, my voice barely audible over the crap coming from downstairs. "Who's fucking playlist is that?"

Easton shook his head again, eyebrows pulling together. "I actually have no clue."

I rubbed at my templates. The song about baby sharks was thirty seconds in and already giving me a headache. "How did we even lose control of the speakers?"

"They probably took control once everything dropped."

I clamped my palms over my ears. "Make it stop!"

"Zhang," Maverick's voice bellowed from the open door. His dark hair was dishevelled and sticking up at odd angles. Clearly this music wasn't the vibe he and the girl he had in his room were going for. "What the fuck?"