Page 28 of The Accidental Text

I feel my stomach sink as the realization settles on me. Dad … and June?

“I don’t like it either,” Devon says in response to my scrunched-up facial expression. “I’ve caught him twice now texting on his phone and smiling at it.” He shakes his head.

“Is that who you think he’s been texting?” Chelsea asks, letting her jaw fall.

My mind flashes back to the jump—or the attempted jump—when I noticed my dad texting rapidly on his phone. At the time, I was doing my own rapid texting to my mom, so I didn’t think much of it. But now that I think of it, there have been other times I’ve caught him doing the same. I just wrote it off as no big deal. Could he have been texting June? And that long ago?

“What do we do?” Chelsea asks.

Devon lifts his shoulders briefly. “Not much we can do.”

“I’m suddenly feeling offended that he’s been texting Juneso much, when all I ever get from him is one-word replies to my texts,” Chelsea says. “I thought he was just bad at texting.”

Of course Chelsea would make this about her.

“I think we’re making a lot of assumptions here,” I say.

“How can we find out?” Devon asks.

I twist my lips to the side. “Well …”

“Well, what?” He squints his blue eyes at me.

“He’s in the shop right now, trying to help your friend Chad learn how to wrap a door properly. No one seems to be able to teach him.” I give my best look of disapproval to my brother.

Devon doesn’t respond. He doesn’t seem to care at all that Chad has probably cost us more money than he’s made us.

“So what?” Chelsea says, her impatience starting to show.

Devon snaps his fingers and points at me. “His phone—”

“Is probably in the top drawer of his desk,” I finish.

“Oh,” Chelsea says, her eyes bright with understanding.

Without words, I set the main phone to go to voicemail and the three of us walk quietly to our dad’s office, watching our backs as we go.

Sure enough, once we get there, there’s no sign of our dad, and like the predictable man he is, the phone is sitting in his top drawer.

Chelsea is the one who grabs it. She holds it in her hand and looks at it like it’s a foreign object she’s never seen before. Then she holds the phone out to me.

“I don’t think we should do this,” she says.

“You mean you don’t want to do this but you want me to,” I say, giving her a knowing look.

“Yes,” she says.

I take it from her and press the button on the older phone—the one we’ve been bothering our dad to upgrade—and watchthe screen light up. No passcode, because passcodes are for people who can remember numbers, and our dad is not one of those people.

I go to the texting app and open it up, holding the phone out in front of me as we all gather around. Devon stands in a position so he can see the door in case Dad walks in and catches us.

This all seems so familiar. Like we’ve done this before. But I don’t recall snooping on our parents like this. Not the three of us. What I do recall is me and Devon sneaking into Chelsea’s room and reading her diary, which was such a waste of snooping—it was so boring andallabout boys.

I click on June’s name, and there’s definitely been some texting going on. The first few texts seem benign. Just chitchat, not a big deal. I feel my heart lighten a bit. Chelsea and Devon have it all wrong. Dad really is just friends with June.

Using my thumb, I scroll down, watching as older texts populate on the screen. I’m a mix of emotions—worry that we might get caught, anxiety about what we might find, and a dash of shame for snooping like this.

“Good hell, they use a lot of emojis,” Devon says, pointing at the phone. He’s right; it’s mostly smiley faces and a few heart eyes sprinkled in. There’s nothing of interest in actual wordage, though. Just June asking my dad to lunch and my dad sending back an emoji thumbs-up. Then my dad asking if her power went out, to which she sends back a thumbs-down emoji.

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