The man sent a picture of a T. rex skeleton. Then he asked questions. Easy ones. What's your teacher's name. What do you like for dinner. What time does Mommy get home. Jojo knew that one: six-fifteen, except Thursdays. Where does your brother go after school. Jojo knew that one too. Malik walked home past the laundry place and the Family Dollar and sometimes stopped at the Shell for a Gatorade and brought Jojo back a blue one.
Then the man wrote: your brother took me away from you. did you know that? he lied to the police and they took your daddy away. me and him gonna talk man to man.
Jojo did not know what man to man meant. But he read it slowly, sounding out each word the way Miss Haskins taught them, and when he got to the end, it felt like a cold hand had been laid flat on his back.
He did not answer that one. He turned the tablet off and put it under his bed and lay on top of it.
Two days later, the letter came, and Mommy cried at the cabinet. Four days after that, the church grandma came, and Malik had a suitcase, and Mommy said I need you gone.
So Jojo knew. He had told the man where Malik walked, and now Malik had to go away so the man couldn't find him, and it was because Jojo had said JojoRex, and it was because Jojo had kept the secret game.
He had done one thing right. He did not know if it was right. On the porch night, when everybody's voices went strange and Malik started crying, Jojo had been so scared his stomach hurt, and he had remembered what Malik told him, last spring, when he first set up the tablet: "Rex. Listen. If you're ever scared and nobody's listening to you, you hit the red button. Right here. Then there's proof." So he had hit the red button. And when the church grandma came out and didn't shut the door all the way, he had crept up and pointed the tablet through the crack and kept it going, the whole time, even when Mommy sat on the steps and made the noise. He did not know what proof meant. He only knew that Malik said to.
On the fifth day after Malik left, a new message came while Jojo was in the closet under the stairs, where he'd started going after school.
where'd your brother go big man? tanya says he aint at school no more. you tell daddy where he went and i'll send you something special.
Jojo started crying. He didn't mean to. It came out of him loud, and the closet door opened, and Mommy was standing there in her pharmacy shirt with her car keys still in her hand.
"Baby? What's wrong? What—"
He held up the tablet. He couldn't hold the secret anymore; it was too heavy, it was heavier than the tablet.
Clara read it standing up. Then she sat down on the closet floor among the winter boots and scrolled up, and up, and up, and Jojo watched her face go through things he did not have names for. It went grey. It went still. It went to something that frightened him more than crying, a hard, bright, quiet thing, like a knife laid on a table.
"I told him where Malik walks," Jojo whispered. "I told him about the Shell. It's my fault. It's my fault Malik's gone."
Clara put the tablet down very carefully on a boot, screen up. Then she took his face in both her hands.