Free Eat'em by Chase Webster

swear. Nothing like that. It’s just something I had a question about and I didn’t want to have to wait until whenever we cover the material. It’s nothing. Really.”
    “Whatever it is,” she puckered her lips. “It sounds boring.”
    “To a dullard like you, yes!” Eat’em scoffed. “Zing! Yes, Jacob? Big Time!”
    “It is,” I said. “Pretty boring.”
    “Do you have a Facebook account?” Dixie asked, changing the subject once more.
    “No.”
    She gasped, “How. Do. You. Breathe?”
    “What’s she talking about?” Eat’em asked.
    I answered both of them at once, “I don’t know.”
    “Well,” she said, “everyone has one. So you need to get one. Social networking. Otherwise, how am I supposed to get a hold of you?”
    “Morse Code?”
    “What’s that?”
    “Nothing,” I said. “Dumb joke.”
    “Me too, Jacob,” she smiled sheepishly and pretended to tap out a message. “Beep. Beepbeep. Beep. Beep. That means get on Facebook so I can get a hold of you.”
    “Sounded more like Shave and a haircut. ”
    “You,” she said, “are a major dork.”
    “I realize,” I said. “I’m sorry, I really got to go.”
    “Right, Valentine and Isaac,” she said. “See you later... on the interwebs!”
    She blew me a kiss and Eat’em belched in response.

 
    Chapter 12
    I didn’t know why I hadn’t thought of it. Instead of relying on an imagined sixth sense to track down the blonde, all I needed to do was surf the web.
    Dixie, you’re a genius!
    Scouring page after page I dug through the profiles of UT alums. My first search brought up hits in the hundreds of thousands. People tagged themselves to the school dating as far back as the 70’s. Some former students even used their thirty year old school photos on their profile, which made my search that much more difficult.
    I narrowed the field to current students aged eighteen to twenty-five and the list became more manageable. Then it was just a matter of surfing until I found her.
    Eat’em dug through the cracks in the couch on a quest for day old chip crumbs, which he called consumptive loot. He pulled at the cushions, rummaged through my bedding, and shook the seats for whatever morsels he could find, grumbling as he went.
    “This,” he said. “Oooo this too, yes. Very salvageable. We’ll put this one over here.”
    He added a handful of chip crumbles to a pile on the coffee table and meticulously picked out bits of lint. Then he scooped the whole mound into his mouth and washed it down with a bottle of A1 left out from Val’s lunch – a Hamburger Mac Hot Pocket and microwavable French fries.
    After finishing off the steak sauce, something I’d surely pay for later, Eat’em drug himself onto my lap and curled up in front of the laptop.
    “Three, yes,” he said, “definitely a three.”
    “Three?”
    “Her.” He nodded at the screen. I was on the profile of a Hispanic girl with drawn on eyebrows.
    “She’s a three?”
    “Yep.”
    “Out of what?” I asked. “Five?”
    “Fifty,” Eat’em said. “Six percenter, yes. Ugh.”
    Laughing I asked, “How about her?” and clicked over to an Irish woman with fiery red hair and pools of freckles.
    “Eight.”
    “Her?” I clicked to another.
    “Two,” he said, “No, no… One. One-point-five. No, one. One’s right, yes. One.”
    I looked at the oil-tanned brunette on the screen. She had long eyelashes, a slender face, pouty lips, and perfect skin. A botany major. She could have been a model for all I could tell.
    “A one?” I asked. “You’re giving her a one?”
    “Yes.”
    “Out of fifty?”
    “Hundred for her,” he said, mocking a shiver.
    “One out of one hundred?” I said, “Are you kidding? Who taught you this scale garbage anyway?”
    “Valentine.”
    “Ha,” I clicked to another picture of the brunette. A top-down shot, revealing a respectable amount of cleavage. “And you think Val would give her a one? Out of a hundred?”
    “Oh no,”