Free Social Suicide by Gemma Halliday

loan.
    “I promise we won’t even spend it. We just need to use it as bait for a couple hours, then we’ll bring it right back,” Sam told him.
    Kevin blinked, giving her a blank stare. Though come to think of it, Kevin always had kind of a blank stare on his face. He was dressed in jeans and a faded Green Day T-shirt, laid out on the sofa with one foot hooked over the end in a sprawling pose. The TV was showing some nature channel with a bunch of ocean scenes, and the coffee table in front of him was littered with an empty Cap’n Crunch box and half a pepperoni pizza.
    “Dude, a hundred bucks is a lot of money,” Kevin said. “You know how many boobies I could save with a hundred bucks?”
    I almost hated to ask. . . . “Boobies?”
    Kevin nodded. “There are only like a dozen Abbott’s Boobies left in the world. The whole world, dude! That’s, like, really not a lot.”
    “Birds?”
    Kevin nodded solemnly. “Endangered birds, dude. They’re being killed off by Yellow Crazy Ants.”
    Clearly someone had been watching way too much Nature Channel.
    “Look, we’ll do anything, Kev. Please? We really need the money,” Sam pleaded.
    Kevin raised one eyebrow. “Anything?”
    Uh-oh. “Um, well, maybe not anything—” I broke in.
    “Okay, how about this?” Kevin proposed. “There’s this job I’m supposed to do this afternoon. It pays a hundred and fifty dollars, and if you two wanna do it for me, you can keep the cash.”
    “What kind of job?” I asked. As far as I knew, Kevin’s only real job since graduating from high school two years ago had been keeping the Kramers’ sofa from floating away.
    “Just a quick one.”
    I narrowed my eyes. “This job is legal, right?”
    Kevin did a short laugh-slash-cough thing. “Totally, dude. Look, all you have to do is stand in front of Chuck’s Chicken on Main Street and hand out chicken bucket coupons for a couple hours. Easy, right?”
    I had to admit, it did sound easy.
    “I don’t know,” Sam hedged. “Main Street is like three miles away.”
    “You can take the Green Machine,” he offered, sweetening the deal.
    I bit my lip. The Green Machine was Kevin’s puke-green-colored Volvo sedan that was, in fact, an environmentally friendly “green” machine by virtue of the fact that it ran purely on clean-burning vegetable oil instead of fossil fuels. Though the term clean was relative. The only places that had the volume of veggie oil needed to run a car were fast-food joints that threw out drums of used cooking oil. Which meant the Green Machine perpetually smelled like French fries and fish sticks.
    But, while I had a moment of pause over being seen driving around town in Kevin’s car, the truth was if we wanted to catch our cheat seller and figure out who killed Sydney, we had little choice.
    “Okay,” I finally said. “We’ll do it.”
    Kevin grinned, showing off a piece of pepperoni stuck in his back teeth. “Sweet, dude. The gig starts in an hour, and the suit’s in the Green Machine’s backseat.”
    I paused. “Wait—suit? What suit?”
    Kevin blinked at me. “The chicken suit, dude. You didn’t think you could hand out coupons looking like that, did you?”
    I closed my eyes and did a mental two count while I yoga-breathed, telling myself that this was all for a good cause.
    Forty minutes later, Sam and I were parking the Green Machine at Chuck’s Chicken in a haze of fried food–flavored smoke. Sam cut the engine, and we got out and stared into the backseat. Laid out across the cracked vinyl bench was a huge mass of yellow feathers.
    I bit my lip. “So . . .”
    “Yeah, no way,” Sam said, reading my mind. “I’m so not being a giant chicken, Hartley.”
    “It’s just for a couple hours.”
    “N. O.”
    “I think the feathers match your hair color better than mine.”
    “Nice try. We have the same color hair, Hartley.”
    “I’m allergic to feathers?”
    “Liar.”
    “I’m allergic to looking like a