Chapter 8: What Backing Off Looked Like
I showed Leo the text that evening.
He read it and handed the phone back without speaking.
"Do you know who sent it?" I said.
"Could be anyone in the group," he said.
"Some of them were really loyal to Dave.
Like, genuinely thought he was helping them."
"Did you?
Think he was helping you?"
Leo was quiet for a moment.
"At first.
Yeah.
He made it sound like — like the reason things weren't working with girls was because we were being too passive.
Too nice.
He said girls want someone who doesn't give up." He paused.
"It felt like advice.
It felt like someone finally explaining something."
"And when Chloe said stop?"
"I told myself she didn't mean it.
Because that's what he said.
He said the first no is a test." Leo looked at his hands.
"I knew it was wrong.
Somewhere I knew.
But I'd been in that group for months by then and it had just — it had gotten into the way I thought about things."
"That's what it was designed to do," I said.
He looked up.
"David Reid didn't build that group to help you.
He built it to see how far he could push thirty boys in the direction he wanted them to go.
You were an experiment, Leo.
All of you were."
Leo sat with that for a moment.
"Does that make what I did less bad?" he said.
"No," I said.
"It explains it.
It doesn't excuse it."
He nodded.
Like that was the right answer.
Like he'd needed to hear it said plainly.
The following days moved in two separate tracks.
On one track, the school.
Mr.
Garfield had contacted the families of twelve other students by Wednesday — the ones whose usernames he'd been able to identify from the member list I'd provided.
Three of those families called me directly.
Two were angry, not at David Reid but at me, for surfacing something they would have preferred to stay buried.
One mother called me at seven in the morning and said, "My son would never," and hung up before I could respond.
The third family — a father named Gerald, whose son Marcus had been in the group since September — called on Thursday evening and talked for forty minutes.
Marcus had already told him everything.
Gerald had already pulled the Discord logs himself.
He was calm in the way that people are calm when they have already done their crying somewhere private.
"My boy is a good kid," Gerald said.
"He's also done something that hurt someone.
Both of those things are true."
"Yes," I said.
"They are."
"What do you need from me?"
On the second track, Detective Paulson.
He called Friday morning.
"We've identified David Reid," he said.
"We've confirmed he was removed from the junior soccer coaching program in 2022 following a complaint from a parent about inappropriate communication with a minor.
The complaint didn't result in charges at the time.
It will be part of what we're building now."
"What are you building?" I said.
"A case.
It takes time.
But the Discord logs are significant.
The pattern of targeting minors, the grooming rhetoric, the fact that he created the group and administered it — that's not nothing."
"The text I received.
The back off message."
"Traced to a prepaid phone.
Purchased cash.
We're working on it."
"Do you think it was David?"
"I think someone close to him is scared," Paulson said.
"Scared people make mistakes.
We'll wait."
That afternoon, Chloe sent me a text.
I hadn't expected it.
It was short.
*Leo asked Ms.
Okafor if he could write me a letter.
She said it was my choice whether to read it.
I said yes.
I just wanted you to know that I said yes.*
I read it three times.
Then I typed back: *Thank you, Chloe.
May you like
That took courage.*
She replied with a single word: *So did Monday.*
