Leo’s high school had more firewalls than a medieval fortress. Every gaming site, every streaming platform, every “fun” URL was a digital ghost—blocked, banned, buried. Study hall in Mr. Henderson’s room was a special kind of purgatory: forty-five minutes of nothing but the hum of old computers and the ticking of a clock that seemed to move backward.
Mr. Henderson looked up from his desk. “Everything okay, Leo?”
Splat.