The entire auditorium erupted. Three thousand people rose to their feet in unison, delivering a thunderous, deafening standing ovation that physically shook the wooden floorboards beneath my feet.
But I didn’t look at the crowd. I looked exactly at the fourth row, center aisle.
I watched the smug smile on Thomas’s face evaporate so violently that I could almost hear his jaw physically click out of place. His eyes bulged, wide and unblinking, staring up at me as if I were a ghost that had just crawled out of a grave.
Beside him, Victoria’s artificially tanned face drained of all blood, turning an ashen, sickly, ghostly white. Her perfectly manicured hand went limp, and her thousand-dollar designer purse slipped from her lap, hitting the concrete floor with a heavy, unnoticed thud.
Haley, who had been holding her phone up to record the mysterious genius, froze. Her mouth fell open in a silent scream. The phone slipped through her trembling, sweat-slicked fingers, clattering loudly against the legs of the chairs.
