You could’ve knocked Drew over with a jobberknoll feather. All right, maybe DJ was not a suitable candidate for Second Sane Man, because—well—okay, so it wasn’t that Drew didn’t believe Dade about stuff. He believed that Dade believed all the stuff about Claudia and Remington being evil. He even believed Dakota had found some reasons to believe these things. But DJ seemed to be siding with Dakota on the “it’s okay to randomly attack people if you think they’re out to get you” front, which Drew disagreed with.

He wasn’t as much of a pacifist as his dad (Garen Tennant would definitely not approve of many of the spells Drew had learned from Aaron’s teaching or Ruben’s grimoire), but there was a reason Drew had wanted to call it the self-defense club. He was also a lot more inclined to believe what Remington said she’d seen in Claudia’s Pensieve memory—he’d talked to Aaron about it and apparently those were pretty hard to fake—than Dakota’s suspicions. Yes Dakota had had reasons for what she did, but they were also reasons she probably shouldn’t have listened to. She wouldn’t need to be afraid of Claudia now if she’d never tried to use the fire ants spell against her in the first place.

Anyway DJ sounded like he had fully sided with Dakota, which no one had done so far, even Drew. That was good for Dakota—again, she needed all the friends she could get—but it meant Drew had to walk carefully here. He was used to being the person who defended Dakota’s point of view all the time, and being on the other end of it was weird. No, see, he wanted to say, I’m on Dakota’s side, and Remy is a good person. She was one of the best people in the school as far as Drew was concerned, and DJ should know that.

“Dakota hasn’t told her,” Drew said, which was true. Shaking his head right before he said that was kind of a lie, but Drew had done it anyway. Remington did know, because Claudia had figured it out, and oh crap that did sound a lot like what Dakota had been saying this whole time. But no, Drew was pretty sure that gaydar wasn’t a thing so there was no way Claudia could’ve found out before Dade had told anyone. “And I’m not gonna out her, so,” he added on a shrug. “Kind of stuck with the misunderstanding.”