The Team

In a dark alley, a high schooler named Cooper Calhoun drops off a grocery bag of demanded items for a mysterious blackmailer who speaks to him through a distorted voice on the phone. Weeks earlier, while his parents were out of town, Cooper joined some teammates at what turned out to be a wild party near Trickle Lake. Though he did nothing wrong and left before the police broke it up, someone snapped pictures of him there, and now the blackmailer threatens to send them to Cooper's church, his parents, and the Christian colleges he hopes to attend unless Cooper obeys his orders. The newest demand is the worst yet: Cooper has forty-eight hours to sneak into his principal's computer and change one of his own grades. The blackmailer signs off with a chilling cheerfulness: "Cheer up, Cooper, and enjoy the ride!"

Meanwhile, Emily Jones wants nothing to do with Morrie and Suzu Rydell, who have finished their punishment for breaking into the principal's office and now want Emily to join a new helping-people team they call the EMS team, for Emily, Morrie, and Suzu. They praise her detective skills and even offer her top billing, but Emily hasn't forgiven their past schemes, telling them that "friends don't make friends think they're gonna die." She demands to be left alone, which Morrie breezily takes as a maybe.

Staying late at school, Emily catches Cooper about to pry open his principal's office window. Once he pours out the whole story, Emily realizes it's blackmail and, despite her misgivings, brings him to Morrie and Suzu, first making them look her in the eye and promise they aren't behind it. Morrie discovers the blackmailer has been tracking Cooper through his phone's GPS and programs it to broadcast false locations. When Morrie casually offers to hack the principal's computer, Emily puts her foot down: no break-ins and no hacking, because a team that helps people can't break the rules. So Morrie builds something cleverer, a "fake wall" program on a flash drive that will let the blackmailer think he's watching the real grade records while the official files stay untouched. The catch is that someone must plug the drive into the principal's computer in person, so Cooper books a meeting with Principal Solly while Suzu supplies the diversion: Gargantuan, a battle robot she built for combat competitions, now modified to shoot off fireworks outside the office window.

The plan nearly unravels. With the principal lured outside by the robot, Cooper inserts the drive and phones the blackmailer, who fumbles helplessly at logging in while Emily breathlessly reports the principal walking back down the hall. She stalls him at the door just long enough for the blackmailer to finally connect, watch Cooper change an A to a C, and log off, and Cooper yanks the flash drive out seconds before the principal sits back down.

Morrie's program has secretly traced the blackmailer to an abandoned shopping center across town, where the kids find a boy named Seymour Krelborn, identified by his laptop screensaver and its ridiculous motto, "Release the Krelkin." When Seymour bolts, Cooper flattens him with a quarterback's tackle. Seymour admits he has nothing against Cooper at all; he simply wanted a victim, and a popular Christian athlete photographed at a wild party made an easy target. Morrie finds a notebook of beginner computer instructions and realizes Seymour knows almost nothing about computers; a mysterious friend wrote it all out for him. That friend also taught Seymour one more trick, and before anyone can stop him he erases his laptop and phone, destroying every scrap of evidence. With nothing to hold him on, the kids must let him walk away, but he leaves with a threat: "I'll be seeing you again. All of you."

Cooper is grateful, and Emily tells him the real way to thank them is to tell his parents everything, which he should have done from the start. Morrie invites Cooper to join the team for his athletic skills, dreaming up the new name CEMS, but Emily quietly walks away. At home, she confesses to her dad that she feels she contributed nothing, since Morrie and Suzu did all the planning. Her father gently disagrees: she kept everyone calm under pressure and insisted the team do everything honestly, and that, he tells her, is moral leadership. Emily admits she still owes the principal an apology and still doesn't fully trust Morrie and Suzu, which her dad suggests is exactly why they need her. Before deciding whether to join, Emily picks up the phone and calls Mr. Whittaker with one simple request: "Can we talk?"