Don't Read the Comments

by Eric Smith

  “So, Divya, why don’t you let me start, and you can help me fill in some of the blanks here.” She fusses with her notebook again. It’s one of those fancy Moleskine notebooks everyone seems to have but never actually uses. By contrast, hers looks worn-out, like it’s really seen some things.

  “It’s my understanding that you and Rebekah have been dealing with some pretty intense harassment—on social media, in emails and video games,” she says. “Just have to search your username to see that these people seem to love posting this stuff afterward. It also seems like some of that harassment might be happening locally. Is this true?”

  That email. That photo of my apartment.

  I bite my lip and shrug. If I tell her, it might just make things even more complicated for me. I can’t let my mom find out—she’ll make me stop streaming for sure. And besides, Rebekah was the target yesterday, not me.

  “I’m not sure,” I venture. “Maybe? The guys at that pizza place definitely knew who I was, and they got that video into the hands of someone who knew where to send it. Though I suppose you can just send something like that to any blog that’s talked badly about me. About us.”

  “Any threats that have been more direct? From what I gathered, that pizza-place incident was more happenstance than planned,” Detective Watts says, arching an eyebrow. “Anyone coming here, to your apartment? Any doxing, is basically what I’m asking here. People pushing your address, your personal information, out into public forums?”

  The email and the photo of my apartment flash into my mind again, and my heart pounds. The coldness of it all.

  Leave. You aren’t welcome here.

  It would be easy to say “yes.” To show her the photo. The anonymous email address it came from, that maybe she and her team could trace.

  But that would mean more news articles. More people knowing who I am, and likely finding out where I live. We’d have to move, just when Mom is almost done with her classes. Plus, Rebekah and my few friends are here, even though it’s the summer and I’m not really seeing most of them right now. I want to hit reset at the community college, and help my mom start a better life. One without my father. A life that belongs to her for once. To us.

  I can’t let some anonymous troll on the Internet rip all that away from me. And it’s not really doxing yet—is it? It was just a photo. They didn’t post it anywhere.

  But even as these thoughts run through my mind, as I try to rationalize them in some way, I know I’m just lying to myself. There’s this voice telling me to just let it all out, to not be that person who hides and is afraid, but it’s hard to be brave when there’s so much at stake.

  “No,” I lie, the word feeling foul and wrong in my mouth. “We get a lot of awful messages on social media, and sometimes through email, but that’s really it. I know there are some bloggers writing things and YouTubers making videos, but I avoid them if I can help it. And that guy who recognized me at Quarter Slice, of course.”

  “Okay, okay,” the detective says, writing something down in her little notepad. She looks up at me and back down at the pad, then at me again. “Are you sure there have been no threats made to you here at home? With the incident at the pizza place, and the news articles... I worry that people will have an easier time triangulating where you live.”

  “I’m sure,” I insist, trying to look right at her. Maintain eye contact. Don’t dart around the room. I feel my hands getting sweaty against my legs.

  “And this is the first time you’ve been caught on camera, in person?” she presses. “Outside of your videos, I mean.”

  “Yeah, definitely,” I say. “We’ve never done any events or anything. We were hoping to make an appearance at GamesCon later in the summer, but... I don’t know. I guess we’ll see.”

  “GamesCon?” she asks.

  “It’s like Comic-Con, or those book conventions, but just for video games. They go on all around the country, and the New York City event is just a few weeks away.” I sigh, remembering Rebekah’s excitement when she talked about those pins and patches. “We’re supposed to set up a table, and I’m gonna do this panel...” I shake my head in frustration.

  “Hey.” Detective Watts reaches out and puts a hand on my shoulder, her grip strong and sure. “It’s going to be okay. We’re not going to let them win. You’ll be able to do your panel. We’ll think of something.”

  She exhales sharply and stands up, pulling her badge back out, revealing some business cards tucked away inside the folds of the wallet-like flap. “If anything—and I mean anything—else happens,” she says, handing me a card, “you call me, you hear me? Like I said, a lot of the harassment in this region seems to be coming from the campus and the surrounding area. And those boys at the pizza place, when we find them, are potentially facing criminal charges for what they did to you and Rebekah, if I have my way—”

  “Wait,” I say, the image of that Brian guy flashing into my mind, with his burger T-shirt. “There was this one guy—”

  “Brian?” Detective Watts asks, pulling out her notebook again. “Yes, the precinct told me about him, from your statements. He’ll be fine, I suppose.”

  She shrugs and makes her way toward the door. I follow her down the stairs of my apartment building to the outside, where she stops for a moment and turns around, sliding on a pair of sunglasses like a badass cop in a movie.

  “In my opinion, if you associate with trash, you should get thrown out with the rest of the garbage.”

  Reclaim the Sun: Chat Application

  AARON: Hey! How’s it going over there?

  AARON: D1V?

  AARON: Hey I know things are rough, but I’m around if you want to chat.

  AARON: Or blow up some things in the game.

  AARON: Or both!

  AARON: Just saying.

  9

  AARON

  The calendar in the kitchen feels like it’s glaring at me. There, with a Post-it note on today’s date, written in my mom’s messy doctor handwriting, is a message that seals my fate for the day.

  Aaron, Office, Morning–Afternoon.

  Today’s the day we’re supposed to be meeting across town, at that pretentious café Laura picked, to really dig into the illustrations with Jason. I need to be there for Ryan, and my mom knows this. She has to—this video game gig is literally the only thing of note that I’ve been doing this summer, besides playing games with D1V in Reclaim the Sun, which I’ve neglected to mention to my parents. Mom doesn’t even get why I want to make games, so she’s certainly not going to understand the thrill of playing them with a famous streaming star.

  And yet, here we are.

  “Goddamn it,” I grumble, snatching the Post-it off the calendar. I hustle my way around to the side entrance that leads into the practice and swing the door open, only to catch my dad hurriedly trying to cover something up on the computer.

  “Aar-Aaron!” he stammers, making quick work of something on the screen. I walk toward him, trying to get a glimpse of whatever he’s fussing with. “I didn’t know you were on the schedule.”

  “Yeah, I was surprised, too...” I trail off, gesturing to the computer. “What’s, um, what’s going on over there?”

  “Oh nothing,” he says brightly, shaking the mouse, the screen black. “Trying to get this darn thing to unfreeze.” He laughs nervously, in a way that makes him sound decades younger. He manually shuts the computer off. “Maybe that’ll do it. Reset the beast. Your mother really needs to replace this thing, am I right?”

  “Dad, why are you acting so weird?” I ask, reaching over the desk and turning the PC on again, the old switch making a snapping noise as it clicks back. “Does it have to do with that...that medieval game?”

  Speaking of things I’ve neglected, there’s the whole mystery here of my dad and this ancient video game. I’ve been so invested in everything going on with D1V
that I completely forgot about...well, whatever this is.

  “What are you talking about?” he asks, his eyes widening.

  “The computer was frozen the other day when I was in here,” I tell him. “The screen was locked on some old-looking fantasy game. Looked kind of like Diablo, only older. Are you...are you playing something?”

  “Me? What? No,” he insists. “Come on, this thing can barely run Microsoft Word, never mind a video game. Maybe Solitaire.”

  “Hmm.” I eye him suspiciously, totally not believing him. I make a mental note to check the computer later, maybe when I get back from the ManaPunk meeting. If he’s playing something, I want to know what it is. And why he’d hide it.

  “Where’s Mom?” I ask.

  “Seeing a patient.” He glances back toward the exam rooms and catches sight of the Post-it in my hand. “When does she have you on for?”

  “Ugh,” I groan. “Morning through the afternoon. I’m supposed to—”

  “I’ll cover for you. I’ve got this,” he interrupts before I can launch into what the ManaPunk meeting is about today.

  I blink in surprise. “Are you sure? Mom might get mad.”

  “She won’t. I’ll talk to her.”

  A grin spreads across my face. “Thanks, Dad.”

  “Anytime.” He smiles back, but his eyes keep flitting to the computer. “You can go. It’s okay.”

  “Alright, alright, I’m going.” I try not to laugh as I walk back into the house. It’s got to be that old game, but why hide it? Especially from me? Seriously, I don’t see the point. I wonder if Mom knows he’s playing some archaic RPG on the office computer, and the thought of her reaction makes me chuckle.

  As I make my way back upstairs to grab my pack and laptop, my phone starts buzzing. It’s Ryan calling, which is odd—he usually just texts me.

  I answer it. “Hey,” Ryan says, hanging on the vowel. “You coming to the meeting?”

  “Yeah, of course, just getting ready to leave now.”

  “Did you, um...read the blogs at all today?”

  “No, why?” I ask curiously. “What’s up?”

  “You might want to get caught up on the way here.”

  * * *

  “It’s all so terrible,” Ryan says, staring at his phone.

  “Have you ever been to Quarter Slice Crisis?” I ask, looking down at mine. I find that I’m straining to hear him over the morning rush at Autofocus Café. I still can’t believe Laura picked this damn place—the line to order is so long that I’m convinced the meeting will be over before we can get any caffeine.

  “A few times. The pizza there is garbage.” Ryan sticks his tongue out and makes a disgusted noise. “Alberto took me there on a date once, when we hopped a BoltBus out of town for the day. ‘He likes video games, he’ll like this!’ So sweet.”

  The news article I’m reading on Kotaku is like something out of a nightmare, and so is the piece Ryan found on Giant Bomb, both complete with a video that I can’t believe anyone would think is a good idea to share. There’s D1V, the first time I’ve seen her in an actual, physical space and not just on a stream or as a thumbnail on social media. It’s also the first time I’ve realized that her profile photos are super photoshopped, in a way that would make it hard to recognize her, though I suppose if you watch her videos, it doesn’t really matter. This is her, in real life. Moving and talking and being a person.

  And it’s devastating.

  It’s her and Rebekah, the girl who does the live streams with her, trying to get away from some guy by an arcade machine. The guy grabs D1V, she slaps him, and then she bolts out the door with Rebekah. The dudes pursue, the person holding the camera running down the street behind the guys, the footage jostling about, like something out of one of those found-footage horror movies. But it’s so much worse than watching a movie like Cloverfield or Chronicle. Because it’s real.

  There’s a bit more in the article about the campus police getting involved, at some college in Hoboken, and how Rebekah had been the subject of an assault a year ago, with a ton of links branching out to other stories. Stories about the boys on campus still being there, Rebekah moving away, lawsuits that are pending. I open a few and then quickly shut them, feeling like I’m invading her privacy. I only know Rebekah from the Internet—as an avatar on social media, barely recognizable. It feels wrong to know so much about her personal life in just a few clicks, with the big takeaway being the lack of consequences for those involved.

  Like I said, a nightmare.

  I tap away from the news on my phone and load up the game’s chat app, checking out my friends list to see if D1V is signed on. She’s there, currently exploring in Reclaim the Sun.

  “Should I message her?” I ask Ryan, staring at my phone. “She...hasn’t been answering me lately.”

  “Can you blame her? Come on, man, she probably needs space,” he says. I glance at him, and he’s staring down at my phone, a quizzical look on his face. We take a few steps forward in the line, the cashier looming. “I mean, what are you going to say?” He looks up at me. “What can you even do right now?”

  “Try to be a friend, you know?” I shrug. “If something awful like that happened to me, I’d want to hear from people who care about me. I think?”

  “Sooo, you care about her?” Ryan asks, raising his eyebrows.

  “Well, I mean, we’ve gamed together a few times now. Chatted a bit,” I say, feeling a little heat flush to my cheeks. “I like to think we’re becoming friends.”

  “Alright,” he says. “Just...just don’t do that thing.”

  “What thing?” I ask.

  “That thing,” he presses. “The whole ‘I’m going to be the nice guy who swoops in and saves the day, maybe then she’ll like me later!’ thing.”

  “Oh, come on, you know me better than that!” I exclaim. “That’s exactly what happened at that arcade. That guy gave her a quarter and then expected her to go out with him or something. That’s not my style.”

  “Okay, okay,” Ryan says, raising his hands in surrender. “I just had to make sure.”

  My eyes drift back to my friends list, to her icon there in the app, the green dot telling me that she’s online.

  “Now what’s on your mind?” Ryan asks, nudging my shoulder.

  “It’s...nothing.” I shake my head.

  “You can’t do that. You can’t tease that you’re gonna say something and then not say it. Hurry up and spit it out, before Jason and Laura get here.”

  “It’s just...that video. And this interview...” I feel the words forming in my head and in my mouth, and I feel like a jerk before they even come out. “I keep thinking about how if she was at Quarter Slice Crisis, that means she might be from around there, right? Plus, her streaming partner goes to college in that area. I mean, there aren’t any conventions going on. So chances are she probably lives in—”

  “I’m going to stop you right there,” Ryan says.

  “But it’s not that far,” I continue. “Philadelphia to Hoboken, or even New York, if that’s where she is? I could take a BoltBus. Or the SEPTA to the NJ Transit, even though it’s hell. We could maybe be in-real-life friends—”

  “Dude. Don’t say that. Don’t like, think about how you could find a way to meet her. That makes you—”

  “That’s the other point,” I interject. “I also can’t help but think of those trolls that have been attacking her and saying all that shit on social media. I mean, she doesn’t have her location listed in her profile, on purpose, to keep people from harassing her. In the game, on the chat application, on any of her social media stuff...nowhere.” I exhale, shaking my head. “Someone else is bound to figure it out, right?”

  Ryan gives me a look.

  “I’ll message her.”

  He stares at me harder.

  “But I won�
��t be that guy?” I add.

  “You’re exhausting. But you might be right,” Ryan admits as we reach the front of the line. He points toward the seating area. “I’ll get the drinks. Go grab a table for everyone.”

  RECLAIM THE SUN: CHAT APPLICATION

  ME: Hey, ridiculous question, considering everything that happened.

  ME: But is everything okay?

  ME: I know you didn’t want to talk about it before, but I saw the news and now I know.

  ME: And I can’t pretend that someone I’m starting to become friends with isn’t hurting.

  ME: Just, you know, checking.

  D1V: Hey. Not ridiculous. But no. Everything is a dumpster on fire.

  ME: I saw some of those articles. I’m so sorry.

  D1V: Thanks.

  Ryan pulls a seat out, the hard polished wooden chair squeaking against the stone floor of the café. A large steaming cup of hot chocolate plunks down next to me, and I grab the cardboard sleeve around the white cup. It’s dark and bitter, and I must make a face, because Ryan laughs.

  “Sorry, it’s some pure cocoa thing. Might want some sugar for that.”

  “You think?” I grab a bunch of raw sugar packets off our table and stir them in, and the result is all kinds of perfect. For a moment, I actually don’t mind that Laura has dragged us clear across town to meet at this place.

  “Man, that was fast,” I say, exhaling in post-chocolate-sip bliss.

  “The wait is never that bad when you just get regular drinks,” Ryan notes, stirring some sugar into his tea. It’s so strong I can smell the spices. “It’s when you’re in a Starbucks and people show up asking for that Butterbeer drink from Harry Potter or whatever the latest unicorn-flavored nonsense is that they take forever.”

  I smile at him and glance down at my phone again. At that “thanks” from D1V.

  Do I say anything more? Suggest we load up a game of Reclaim the Sun and go exploring together after this meeting? Ask how her friend is doing? This weird sinking feeling of dread creeps over me, and I have absolutely no idea what to say.