How to Hack a Heartbreak

by Kristin Rockaway

  “Hey,” she said, totally casual, as if our apartment always looked like the sorting room at a recycling plant.

  “What’s going on here?” I asked.

  “I’m making lanterns for Saturday night.” She held up a can with a pattern of holes punched in it. “You pop a little tealight in there and it glows. Put enough of them out and they’ll make the whole space twinkle.”

  This must’ve been another one of her Pinterest projects. Last month, she’d dragged a raggedy dresser drawer in off the curb and upcycled it into a wall-mounted wine rack for our kitchen. It sounded wacky, but it looked cool. She was a pretty talented crafter.

  “Do you own that drill?”

  “No, Ray loaned it to me.”

  “Does he know what you’re using it for?”

  She answered with a shrug, but I knew she’d kept him in the dark. Ray was our super. If he knew his drill was going to be used to create decorations for an unsanctioned rooftop party, he never would’ve given it to her, since he’s the one that was going to have to deal with all the complaints.

  “Can I help with anything?” I asked.

  “No, thanks. I’ve got it covered.” She lowered her head and resumed her work, the room echoing with the sounds of shredding metal and spinning gears.

  I carefully maneuvered around the tin can obstacle course to get to my bedroom, where I shut the door against the racket.

  Alone, at last. I couldn’t jettison my bra fast enough.

  After changing into my favorite sweatpants and a hole-ridden T-shirt, I busted open that bag of bodega goodies and woke my laptop from its peaceful slumber. Lines of code filled the screen, a reminder of how I’d spent my weekend: getting digital revenge on the guys who did me dirty. I’d almost forgotten about that.

  By now, the cathartic effects of JerkAlert had worn off, and it was time to free up some space on my web server. I signed into my dashboard, ready to take the whole thing down. But when I looked at the activity log, I did a double take.

  Over a hundred new records had been added to the JerkAlert database. Overnight.

  For a moment, I thought there was some sort of glitch. Like the hosting service had linked my login to a different account. Or I’d been hacked by some cyberpunk with low ambition.

  Reading the entries, though, they were clearly legit. Dozens of tales of women who’d been jilted by guys they’d met on Fluttr.

  My friends had apparently been busy.

  I texted Lia, Whit, and Dani: Did you 3 stay up all night adding guys to JerkAlert?

  A few minutes later, the responses started rolling in:

  DANI:

  What are you talking about?

  LIA:

  I didn’t add anything...

  DANI:

  Neither did I. I mean, hello? Look who you’re asking.

  MEL:

  Don’t tell me Whit entered all of these herself. There are over 100!

  And then, in a separate text, without copying Lia or Dani, Whit asked me: Got a sec?

  This could not be good.

  She answered on the first ring. “Don’t be mad.”

  Which meant I was about to be really, really mad.

  “What did you do?”

  “I shared JerkAlert with a couple of contacts.”

  In Whit-speak, “a couple of contacts” could mean hundreds of people. Working in PR meant she had endless connections. Not to mention a skewed sense of the meaning of “a couple.”

  “I didn’t want anyone else to see this,” I said. “It was just a joke.”

  “Well, how was I supposed to know? You didn’t say that.”

  She was right, I guess. I didn’t tell her not to send it around. Besides, if I was concerned about discretion, I shouldn’t have sent it to Whit in the first place.

  “It certainly doesn’t look like a joke,” she continued. “It’s really well-done, Mel.”

  “Thanks.” An unfamiliar tingle bloomed in my chest. Pride. It had been so long since I’d felt it. “I’m taking it down, though.”

  “What? No!”

  “Yes. It made me feel better for a minute, but it’s not like it’s gonna fix anything. Dating is depressing enough without putting more negative energy out there into the world.”

  “Look, I’m all for spreading positive vibes,” she said, “but you’ve obviously struck a chord here. Women are having a hard time on Fluttr. At JerkAlert, they can connect and share their experiences. Plus, it’s a way for them to protect themselves against shady guys. Before you swipe right, you can check their JerkAlert profile to make sure they’re not gonna send you a dick pic.”

  “I thought you didn’t mind dick pics.”

  “Only sometimes,” she said. “The point is, most women do mind. And it’s not just dick pics you’re saving them from, either. Women are logging all kinds of shady shit. Guys who ghost, who stand you up... Did you see that one guy who was actually married?”

  My stomach clenched. “No.”

  “Yes! He was dating a girl for like a month before she found out. I guess he’d stuffed his wedding ring in the pocket of his pants and when he took them off it went flying across her bedroom floor. How stupid could he be?”

  “Wow.”

  “See? You’re doing a real service with this site.” Whitney cleared her throat, shifting to a more subtle, serious tone of voice. Her no-nonsense, get-shit-done, businesswoman voice. “And beyond that, this could be a step in the right direction for your career.”

  I snorted. “Yes, I’m sure this would look great on my résumé. Melanie Strickland—Founder of JerkAlert.biz, because JerkAlert.com was already taken.”

  “I’m serious. The concept is original and compelling. You could really turn this into something big.”

  “It’s not the kind of thing I want to go public with, Whit. Do you know how pissed guys would be if they knew I was the woman behind it? Especially that married guy. Who knows what they’d do?”

  “So stay anonymous. The public doesn’t need to know who you are. That actually makes it more interesting.”

  My initial instinct was to tell her she was crazy, hang up the phone, and continue with my plan to delete the site. But then I remembered Alex’s words: The right opportunities are the ones you create yourself.

  What if this was my opportunity?

  JerkAlert was my vision, and I’d already brought it to life. Maybe it would be the ticket to a brand-new phase of my career.

  “Okay. I’ll keep it.”

  “Great! There’s just one thing.”

  There was always just one thing with her. “What?”

  “I have a few minor suggestions for improvement.”

  7

  Whit’s “suggestions for improvement” weren’t exactly minor. They were huge changes to the basic functionality of JerkAlert.

  Like adding a login system, to prevent people from spamming the site with fake profiles. And a search feature, so users could easily find the men they were looking to review.

  Plus, I had to figure out a way to make sure the right guys were receiving the right reviews. For example, there was surely more than one Brandon from Brooklyn, but only one of them had stood me up. I couldn’t go slandering an entire borough’s worth of Brandons just because one of them happened to be a jerk.

  At first, the thought of revamping JerkAlert was overwhelming. These changes would take hours. Days, even. Was it really going to be worth all the time and effort I’d have to put in to make it better?

  Then I remembered: this was my opportunity. My opportunity to demonstrate my prowess. To take something kind of cool and make it even cooler. If I nailed this, the help desk might soon be a distant, unpleasant memory. So even though I couldn’t be sure all this work was going to pay off in the end, the only way to find out was to try.

&
nbsp; That’s why, instead of watching Jane the Virgin for six hours that night, I coded. I coded until my eyes were bloodshot, until my knuckles cramped, until my thoughts became garbled and mushy. At three thirty in the morning, I didn’t so much fall asleep as lose consciousness.

  The next two days went something like this: wake up in a panic, having slept through my alarm; get ready in under fifteen minutes before heading to work, groggy and disheveled; spend the next eight hours enduring an endless stream of so-called “techies” who can’t figure out how to fix their own computers; finally, race home to work on JerkAlert until I pass out.

  It was an exhausting routine, but the satisfaction I felt from those late-night code-athons made the struggle worth it. I’d never worked on a project like this before, something original and challenging, something that had sprung from my own imagination and that people responded to. Creating JerkAlert made me feel inspired for the first time in... Well, it was the first time I could remember feeling inspired.

  Though I did have an additional source of inspiration: while all this web development was going down, things with Alex were heating up. Every so often, he’d drop by my cubicle, just to say hi. We synchronized our runs to the coffee machine, and then lingered a little too long stirring milk and sweetener into our mugs. We shared secret smiles as we passed in the hallway. Working the help desk was somewhat tolerable now, knowing he was simply a DM away.

  To think I’d almost written him off because of a simple misunderstanding. I made sure to delete that JerkAlert entry I’d entered on Sunday night, where I accused him of flirting with me behind his nonexistent girlfriend’s back. All record of my idiocy had been scrubbed from the internet forever.

  On Wednesday evening, shortly before midnight, I typed out my final closing curly brace and deployed the whole updated JerkAlert site to my server. It looked fantastic. By cross-referencing the JerkAlert database with profiles I pulled from the Fluttr app, I could display photos, improve searches, and reduce the chance of mistaken identities.

  God, I was a genius.

  I spent a few minutes poking around the site, clicking links and searching for random phrases, just to make sure everything was working as expected. Then I texted Whit and told her to give it a whirl.

  Her response: Will get to it 2morrow. Out in the Village rite now and SUPER LIT. Wanna join?

  No thanks, I wrote back, have fun, then continued surfing JerkAlert, taking obscene pride in the fruits of my labor. The speed with which the pages loaded, the slickness of the UI. It looked totally professional. Not at all like it’d been hastily coded in a few harried, Dorito-fueled nights.

  The database had tripled in size since Monday night. There were now over three hundred unique men who’d been logged to the site, some of whom had more than one review. Like Nate, 35, from Tribeca, who sent four women the same dick pic. And Hakim, 23, from Sunnyside, who started at least a dozen different text conversations with the charming opening line, RU horny?

  When I came upon Eddie, 38, from Staten Island, I stopped clicking. His review read:

  Total effing scumbag. Dated him for six weeks last summer before his wife called me on the phone telling me to stay away from her husband. Swipe left on this one, ladies. HE’S MARRIED.

  This couldn’t have been the same married guy that Whitney had been talking about, could it? She’d told me a whole different story involving a wedding ring popping out of his pants pocket. Out of curiosity, I typed the word married in the search box at the top of the screen.

  Twelve records came up, each one representing a different married guy who’d been trawling Fluttr for a side piece. From their pictures, they looked like decent guys. Guys I might’ve even swiped right on if I’d seen them in the app. You’d never suspect them of being shameless cheats.

  Then again, my dad looked like a decent guy, too.

  I didn’t know every detail of how my parents’ marriage came undone. I’m not sure how long Dad had been unfaithful or exactly when Mom found out about it. All I remember is the defiant glimmer in her eyes when she told me the news.

  “Dad’s moving out tomorrow.” Her voice was flat, matter-of-fact.

  “What?” I looked up from my SAT vocabulary list to see her looming in the kitchen doorway. I’ll never forget the word I was trying to memorize at that moment: aberration. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m sorry to spring this on you, sweetie.” She approached the table and sat down next to me. “But there’s no way to sugarcoat it. Your dad’s been cheating on me and I told him to leave.”

  “What?”

  Her words weren’t making sense. My dad was an accountant. He wore sweater-vests and collected vintage Star Wars figurines. He drove five miles under the speed limit at all times. Surely, I thought, a man this seemingly wholesome and cautious would never cheat on his wife.

  But I was wrong. He left the next day, just like Mom had said he would. As he rolled the last of his suitcases out the front door, he shot me this woebegone look and said, “I’m sorry, pumpkin.” As if saying he was sorry made up for the nightmare my fifteen-year-old life had suddenly become.

  After dinner, Mom drained a bottle of white zin and I retreated to my room with my SAT study guide tucked under my arm. Not like I could concentrate. I stared at the pages, unseeing, the sentences blurring together through my tears. A few hours later, Mom stumbled in without knocking.

  “How are you doing?” she asked.

  There were so many ways to answer that question. Terrified, confused, furious, sad. But I settled on, “Fine.”

  Her eyes slid to the floor. She knew I wasn’t fine. “I’m sorry for this, sweetie.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said. “I just can’t believe it. I mean, it’s Dad.”

  She let out a shaky breath. “I didn’t wanna believe it, either. But looking back on it, all the signs were there. As soon as he started working those late nights at the office, I should’ve known something was up.”

  I’d noticed he’d been working late a lot, but I didn’t think anything of it. I just figured he had a lot of tax returns to file. Now I realized I was a fool for assuming my dad was an honest guy.

  Mom looked so sad sitting at the edge of my bed, half-drunk, her liquid liner smudged beneath her watery eyes. I knew I never wanted to end up like that, but it seemed impossible to prevent. Sometimes the greatest man in the world could turn out to be a dirty, dirty cheat.

  In a way, maybe the seed for JerkAlert had been planted that night. Maybe, subconsciously, this site was a premeditated scheme to humiliate men who behaved shamefully. But that’s not what I was thinking as I scrolled through the profiles of those twelve philandering assholes. What I was thinking was how happy I was Alex wasn’t one of them.

  I knew this gushy, smitten feeling wouldn’t last forever. I knew he’d eventually disappoint me, in some way or another. But right now, he made me feel fantastic. And I wanted to ride that wave for as long as it would hold me up.

  My gaze dropped to the clock in the corner of my computer screen. 1:04 a.m. An early night for me! I shut down my laptop and headed to the bathroom to brush my teeth. When I returned, the blue light on my phone was flashing. Alex had texted.

  I don’t know if you’re up, but I just finished working, and in case you are, I wanted to say good night.

  Fireworks went off in my chest. Not those simple one-burst wonders, either. These were flaring fountains, the kind that whistle and pop as they spurt every color of the rainbow in a constant stream of exploding light and energy.

  Maybe, I thought, hopefully, naively. Maybe I’ve found myself one of the good ones.

  I returned his kissy-face with some heart-eyes and crawled beneath the covers, cheeks straining from my hundred-watt smile. When the phone buzzed again, I grabbed it with glee, hoping Alex had returned my heart-eyes with an actual heart. But it was from Whit. She’d
sent a link to a YouTube video with the message:

  This is you, rite? I can barely make out the picture, it’s so fucking dark, but I would recognize your voice anywhere.

  She must’ve been wasted, because this text was totally nonsensical. Confused, I tapped the play button. Shadows moved around the screen, silhouettes of people in a dimly lit crowd. There were no distinguishable faces, just hints of movement. The light from someone’s phone screen, the flash of an earring as a head shook.

  Wait, that earring looked familiar.

  A tinny voice rang through my speaker, garbled at first, then clear as day: “The man behind me is rubbing his dick against my backside.”

  Oh, shit.

  With shaky thumbs, I texted back: Where did you find this?

  Twitter, she replied. You’ve gone viral!

  Against my better judgment, I opened the Twitter app. Right there, under “Trends for You,” was the hashtag #DickInTheDark.

  I was internet famous, all because of an unwanted willy.

  8

  I’d never been so grateful for a lack of proper lighting.

  I mean, I wasn’t feeling particularly grateful at the time, when we were trapped in a tunnel with no fresh air and no personal space. And frankly, the power outage was to blame for the very existence of the video; if we hadn’t been stuck there in the dark for so long, that perv wouldn’t have had the opportunity to grind against me, and I wouldn’t have screamed the word dick in the middle of a crowded subway car.

  But at least the darkness concealed my face. So even though my voice may have been internet famous, my identity was still largely a mystery. Only people who knew me really well could listen to a five-second snippet of shouting on a low-res cell phone video and know it came from me. To everyone else, that person with the flashy earring and loud mouth was merely an angry, anonymous shadow.