by Kate Rorick
Quinn loved Martha Stewart. When other ten-year-old girls were squealing about *NSYNC coming to Dayton on tour, she was sighing over Martha’s latest magazine. In her distracted mother’s house, Martha had become the ever patient, steady maternal force that had shaped Quinn’s worldview.
So when Martha Stewart Living magazine had called and asked for a walk-through of the Beacon Hill house and its redesign plans, Quinn had nearly died. When they said they were going to do a six-page spread in their January issue of the finished house, Quinn required a defibrillator.
“They’re here?!” Quinn said with glee. “The questions? Oh my god. Why didn’t you tell me first thing?”
“Quinn, there’s something else—you have to see—”
“Later, Sutton. I have an email from Martha Stewart to read!” She practically skipped to her office, leaving Sutton, and whatever drama was consuming her, in slack-jawed astonishment.
Quinn closed the door to her office and only then allowed herself to rush to her desk and boot up her computer.
It was then that the little red ball on her work email inbox caught her eye.
That couldn’t be right—497 messages? Granted, she was in the final stages of the Beacon Hill house, with a million little decisions to be made and a million and one things that could go wrong, but that was still about four hundred more emails than she was expecting.
A dazzling thought occurred to her. Maybe her Instagram post with the spaceship costume had lots and lots of likes. Maybe it went “viral,” as the kids said.
But . . . no, all of those emails would have gone to her personal email, not her work, and her personal email only had . . .
Quinn blinked. Refreshed the screen. How . . .
Her personal email had six hundred more messages.
For the first time, Quinn began to have a queasy, sour feeling in her stomach. Something very strange was going on, and her gut told her it wasn’t good.
She went into her personal email first.
They were mostly social media notifications.
Strange, her social media was mostly limited to Instagram—just for photos of her design work and the occasional cutie-pie Halloween pic of Hamilton. She had Facebook, but didn’t really give a fig about whatever high school acquaintance was pregnant, divorcing, or Republican. Twitter seemed filled with angry political activists and Snapchat was full of silly filters that made you look like an anime cat. Life was simply too short to get caught up in all of that nonsense. Quinn much preferred reality, being present in her own life.
So why did she have so many social media notifications?
She apprehensively opened up her Facebook.
The very first thing in her feed was a video. Called “Halloween Mom.”
And there was a message under it. From one of her Facebook “friends.”
* * *
Hey, Quinn—long time! When I first saw this I thought it was you! Ha ha!
* * *
The video started to autoplay.
It took several seconds for Quinn to realize what she was looking at. She recognized the schoolyard first. The historic old barn that loomed on one side of the foreground. Then heard the voice.
“Oh. My . . .”
And then . . .
“Holy fuck,” Quinn said.
Chapter Four
Oh my god, Daisy—what did you do?”
The question had been running through Daisy’s head for forty-eight hours straight. It had been playing on a panic loop from the second she opened Twitter on Sunday morning, hoping to see her friends’ reactions to Carrie’s Princess Leia costume. But instead of being greeted by the dopamine hit of hearts and likes to her picture series of Carrie, she found herself looking at a video.
Her video.
The Video.
On Twitter. How the hell was it on Twitter? Maybe it was a glitch, maybe her phone was malfunctioning, maybe she was still half asleep . . .
Although, she was very much awake at the moment. And that video . . . it was posted by a mommy blog she followed, that had reposted it from somewhere else. It had a caption beneath it: “Halloween takes another soul.”
And of course, a ton of views. Somewhere in the vicinity of eighteen million. And climbing.
And then . . . there were the comments.
* * *
Who the hell would do this? People are awful!
* * *
What a bitch.
* * *
Someone call CPS?
* * *
When you need a coffee and a 47 hour massage, ha ha ha.
* * *
This kid’s exhibit A in therapy, no doubt.
* * *
Halloween is a Godless time, and should not be celebrated, it should be condemned! At The Soul of Goodness Church, we–
* * *
The comments blended together after that, but Daisy got the gist.
She’d sprung out of bed. Everyone in the house was still asleep, thankfully. She typed a text into her phone—but in LA it was pre-dawn, and everyone would definitely still be asleep. But she couldn’t wait. So she did the unthinkable, something reserved only for emergencies or the insane.
She called.
Sarah Prime had picked up on the fourth ring, sounding like a corpse resurrected from the dead.
“This had better not be some fucking robocall . . . ,” Sarah croaked out.
“It’s me, Sarah—what the hell happened?” she said in a whispered rush.
“Daisy?” Sarah’s voice was immediately awake. “What is it? What’s wrong? Is it Carrie?”
“It’s the video!”
“The . . . video?” The grogginess was back.
“The one I . . .” The house heating system made a clunking noise, causing Rob to start, then roll over and go back to sleep. Daisy began to creep up the stairs, away from him. “The one I showed you. It’s all over the internet.”
“It’s . . . what?”
“All. Over. The. Internet. Go online, check it out.”
“Hold on,” Sarah said, and Daisy waited impatiently, looking blankly into the fridge for some breakfast while Sarah got online.
“Oh! Uh . . . Morning, Daisy,” she heard a startled Grandpa Bob say as he froze on his way down the steps. He was wearing a ratty old robe, which he was hastily tying shut to hide the tighty-whities he wore. Daisy turned quickly, but they both knew she’d seen.
“Erm, morning, Grandpa Bob,” she said, “can I make you some coffee?”
“Ah, no, I’m okay. Just gonna get the paper.” He ambled past her toward the front door, throwing it open to the harsh autumn air. As he retrieved his paper, and made for the bathroom just off the kitchen, he gave her a sheepish smile. “I, uh, forgot how cozy this house was, living by myself.”
She smiled back as he shut the door. She willed herself to ignore the grunts and shuffles coming from that small room (Turn. On. The. Fan), as Sarah Prime’s voice came back to her.
“I found it. Okay . . . so . . . it’s online.”
“It’s not just online, it got picked up by a mommy blog I follow, that means it’s going viral, and oh my god I just showed it to you, I didn’t mean for it to go on the internet!” Daisy hissed. “What did you do?”
“Nothing! I just showed it to Allie and Juliana—”
“Why would you do that?”
“Uh, because you said I could,” Sarah Prime bit out. “Just calm down, okay?”
“Calm down?” Everything spilled out of her in a rush. “I have to, like . . . live here now! That kid is in Carrie’s class at school, that mom runs the Parent Association, and it’s on the internet now!?”
“Daisy, I didn’t post it!”
“One of you guys did!”
“None of us would do that,” Sarah said, but Daisy wasn’t so sure. They didn’t know. They didn’t get it. The delicate social balance of parenting that Daisy was blundering through. The high school atmosphere that permeated the parents of preschoolers. The ne
ed to protect, to be polite. Judgementalness came in the parenthood starter pack.
The baseline was that one of them thought it was funny and didn’t think about the consequences. For Daisy. For Carrie. For the kid on the video. Even for Quinn Barrett.
It took her a minute because she didn’t want Sarah to hear the quiver of a sob that would no doubt escape if she did anything other than breathe.
“Daisy, don’t worry—we’ll figure out what happened, okay?”
Daisy took another deep breath. “Okay.”
And they did figure it out. Sarah had roused the troops. It was so early in LA, and still basically Halloween, not everyone had gone to sleep yet. Juliana was still out. Allie was still drunk.
And Allie’s drunkenness turned out to be the culprit. She was the only one who’d shared the video.
“I’m soooooooo sorrrrry, Daze,” Allie said, practically weeping on the phone. “I showed the video to Vanesssss . . . Vanessa . . . she was freaking out about being a good stepmom—like, she’s not even married to S’bastian, she’s not really a mom, you know? So I showed her your video, and then like, I was at a party last night—no, wait . . . two nights ago? Ugh, I was a butterfly, but like a cool one, Jules did my makeup, it was awesome.”
“Allie, stay on point,” Daisy clipped out.
“Right . . . right. I was at a party and Vanessa texted and asked if I could send her the video so she could show it to someone. I figured you wouldn’t mind because you shared it with us, right? I thought she was gonna show it to S’bastard or somebody, not like . . . the world.”
Daisy wanted to rail against Allie. But what Allie said stopped her. Daisy’d been the one to share the video with her friends. She didn’t delete it like she’d told herself she would.
She could have laid into her friend, but that would have been passing the buck—and the buck belonged all to Daisy.
“Thanks, Allie,” she said instead. The sky had been well awake by then, she could hear Carrie stirring in her bedroom, and Grandpa Bob’s flush and fan (thankfully) switched on, indicating he was done with the paper. “I just need to figure out how to handle it now.”
But as Sunday moved into Monday, she began to realize there was nothing she could do. It had been shared so widely, that taking one down—even the first one—wasn’t going to do anything. Allie had said she’d try to coax Vanessa into taking down her original post (it tried for relatable with, “Found this online! We’ve all had one of these days, right, mommies and stepmommies?”), but Vanessa was incredibly touchy about being told she was wrong, as Allie said.
By the time she picked up Carrie after school on Monday, it was with the increasingly claustrophobic weight of knowing that everyone had seen the video, and she was the one to blame for it.
“Oh my god, Daisy—what did you do?”
Yes, Daisy had been asking herself that question all weekend. But this was the first time someone else had asked it.
“Shanna,” Daisy said in a rushed whisper. “I don’t . . . I can’t . . .”
Daisy grabbed at Shanna’s arm, and pulled her down the hall, away from the other parents doing pickup. Everyone else was talking in excited whispers with each other—no doubt having seen the video—so Daisy and Shanna went unnoticed. She opened a random door—it was that little closet-room place that was used for Parent Association storage. And it was blissfully empty.
For a second, Daisy couldn’t do anything but stare at Shanna. And then she threw her arms around the other woman.
Shanna stiffened in shock, but then relented and patted Daisy’s back. It was a small relief—in truth, Daisy had completely forgotten that she’d lied to Shanna and said she hadn’t taped anything at the parade. But Shanna had no doubt sussed out that little lie the second the video hit her Facebook feed.
After a moment, Shanna pulled back. “Okay, that’s more groping in a closet than I’ve done since middle school. Daisy, what happened?”
Daisy gave her the full rundown. Feeling isolated, talking to her friends late at night, and just showing them the video, and then someone else showed it to someone else and it got posted.
“And I don’t know what to do now. How do I fix this? I have to tell her, right? I have to tell them it was me?”
“No!” was the immediate answer, so sharp that Daisy jumped. “You should have called me the second it happened,” Shanna said, brushing a wisp of perfect straight blond hair out of her eyes.
“Why? Do you know how to get a video taken down?” Shanna was a lawyer or had been before taking leave to stay at home. Maybe there was some legal maneuver . . .
“Well, no . . . but I could help you strategize. Figure out what to say. Maybe call one of my colleagues. And the very last thing you can do is tell anyone!”
Shanna’s whisper was so fierce that Daisy actually took a step back. And bumped into a large Tupperware container filled with what looked like balls for a ball pit. “Why?” Daisy asked. “What good comes from keeping it secret?”
“Uh, it protects you?” Shanna replied. “You don’t know Quinn Barrett. I do. And if she’s not calling her lawyers right now, trying to place injunctions and figure out who to sue, then I’m Kim freaking Kardashian. I don’t know a ton about the internet, legally, but I do know it’s basically the wild west when it comes to privacy laws.”
Who to sue. Daisy hadn’t even considered the idea. Oh god, could she be sued?
“Not to mention,” Shanna continued, “I’m in the video. That’s my voice. She could come after me, too!” Shanna took a deep breath. “You really, really should have called me.”
Cold dread trickled down her spine. “You think she would do that?”
Shanna just shrugged, her face smoothing over noncommittally. “I wouldn’t put it past her. She and Jamie were co-chairs of the Parent Association last year.”
“They were?”
“And he used to say that he’d never known anyone more relentless than Quinn Barrett. He kept saying it like it was a good thing,” she scoffed. “Honestly, he could have done that job by himself, in his sleep. He didn’t need to get tangled up with her.”
Daisy’s brow furrowed. “Tangled up?”
“Quinn Barrett, and her demands for the Parent Association—for the ‘kids,’” Shanna said, complete with air quotes, “dominated our lives for about a year. Every single day when I got home from work, Jamie was up to his elbows in something Quinn Barrett told him to do. Honestly, if Little Wonders wasn’t the best preschool in Needleton I would have transferred Jordan out, to someplace that put her needs first, instead of one parent on a power trip.”
Daisy took that in, not entirely believing Shanna. Ignoring the contradiction inherent in that claim, Shanna was the one who had raved about Little Wonders when Daisy and Rob first moved, and insisted that Jamie pull strings to get them in.
Life in Needleton was a lot of things—overwhelming, overstarched, overperfected—but Little Wonders had been an oasis of normal. A place that felt safe for Carrie. And ever since the Scary Thing™, that feeling of safety was rare and precious.
“Still,” Daisy said, trying to steer the conversation back to her main problem, “relentless isn’t the same as litigious. What did Jamie say about the video?”
At that, Shanna’s eyes narrowed. “He said, ‘Whoa, it looks like Quinn didn’t have her coffee that morning.’”
“Did he talk to her?” Daisy asked. “If they worked together all last year . . .”
“No. They don’t speak,” was the clipped reply. Then turning it around on Daisy, Shanna asked, “What did Rob say? About the video. Oh god, don’t tell me you told him you posted it.”
“No!” Daisy said. Her heart jolted at the thought. “I don’t even know if he’s seen it. I spent the last two days avoiding his stare so much he’s been asking if I’m all right, looking at me like I’m hiding something.”
Which, to be fair, she was.
She was such a terrible liar when it came to Rob. But who know
s—he was so busy getting situated at work, he probably wouldn’t notice just one more layer to his wife’s eternal discomfort.
“Good,” Shanna nodded. “There’s no reason he should ever know.”
“Shanna, if Quinn decides to sue me, then Rob definitely is going to have to know.”
“All the more reason to not tell anyone you took it. It can’t be traced to you, right?”
She didn’t think so, but . . . who knew?
“It’s not just Quinn you don’t want to know—all the other parents would hate you, too. To think you would post something so personal and awful online?”
“But I didn’t post—”
“Does it matter?”
Daisy didn’t even have to think about that one. No, it did not.
“You’re still very new. People don’t know how to relate to you yet.”
“. . . relate to me?”
Shanna’s eyes flicked to Daisy’s blue hair, to the sliver of swirling ink exposed from her sweater falling off her shoulder. “A lot of these people are stiff-upper-lip types. They haven’t met many people like you. I don’t think this video is what you want to be known for.” Shanna bit her lip, her eyes filled with concern. “The school administration may decide Carrie would be better off somewhere else.”
Daisy felt the walls of the tiny storage space closing in on her, crushing her like a garbage compactor. She had worried so much about herself, she hadn’t even thought about how it would affect Carrie.
Shanna was right. Should the truth come to light, even if the school administration didn’t kick them out, Carrie would still be ostracized. No birthday party invitations, no playdates.