by Bernie Su
But as I was contemplating Darcy, and reheating noodles for dinner, I got a phone call.
“Lizzie!” Gigi’s voice was almost drowned out by the crowd noise and singing I heard in the background. “I know we just spent the day together, but I’m inviting you to impromptu karaoke! We’re less than two blocks from you.”
“We?” I asked.
“Fitz and Brandon and me . . .” The connection became a little garbled, but I managed to make out, “William had to catch up on paperwork.”
“Oh.” I was strangely (or not strangely?) disappointed.
“Come on! Sing one show tune with me!” she pleaded. “Fitz wants to ask you all about the day and is willing to ply you with mixed drinks for it. He doesn’t believe me when I say you had a good time.”
I looked at the clock. “Okay,” I decided. “One song and drink.”
Gigi squealed and gave me the address.
I have to admit, I’m happy for the distraction. As great as today was, it was also altering. The fact that Darcy wouldn’t be there meant that I could relax.
I’m relieved by it.
And yet, I’m not.
I find myself wanting to see him again. Only hours after he dropped me at my door.
Wow. Do I . . . do I like William Darcy?
No. No, Lizzie, don’t go that far. Pull up on the reins of your imagination.
But I know I could like William Darcy. Which is strange enough.
TUESDAY, JANUARY 29TH
Ode to a Broken Phone
I remember when we first met. You so shiny, so new, so rectangular.
You promised the world to me.
A world of Internet and email, cat memes and Angry Birds.
Alas, I would always root for the pigs.
It was beautiful, the years we grew together,
the phone cases I clothed you in,
the pictures and videos we shot, then deleted.
You could incriminate me, yet you never did.
The notices, the texts, the dings and pings.
All of life’s moments, big and small, we shared.
But our time has come to a sad end.
Gravity has parted us.
One fall on the dock left you seemingly fine, and yet.
And yet.
It began with a garbled connection. The decline.
Miss calls, dropped texts. The downfall.
Something in your insides scrambled, something no longer wired right.
“Don’t worry!
You will be going to a good home.
A farm upstate, with an open field that
will never allow for hard landings.”
But I lie to both of us.
I would say you are irreplaceable, but let’s face it.
We are in the hi-tech capital of the world,
and I can get a new phone as easily as a cup of coffee.
Good-bye, broken phone.
The time we shared has been so sweet.
And I consider your last act a kindness,
sacrificing yourself so two pairs of fingers could meet.
I will miss you—
the small scratch at your bottom left corner,
the volume button that won’t go down.
Good night, sweet phone. Good night.
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 30TH
I’m sitting on a plane bound for home. They’ve made us turn off all electronic devices and I can no longer keep calling Lydia. Although she’s not answering. Twenty-four hours ago, home was the last thing on my mind. Hell, four hours ago, for a brief moment I thought I might be spending tonight at the theater in the company of someone who could be special. But that was before I got the call.
My phone had been on the fritz ever since I dropped it at the pier. The outside seemed fine, but calls quickly became fuzzy, then the type pad wouldn’t work properly, and finally it just wouldn’t turn on. I got a new one, and while I was offline waiting for it to activate and download my settings, the world decided to implode.
“Charlotte?” I said, immediately picking up the phone. “What’s wrong?”
Something had to be wrong. The minute my phone turned on I could see that she’d called me seven times in the last hour.
“Oh, thank God, Lizzie.” She exhaled in relief. “Where have you been?”
“My phone died and I got a new one,” I tried, but she just cut me off.
“It doesn’t matter—Lizzie, get on the Internet. There’s a website.”
“A website of what?”
“They say they have a tape of Lydia. A sex tape.”
“A . . . a sex tape?” I couldn’t believe it. There was no way Lydia would make a sex tape—but, would she?
“The website is asking for subscriptions, and they have a countdown clock, and . . . Lizzie, it’s with George. They’ve been dating,” Charlotte said.
“George. George Wickham?”
And that was when I knew it was real. A sex tape was not beyond the reaches of George’s twisted imagination. And since he could talk an Eskimo into buying ice, I have no doubt he could talk Lydia into this.
“I’m forwarding the link. I think they’re trading on her fame. They call her ‘YouTube Star Lydia Bennet,’ ” Charlotte was saying. “I tried calling Lydia when I couldn’t get through to you, but she didn’t pick up. Lizzie, do you have any idea what’s going on? Do your parents know?”
“No,” I said. But I needed to find out. “No, I’m coming home. I’m coming home right now.”
I hung up and just stared at my phone. Like a bomb about to go off—but it had already exploded.
“Lizzie, what is it?” Darcy asked, beside me.
Yes, because Darcy had been witness to the entire exchange. He’d come into my office to ask me if I wanted to go to the theater that night.
With him. On a date.
After I hung up the phone with Charlotte, the rest is kind of a blur. Except for Darcy. He made me tell him what was going on. He asked me to let him help. But as I opened up that website on my phone, its garish, sparkly text and its picture of Lydia and George smiling at each other in bed, I knew there was nothing he could do. And the only thing I could do now was try to talk some sense into Lydia.
Darcy insisted on putting me on a plane immediately, getting me the first flight out. Which is how I got to here. Sitting on the runway at SFO, unable to keep calling Lydia or Jane (I tried her once but she doesn’t seem to be picking up, either—we Bennet sisters chose a really bad day to simultaneously go offline). Darcy put me into his car and instructed his driver to take me back to the apartment, where I packed up my things in ten minutes before running back out to the car again to make my flight.
I just can’t believe Lydia would do this. That she would make a sex tape, and let George release it online. For what? For money? There’s no amount of money in the world worth letting something that personal exist in the open, and forever.
And I’m at fault for this. I wasn’t holding the camera, but I sure as hell didn’t warn her about George. If I hadn’t been so stupid and stubborn for the past month and actually talked to my sister, I might have seen this coming and been able to stop her.
But how, and why, would George go after Lydia?
She doesn’t have anything, other than a marginal bit of recognition due to the videos—hers and mine.
And that’s my fault, too.
I knew Lydia had been making videos while I was away. Viewers had been tweeting me, imploring me to watch them, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I thought it would just be Lydia being Lydia, blithely irresponsible and floating from one crisis to the next.
I never thought she would ever do anything like this.
I tried to watch one of her videos with George while I was in the airport lounge, waiting to board. But once his smarmy face popped up I couldn’t continue. I just wanted to break through the screen and strangle him. Everything he said was a line. A self-deprecating ploy. My insides were screaming at Lydia, asking why could
n’t she see it?
But then again, I hadn’t seen it at first, either.
I don’t know what I’m going to do when I get home. I don’t know what I’m going to say when I see Lydia.
I just know I need to see her.
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 2ND
I don’t even know where to start.
As bad as it was thinking that Lydia and George made a sex tape and released it, the reality is actually ten times worse.
My presumption that Lydia had known about the website—had signed off on it—was terribly, terribly wrong. If she had known, as disturbing as that would be, at least she would have had some control. Perhaps we would have been able to talk her out of releasing the video when the countdown expires. Which is in about twelve days. God, we only have twelve days to solve this.
No, as bad as my presumption was, that’s not the nightmare scenario. The nightmare scenario is that Lydia didn’t know about the website.
She knew about the tape, of course. She’d participated, but she never dreamed George would do something like this with it. That he’d try to make money off of baring her body and soul to anonymous perverts online.
Because she loves him.
When I came home, no one was here. Lydia still wasn’t picking up, so the only thing I could do was wait. And when Lydia finally did come home . . . I got angry with her. Because I thought . . .
I can’t believe I thought that she knew about it.
When I showed her the website, I watched something inside my little sister break. She became so small and so very, very young. She ran to her room and hasn’t come out since.
That was three days ago.
Thank God I finally got in touch with Jane, and she came home, too. Lydia wasn’t letting me into her room, but I knew she’d let Jane in. She’s been going in once an hour, with ridiculous amounts of tea, just to make sure Lydia is okay.
That she’s not hurting herself.
“Has she eaten anything?” I’d whispered to Jane, as she was preparing her fourth tea tray of the day in the kitchen.
“No, but she did drink a little tea,” Jane whispered back.
“Is she talking to anyone?”
“I know she’s tried to called George. Is still trying,” Jane replied.
“He’s not answering,” I said.
“It’s worse than that. I’ve heard her through the door. She still thinks this is some kind of misunderstanding. Like George got hacked. I think she tried all of his friends, too, but—”
“But he’s nowhere to be found.”
I knew this because I had done the same thing. I had called George’s number a million times, wanting an explanation. I tried everyone I could remember was a friend of his . . . but then I learned he didn’t keep friends very well. Two of his so-called buddies told me that if I found him, to let them know, because George owed them a couple hundred bucks each. I even went down to Carter’s to see if anyone there might have an idea where George went.
Nothing.
“I don’t know what to do anymore,” I whispered to Jane. I was filled with so much impotence and rage. Without George, there was no way of getting the tape back and getting the website shut down. I’d even emailed the company that was listed as creating the site (Novelty Exposures, ugh), sending a DCMA takedown notice on Lydia’s behalf, but didn’t get a reply. Of course. Charlotte says Novelty Exposures is just a shell company, and there’s an entire labyrinth of holding companies and false ISPs that are protecting it from view. We have no idea who actually has the tape.
“I know,” Jane said. “Neither do I.”
“How are we going to get her through this? How are we going to stop him?”
“Stop who?” my dad said from behind us, causing both Jane and me to jump.
“No one,” I chirped, a little too brightly. “We were just discussing something . . . Jane and I saw on television.”
But my dad just shook his head. “Don’t lie to me, Lizzie. Not you.” His eyes flew to Jane. “Why are you home? You have a full-time job and an apartment in Los Angeles.” Then back to me. “Why aren’t you completing your coursework in San Francisco? And why haven’t I seen my youngest daughter or heard her voice in days?”
“Lydia’s not feeling very well,” Jane tried. But it was no use.
“Girls,” Dad said. “Something’s not right here. So, I’m only going to ask this once more. You are either going to tell me what is going on or I am barging into Lydia’s room right now and asking her.”
I looked to Jane. She nodded at me. It was time. We’d both run out of ways to fight this on our own. We needed help. We needed our dad.
But that meant he had to be filled in on some backstory. About the videos.
“Dad,” I sighed. “I don’t even know where to start.”
“Start at the beginning,” he said, softer now. “It will be okay. Whatever it is, you can tell me.”
And so I did.
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 5TH
I don’t want to make another video. I don’t want to expose the inside of myself anymore, or the inside of my family’s lives.
That’s what led to this. Right? My videos led to me being vaguely Internet famous, which led to Lydia being vaguely Internet famous, which led to George thinking he could make money off of her.
But I can’t stop now—contract with my audience, and all.
Besides, the people who watch my videos are almost as invested in our family as we are. Everyone is commenting and asking if Lydia is okay. They care about her. More than I was caring about her for the past couple of months, it seems.
She still hasn’t come out of her room. Jane is still going in there with tea and trays of food.
Maybe I can use the videos. Beg people to not subscribe to the website, and also beg them for help. Who knows, maybe some tech genius is watching and knows how to take down a website. That’s what I keep praying for. In fact, it’s gone down a couple of times now. But never for long. It pops right back up, like an evil hedgehog.
I don’t know how to stop this from happening.
But Dad is doing everything in his power to try to fix it—which, we’ve discovered, is not easy. Dad talked to Uncle Phil—under the strictest of lawyer-client privilege so Mom, his sister-in-law, won’t find out. Uncle Phil is a tax attorney, so I don’t know how much he can help in reality, but he did some digging.
Since the website is subscription based, nothing illegal has been posted yet. Apparently authorities can act only after something happens, not before. Dad says he’s going to talk to a friend who’s a private investigator and see if he can find George. But George has practically disappeared off the face of the earth.
He is incredibly slick. More slick than I think I gave him credit for. I keep thinking back to when I challenged him to watch my videos in the grocery store, so he’d know how much I no longer liked him. Then I have to wonder, did he go after Lydia to get revenge on me for it? No. That’s too self-centered. He just knew Lydia was an easy target for someone like him.
Because she was alone.
Because I gave her a book, and we got into a stupid fight, and I left her alone.
I just did the math and realized—the day the countdown ends and the website goes live? Valentine’s Day.
As if we needed further proof that George Wickham is a sadistic asshole.
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 8TH
Among the other shitty things to have happened recently, Jane lost her job. Her coming back home to help her family during one of the busiest times of the fashion year did not go over well with her new boss. Or her now new ex-boss.
She loved that job. And I bet more money than I have in my bank account that she was the best thing to happen at that office, too. However, even knowing how much losing her job sucks, I can’t help but be grateful that she’s here. She’s the only one who makes any sense.
She’s also better at handling Mom—who is still in the dark about most things, including my videos and the sex tape. Whil
e it is hard to believe that anyone could be so oblivious about the goings-on right under her nose, here is a sampling of things my mother said at last night’s dinner table:
“With Lydia’s hair and young George’s physique, their babies will look just like Prince Harry. Oh, we’ll have our own little princes and princesses in the family!”
“Do you see how distraught your sister is when her boyfriend leaves town for just a few days, Lizzie? That’s what love looks like. Men like a certain show of devotion. Something you should learn.”
“Now, Jane, I insist you take some of these mashed potatoes up to Lydia tonight. I know, I know, she’s ‘under the weather.’ But I will not have her wasting away for want of her George.”
While I was boiling over, Jane simply hummed to Mom her assent and deftly changed the subject to a more innocuous topic. Like global nuclear politics.
We’ve all been debating whether or not to bring Mom into the fold. Part of me wants her to know, so she would at least stop being George’s champion, but the other part of me knows how she’ll react—if the wailing and couch-fainting she did when Bing left is any indication, this would be incapacitating. Dad agrees, because having to clue Mom in would simply hinder any progress on getting the website taken down.
I use the word “progress” liberally, because there has been none. George is still missing. The website countdown is still going on. And Lydia still won’t let anyone in her room but Jane.
Which is another reason I’m glad Jane is here.
I feel so useless.
But Jane did something else. She challenged me to sit down and watch Lydia’s videos with George. My previous aborted attempt ended with my stomach churning and me looking for a Matrix-like ability to climb through video screens and beat George bloody. But Jane says Lydia and I have more in common than we realize. That we’re both stubborn, and would rather talk to the Internet at large than to each other.
So that’s what I’m going to do. I’ve got the videos queued up, and I am as prepared as I can be.
* * *
Wow. I . . .
I need a minute.