Want to Go Private?

by Sarah Darer Littman

  “I need to talk to Luke. I’m sure he can explain all this.”

  I feel Mom stiffen next to me.

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible, Abby,” Agent Saunders says. “And even if it were, I’m sure Schmidt’s lawyer wouldn’t allow it. Nor would I advise it.”

  Hearing that Luke has a lawyer brings home to me even more how much trouble he’s in. All because of me.

  “How did you first meet this man?” Mom asks.

  But I know the question she’s really asking: Where did Dad and I go wrong?

  “It was the website I go on all the time, ChezTeen.com. I talk to all kinds of people on there. That’s the whole point of the site, to talk to people.”

  “I thought you only chatted to people you actually know in real life,” Mom says. “That’s what they tell us you should do in all the PTA talks about safe use of the Internet.”

  I roll my eyes.

  “But, Mom, this site is different from, like, Facebook. They have the latest movie trailers, new music videos, and virtual concerts and things like that, and you can talk to other people about all that stuff.”

  “And it’s geared to teens, and whenever a site brings teens, it attracts predators, unfortunately,” Agent Saunders explains with a sigh. “We try as hard as we can to keep up, but new sites pop up constantly, and teens migrate to them.” She looks at Mom. “And as you saw in this case, when the servers aren’t in this country, we have a real problem getting timely access to the information we need to protect a child from harm.”

  “Luke would never harm me!” I protest. “You don’t understand him. He really cares about me. He …”

  I’m about to say “he loves me” but both Maura and Agent Saunders are looking at me with pity in their eyes like You poor gullible kid, that’s what they all think.

  Well, fuck them. They’re wrong. I know they are. I need Luke so bad. I want to call him, but they’ve taken away the cell phone he gave me as “evidence.” I can’t e-mail him because they took away my laptop as “evidence,” too. I might not ever get it back, even. How much does that suck? And there’s no way in hell Mom and Dad are ever going to buy me another one after this. They’ve taken my underpants as “evidence.” I’m surprised they haven’t stuck me in one of their stupid plastic bags and marked me as “evidence,” too.

  Agent Saunders takes out another piece of paper from her folder, and hands it to me facedown. “Abby, does this look familiar?”

  I turn it over and the bagel I ate for breakfast threatens to come back up. It’s a picture of me, topless, in my bedroom. It looks like …

  “Where did you get this?”

  “Our agents downloaded it from a child porn site. Edmund Schmidt uploaded it, along with several other pictures of you. The ‘Abby series’ is being discussed in pedophile chat rooms.”

  She waits while I stare at the picture. I wrap my arms around myself and rock back and forth, as if the motion can bring me back to being a baby, before all this happened.

  “I’m afraid it gets worse, Abby,” she says.

  Worse? What could possibly be worse? No … No …

  “You’re so beautiful, baby. I need to capture the moment when every sweet inch of you finally belongs to me….” — fingers hard on my chin, turning my face toward the video camera — “Stop bawling, baby, and look like you enjoy it!”

  The next morning, he leaves me in the motel room while he goes to buy breakfast, and he takes the camera with him “in case I accidentally push the ERASE button on the best moment of his life, ever.”

  He wouldn’t. Not Luke. He loves me. He said it was just for him, for us, because I was so beautiful.

  Maura comes and sits on my other side as Agent Saunders takes out a small laptop and opens it. She pushes PLAY and there I am naked, on that ugly plaid bedspread in that crappy motel room, my legs spread wide, and Luke is saying all the things he’s going to do to me. The video Abby says something — it’s hard to tell what because my words are so slurred — and Luke laughs and holds my head while he gets me to drink some more. Then he …

  “STOP IT! Make it stop!”

  I feel dizzy, because the floor has just collapsed under my world. Luke did this? My Luke, who said he loved me? Luke, who said I was his special girl? He put pictures of me on the Internet, on porn sites, for perverts to see? He put that video up for everyone and anyone to see under the caption: VIRGIN PUSSY GETS SLAMMED so HARD SHE CRIES.

  This isn’t real. This can’t be happening. It’s a bad dream and I’m going to wake up and it’ll all go away and life will be normal again.

  Mom’s hand covers her mouth as she stares at my image frozen on the screen, like she’s trying to hold in the guts she’s about to puke out from the sight of her oldest daughter losing her virginity for everyone and anyone to see.

  Then it’s like she visibly tries to put on her Mom Face.

  “Are you okay, honey?” she asks. “You look pale. Do you want some tea?”

  She can’t look at me. She can’t wait to escape from my presence; she needs some excuse to be away from me, because what she’s seen disgusts her so much.

  No, I’m not okay, Mom. No, I don’t want tea. I just want to be Abby again, not some Internet porn star with my own “series.”

  “This has got to be an awful shock for you, Abby,” Maura says. “And it must feel like a terrible betrayal.”

  “Can you … take it … take them … down?” I ask, my voice shaking. The thought of all these perverts out there looking at me, looking at pictures of me that were meant only for Luke, makes me want to go run to the shower and scrub my skin until it hurts.

  “We will make attempts to get these images and the video taken off the servers,” Agent Saunders says. “But the problem with most of these child porn sites is that they’re not located in the United States, so we have no jurisdiction.”

  “That’s the same problem that we had when we were trying to find you, Abby,” Mom tells me. “The server thing. If it weren’t for Faith being able to guess your password, we might not have found you in time.”

  Faith. How did she guess? Well, duh. I suppose if anyone was going to be able to hack my account, it would be Faith. She knows the way I think better than anybody. Except for Luke. But I bet even Faith couldn’t imagine me being an Internet porn queen.

  What happens if people at school find out about this? I might as well just die now.

  I reach deep inside for my numbness blanket but it’s gone. I’m forced to feel and what I’m feeling is so overwhelmingly awful that I wish I could rip my skin off. Maybe that would make me feel less dirty.

  Agent Saunders starts asking me questions about Edmund Schmidt again. I still feel like she’s talking about a different person, that it’s this horrible Schmidt guy from Boston who took the pictures of me and put them online, not my boyfriend, Luke, the one who loves me, who tells me I’m his special girl.

  “You weren’t the only girl he was chatting with, Abby,” Agent Saunders says. “Schmidt had chats going with at least four other girls, from the ages of twelve through fifteen, from all over the country.”

  Her words shatter me like a plate-glass window. I don’t know what hurts me more — the pictures and videos of me being posted online or the realization that if Agent Sanders is telling me the truth, then everything Luke said to me is a lie. Which makes me the world’s Biggest Fucking Idiot, as well as someone whose half-naked photos are being gawked at — and probably worse, gross — by a bunch of perverted weirdos. And whose loss of virginity is now a major motion picture of the porn world.

  How could you do this to me, Luke? You said you loved me, that I was your girl. Is that what you were saying to all these other girls, too?

  I don’t realize that tears are streaming down my face until Maura hands me a bunch of tissues.

  “Abby, we realize this is incredibly difficult for you,” Maura says. “But the more you can tell us about him, it’ll help us to make sure that he doesn’t do t
his to anyone else.”

  I don’t care about anyone else right now. I just want to go to bed and pull the covers over my head and never have to face anyone ever again. I just want to never have to feel anything, ever. I just want to be numb. Forever.

  “Maybe we should take a break,” Mom says. “Are you sure you don’t want anything to eat, sweetheart? Or to drink?”

  I just shake my head, covering my face with my hands to try and block them all out. To block everything out. To try to find the comfort of nothingness again.

  CHAPTER 30

  FAITH DECEMBER 12

  “So, what happened with Abby? Did, like, she get raped or something?”

  If another person asks me that, I’m going to scream. It’s been like this all day. I told two people, Gracie and Billy, that Abby had been found and was home, and all of a sudden it’s like the whole school knows and turned it into “Abby got raped.”

  The thing is, I don’t even know what happened to her. Mom’s taking me over to see Abby after school, but she said I shouldn’t ask her, that if Abby wants to speak about her “traumatic experiences,” she will, in her own time. But I’m her best friend and if it weren’t for me, they wouldn’t have found her. She has to tell me.

  This whole Luke thing — I can’t believe it all happened in the first place, that she would be stupid enough to run off with this guy. Abby’s usually so smart about everything, way smarter than me. How could she fall for a creep like him?

  “It’s none of your business,” I tell anyone who asks what happened to Abby.

  They all probably heard on the news that the police arrested Edmund Schmidt, age thirty-two, of Boston, Massachusetts. They’ve all probably seen Abby’s eighth-grade yearbook picture, the one she hated, on their TV screen. But it’s not like any of them were such good friends to her before.

  When Nick Peters and Amanda Armitage come up to me in the hallway and start peppering me with questions about Abby, I finally blow.

  “What do you care?” I shout at Nick. “You couldn’t even remember her freaking name, you moron!”

  I burst into tears and run for the bathroom. Gracie follows me.

  “OMG, Faith, you should have seen Nick’s face,” she says, laughing. “I don’t think any girl has ever called him a moron before. And Amanda … she looked like she just drank a diarrhea milk shake.”

  “It’s not as if they even like Abby,” I say, grabbing some toilet paper to blow my nose. “Amanda’s been a total witch to us for as long as I can remember. They just want gossip, that’s all.”

  “Can you blame them, Faith?” Grace says. “Seriously. This is the biggest thing that’s happened at Roosevelt High ever. There are TV cameras outside.”

  “But … can you imagine what it’s going to be like for Abby to come back to school? I can barely stand it today and it’s not me that it’s happened to.”

  Gracie looks away.

  “Look, Faith, you’re probably going to be really mad at me for saying this, but I’m going to say it anyway. Maybe Abby should have thought about that before she ran away with that Internet creep. I mean, seriously. What was she thinking?”

  I feel this rush of anger at Grace, but when she meets my eyes, finally, it fades away because the truth is, I’m wondering the same thing.

  CHAPTER 31

  ABBY DECEMBER 13

  Mom and Dad still aren’t letting me out of their sight, other than to shower and go to the bathroom. Faith came over last night to bring me homework. At first it was really awkward. Like, I know she wanted to ask me what happened and did he do stuff and all the gory details, but how can I possibly tell Faith about how I’m now the star of a “series” of naked pictures on a child porn site? About how the video of me losing my cherry is being watched by perverts around the world.

  I feel like the dirtiest filth on earth and I love Faith too much to contaminate her. She’s still a normal girl. That’s something I’ll never be, ever again.

  But then she just looked at me and said, “Oh, Abby, I was so scared!” and she threw her arms around me and hugged me and I felt her shoulders shaking.

  Did I say dirtiest filth on earth? I meant in the universe. I’m this awful scum of a person who has let everyone down, especially the people who are closest to her.

  “I’m sorry, Faith,” I said, starting to cry myself. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  She lifted her head, tears tracing the freckles on her cheeks.

  “You don’t know what it was like, not knowing … and imagining … You hear all these stories of girls being tortured in basements or getting cut up in wood chippers and —”

  “Look, I’m here and unchipped, okay?”

  “Okay. I’m so glad you’re safe, Abs.”

  She looked like she was about to start crying again so I asked her how things were going with Ted. Turns out that wasn’t such a good idea.

  “Not so well. We … kind of broke up.”

  “What? I thought things were going so well?”

  “They were,” Faith said. Suddenly, she couldn’t meet my eyes. “But …”

  “But, what?”

  There was this awkward silence, in which it seemed like Faith was trying to figure out what to say, but then she finally just looked me straight in the eye and said, “The thing is, Abby, when you ran off with this guy without telling anyone, I felt so awful, because before you never would have done something like that without telling me. And if you had told me, maybe I could have talked you out of it.”

  I opened my mouth to try to tell her that no one could have changed my mind about going to meet Luke, that it was like my destiny or something, but she held up her hand and continued.

  “But I was so wrapped up with the play and Ted that I wasn’t there for you.”

  Tears flooded her eyes and she grasped both of my hands.

  “Ted … Well, he said stuff about you and we had this huge fight and broke up.”

  She shakes her head as if to erase the memory.

  “But … I’m just … I’m so sorry, Abs. I’m sorry for being such a bad friend.”

  Guilt doesn’t even begin to describe what I felt right then. Faith was so happy with Ted and now they’ve broken up because of me and she’s apologizing to me for it? Lily’s right. She was happy to see me when I got back, but it didn’t take too long afterward before she proceeded to tell me how badly I’ve screwed everything up for everyone.

  “You’re not a bad friend, Faith. You’re the best.”

  I hugged her and even though I’d felt angry at her before I went away with Luke, I felt closer to her then than I ever had.

  “So … what are people saying about me?” I asked.

  The flush on Faith’s face told me that whatever people were saying, it probably wasn’t anything I wanted to hear. But I need to know the worst. At some point, I have to go back to school.

  “I don’t know…. I …” She didn’t meet my eyes.

  “Come on, Faith. Just tell me. I’m going to find out sooner or later.”

  Faith took a deep breath and looked straight at me.

  “People keep asking me if he raped you and stuff. I told them it wasn’t any of their business. But people want to know …” She swallowed. “But I want to know how you could go off with some creep from the Internet that you never met before in your life. How someone as smart as you could do something that stupid.”

  Each word felt like a needle, piercing my skin. But Faith wasn’t done.

  “What I really, really need to know, Abs,” she said, tears welling in her eyes, “is why didn’t you tell me? Maybe if we’d talked …”

  “You were busy,” I mumbled, feeling like the biggest piece of shit in the world. “With the play and everything. Things were different and I …”

  “But we’re still best friends, right? And best friends tell each other stuff. Especially important stuff like they’re thinking of running off with some guy they met over the Internet.”

  “It wasn’t like th
at, Faith. You don’t understand. Nobody does.”

  “So explain it to me, Abby. Make me understand.”

  I took a deep breath and tried to figure out how to begin.

  “Like I said, you were busy and I guess I was feeling, I don’t know, lonely and … like … well, Luke listened to me. It was like he knew me better than anybody, and understood exactly what I was going through.”

  I could tell Faith was upset at the “knew me better than anybody” thing. I guess I could see why. We were always the ones who knew each other better than anybody.

  “But couldn’t you see he was just pretending?” Faith asked. “You know, whatever they call it … ‘grooming’ you?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” I told her. “It really felt like …”

  The loss hit me suddenly, and I was crying hard over the loss of something I never really had.

  “It felt like he loved me, Faith. But he didn’t. He was telling all these other girls he loved them, too. I’m just an idiot. A dirty, brainless idiot, who’s screwed up everyone’s lives.”

  Faith was hugging me and our tears mingled where our cheeks touched.

  “Oh, Abs, you’re not dirty. And you haven’t screwed up everyone’s lives.”

  But Faith doesn’t know the half of it. She doesn’t know that I’m the star of the “Abby Series” on all these child porn sites.

  She doesn’t know that I’m a “celebrity” just like Paris Hilton now, with my own personal sex tape. She doesn’t know about the stuff that happened in those dingy one-star motel rooms while I was away with Luke.

  “What about you and Ted?”

  She sighed.

  “I guess it wasn’t meant to work out. It’s pretty awkward still being on stage crew with him. But, whatever.”

  “I’m scared to go back to school, Faith. I mean, it was bad enough before, but now … ”

  “I’ll be there for you, Abs. I’ll always be there for you. And this time, don’t forget it.”