The Last Kid Left

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  “Uh, I guess.”

  “Sorry. Thanks so much.”

  Ten minutes later, as she drives back to Madbury in the slanting midday light, she of course is not sorry. Screw that. Overrun with emotions, yes—but remorse isn’t one of them. Though it’s possible that she just wrote a bad check for a fourteen-dollar sandwich.

  But even the psychology behind that drama, in that school play, whose script combines all the insight of her morning’s profound realizations, warrants way less than ten thousand words.

  * * *

  Of all the jobs and stories, everything she’s done so far in journalism, the most popular and controversial thing Leela Mann ever wrote was an essay for Salon regarding why she had yet to take a picture of herself. A simple fact that was and remains true, no matter that she is web-savvy and tech-positive, for one easy reason, being ninety percent honest, that she’s never felt so inclined.

  In college, at the newspaper, she wrote about academic politics and housing practices. Sorority hazing. The sex lives of Muslim students. A series of album reviews where she interviewed her dad on the phone after she made him listen to new music. Predictably he loved Taylor Swift. Unpredictably he didn’t hate Gucci Mane. “This guy is telling his stories!” Her best piece of work involved attending a state fair in Sussex County, to report on a pig scramble, which she wrote from three different points of view—the pig farmer, the public, the pig—and won herself a hundred-dollar gift card from the Journalism Department.

  But after college, while she hustled her ass in the off-hours to get things published in various places around the web, none of it appeared to be much good. Also, little was for money, at least not much money. Articles on fan fic. Fan fic on fan fic. Recaps of other people’s recaps of trashy shows.

  She once wrote a personal essay on the Chinese New Year that occurs in a young lady’s intestinal tract when the lady’s trying to survive on lentil soup—but no one seemed interested in that one.

  On the whole, during lunch, during the long subway rides to and from work, when she thought about her ambitions, her daydreams always dressed like nightmares. Her labor was for nothing, was how it felt. Then one day an assistant editor at a site suggested, via email, how about something on growing up as a girl and South-Asian-diaspora-ish in New England? So she wrote it. It ran. It was fine. But then another editor got in touch, at another site, and she asked her to do it again, just slightly different. Quickly, it became a trough. It even paid! By now a half dozen articles, at least, including her one writing foray during her internship at BuzzFeed, in the personal-essays vertical, about the time she’d made out with a guy at a loft party in Gowanus because he smelled like her mother’s cooking.

  It turned out that he lived in Crown Heights, his only window was right above an Indian restaurant’s exhaust system. And she’d basically known she’d hook up with him for narrative’s sake before they even kissed. But the kiss wasn’t bad.

  The reality was that editors, many editors, loved themselves some apples-on-apples. No matter that they knew, and she knew, and they knew she knew, and everyone knew that everyone knew, that it was all so much editorial racial profiling. Still, Indian ancestry was a good thing. Wasn’t she only sort of miffed about the profiling thing anyway, if it came to her career? Maybe she’d start a club online: Sorta-angry Indian girls, who are basically not Indian at all, unite! Kind of!

  For whatever reason—and there were many, which she’d discussed extensively with friends—a Leela Mann byline was simply perceived to be better equipped to critique whatever Aziz Ansari did next, no matter that she was from New Hampshire and liked to ski. And even though she did have a couple problems with all of that, she kept them to herself. After all, she needed to start somewhere. And the money wasn’t bad.

  But the Salon story was unusual. It had almost nothing to do with ethnicity. For a long time, posing in photographs had made her uncomfortable, profoundly. Her father was an amateur photographer. Since they were little, she and her brother had been dressed and posed at his whim. Family vacations were for touring Civil War battle sites—Gettysburg, Manassas—and they were made to wear little blue kepi caps. Even though maybe fifty South Asians fought for the North? He still loved it, made them pose by every monument, of which there were hundreds, thousands, and she hated it every time, the trapped heat, the self-consciousness, the weirdness of it all.

  To this day she hates to stand before a camera, smartphone or otherwise. All the pressure to fake-smile, lips shiny, eyes aglisten. Everyone having such a good time. While a tiny part of her feels like they’re commemorating the Union dead.

  And so, also, yes, she never really loved her nose. She’ll admit to having nice legs, and long fingers for someone who’s barely five-four. She does hate her mother’s love handles, which are her love handles, and she could do without the spots below her chin. But mostly she hates the nose. Which is shameful. Intersectionally pathetic, and without a doubt extremely vain in its own apparent ghoul-shape. She gets it, she owns it, and down the road she’ll get over it. And become comfortable eating in restaurants lined with mirrors. But for the moment her deep reluctance is real, and she’d made a decent argument out of it in the article, she thought. The editor agreed. That if Leela Mann never felt the need to see her face snapped, filter or no, then there was nothing to defend; her position was only offense. Case in point: During college, her roommate Rebecca took her as her plus-one to her brother’s wedding. During the reception she’d overheard Rebecca ask her mother, “Will you take a picture of me? I look so good tonight.” Well, she could never imagine saying such a thing. So if the world had a problem with the global lack of portraits of Leela Mann, it was the world’s problem, not hers. And she was pretty sure the world didn’t have a problem. And therefore she didn’t predict that so many people would be bothered by approximately two thousand words on the subject.

  Within four minutes of publication, half a dozen people had left comments. How’d they find time to read it so fast? Calling her stuck-up, egotistical, self-involved. Within an hour over a hundred people had weighed in along the same lines. Stupid bitch. Sexless bitch. Self-hating, race-traitor bitch. Further variations on the theme that Leela pored over at her desk—meaning that she sat on the floor of her bedroom, her computer on top of JavaScript for Dummies, until she cried and needed to flop facedown on her comforter, drizzling snot, and discover that every ounce of self-doubt she’d ever experienced had been unexpectedly, completely validated.

  Ten minutes later, her editor texted to warn her about some heated, “slightly personal” opinions in the comments section, and encouraged Leela to stay off the internet.

  Then, a day later, Salon loaned the story to The Huffington Post to republish. Where it acquired a catchier headline: “Why One Millennial Among Millions Hasn’t Taken a Selfie.” From there, in the blink of an eye, came dozens of more comments, eventually hundreds. Way more full of orientalist fuck. Soon, random emails would appear. How’d they find her address? Newsfeed geyser eruptions occurred like so many natural wonders. One diss involved her and Mindy Kaling as self-satisfied dyke lovers, which was, on its own, sort of fantastic to imagine? And there was also an all-caps shout-out to HER COCKY VAG, which she took as a feminist compliment. But it got to be too much. Inside her unhappiness, she dug out a lair, but even there she couldn’t keep her eyes off the web. She was the most horrible young woman to ever navel-gaze. Conceited, Narcissus-like, the black mirror to Malala Yousafzai. For such a stupid twat to pen this article? To gain license to address the masses about not navel-gazing, not taking self-portraits? The world was that much worse because of her existence.

  At her roommate’s suggestion, she took a day off. Put her phone in her underwear drawer and iced out everybody. She went into the city. Walked around Central Park. She bought a package of new dish towels from a cute shop on the Upper East Side. She loved buying dish towels. Normally they mopped up her nerves. Not this time. She was back on the internet in less than a
minute after walking through the door, until Carlo, the boss roommate, who’d just gotten home, called her superpathetic and then showed her how to install a program to block her laptop from even being able to load Salon or The Huffington Post. So that her worst tendencies, manifest in computer use, would be controlled by the computer itself. How much of her was still human anyway?

  That evening, like a summons from Valhalla, an urgent request appeared in her inbox. A CNN producer wanted Leela Mann to show up in her office immediately, midtown Manhattan, proceed to hurry up. She was about to say no, but Carlo convinced her otherwise. Thirty minutes later, in her single suit, Leela crossed the East River, and tried hard not to be afraid—that’s when she really wished she’d said no. They put her through makeup. She’d never worn so much makeup. Were they trying to lighten her skin? The stuff melted off anyway. She drank three bottles of water while she waited, then a hot-chick producer stopped by with a request: the scarf that Leela had been wearing when she arrived, could she put it back on, drape it across her chest, sari-like? And lose the suit jacket? They wanted something a little more “exotic,” and was that cool? Leela thought at the time, why doesn’t she just say “Indian”? Do they want her to do an accent? Ninety minutes later, she rode the train home in a daze. The network squeezed her segment into a talk show late that night, which likely no one watched except her. And she wasn’t at all sure whom she was watching. All sweaty, this girl, and monosyllabic, wearing three bottles of water weight like a neck brace. She hated every second of it; it was like having her photograph taken a million times in a row. But then came the internet the next day, particularly her parents, who emailed everyone they knew, all her relatives back in India, Leela is a celebrity!! A TV star!!!!!!!!!! LEELA’S ON TV!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And for a week her inbox and newsfeed were a forest of exclamation points. Total reverse of the public reaction. Her father started sending her story ideas, about himself, or some cousin in Guwahati who’d invented an umbrella for people’s shoes. The following month, she even received an email from one of her favorite professors in college, a request of permission for Leela’s Salon article to be included in a syllabus for a new course at Rutgers, “Introduction to Creative Nonfiction on the Web.”

  And all of it, all of it, troll garbage notwithstanding, was simply great.

  But that was more than a year ago. No big articles since then, no TV requests. She’s back in Claymore County, alone, ashamed, unemployed, squatting in an unfurnished rental.

  After lunch she takes a long nap on her pile of clothes: ninety minutes.

  Does the full maintenance routine in slo-mo: shower, shampoo, condition, shave, treat hair, tweeze eyebrows: sixty-five minutes.

  A quick glance over the start to a novel, forty pages, that she wrote during a crazed, three-week period the previous year, about a girl who trades her nose for a functional tail in the center of her face: twenty-five minutes, including comma adjustments.

  A jam jar of white wine: eleven minutes.

  And while all of this is taking place, at least once every five minutes, she imagines what her competition is up to: Dude Bro, Real Writer, probably with an MFA from Iowa and a PhD from Stanford and who knows what else, was hard at work in his East Village studio on the final revisions to his debut novel about Orthodox Jewish/WASP intermarriage on Mars in 2216, while simultaneously he wrote the pilot script that had already been commissioned, while all the other Real Writers in town, who’d caught the buzz, who’d heard snippets at readings, eagerly anticipated passing around copies at artistic retreats. And literary agents would ejaculate six-course compliments into his ears! All for the chance for a big publisher to top off the right critic’s stack of galleys and launch a name.

  O ambition! O emotions! O brain!

  Leela gives up and checks her email. One new message, from her dad. She can’t bring herself to read it. She stares out the window. She does feel horribly about her parents. What will they do? The idea that they probably don’t know the answer to that question either, that their future is also up for grabs, makes her throat close. It’s beyond misguided that she hasn’t told them that she’s home. What a selfish, shallow girl. She stumbles on her way to the bathroom and stubs her toe. She calls her brother, he doesn’t answer, he’s probably too stoned. So when she can’t avoid it any longer, she zips herself into her sleeping bag with her phone, opens her dad’s email, and reads a long-ass message about some crazy true-crime story that recently took place in Claymore, more or less.

  What the hell?

  She grabs The New York Times off the floor. Nothing about a “double murder story,” as her father put it. She turns back to her phone. The link he sent goes to a short article in The Boston Globe. Dateline, Claymore. She’s never seen her hometown in a dateline before. She grabs her laptop, reads the article. And feels like a meteor has just crashed through the ceiling.

  Hours later, at ten that evening, she steps outside the house. The night is hushed. The woods are full of moonlight. Her eyes sting. Her legs are sore from sitting cross-legged. Since she read her father’s email, she hadn’t left the living room except to pee and fill up her water bottle. Frantic web research. Phone calls. Email inquiries. Deep-dives into social media. She left requests for information anywhere she could, even on Craigslist. Hi. I’m a journalist looking into the story around the Ashburn murders. If you or anyone you know …

  As far as she can tell, the story’s been ignored. Why? Local TV hasn’t run anything. There isn’t a town newspaper anymore. And yet a kid from one of the founding families in Claymore—even she’s heard of the Toussaints—stands accused of killing two people, then goes on a drunken rampage with the bodies, and this isn’t news?

  She dares to smile.

  She goes back inside the house, brushes her teeth, turns off the overhead light, zips herself back into her sleeping bag, to the tune of frogs quietly chirping in the trees. She closes her eyes. Smiles in the darkness. She grabs her phone, can’t help but refresh her email one last time. And there’s actually a new message, a response to her post for information, from a name she recognizes right away, Justin Johnson.

  A name that makes her stomach plummet.

  Leela Mann. You know I’d recognize that name. What’s up? It’s Justin. I’m over at DROP now and holy crap I’m obviously responding to your Craigslist post because guess what, I’m in Claymore. Let’s get something to eat, I’ll fill you in on what I’ve found. This story’s even more messed-up than it looks.

  THE CLAYMORE KIDS

  Three days after Justin Johnson’s DROP story breaks, Claymore High School blasts an urgent email out to staff, students, and parents, instructing them to forcefully deny, please, any requests from nonstudents or non-CHS personnel in the coming days to borrow old yearbooks, school newspapers, telephone directories, photographic or video footage of school events, any digital archives of the school website or class materials, and/or any materials featuring pictures of students or any information about them.

  The announcement, the first in school history, follows three confusing days of disturbances that crash over Claymore’s shorefront defenses, which the town is by no means equipped to handle.

  When, within thirty minutes of an early-morning run time, the DROP story is shared more than a hundred times. DROP is a new print and web magazine, Brooklyn-based, nine months old. It’s a big investment by social media royalty in old-fashioned journalism, of both the high-end adversarial and gossip varieties—like Spy in its heyday, people say—which may or may not prove profitable but still seems cool for the present moment, even gutsy. So the story is soon prominently featured on an assortment of gatekeeper websites, whether or not their editors actually read the full thing, or even part of it.

  Within three hours of publication, social shares number close to one thousand.

  Testifying how broadly and mysteriously the DROP story will appeal in the coming weeks, it is throughout the day paraphrased, teased, wondered about, sneered at, and otherwise promoted
as the read of the moment, the day, the week, for its dirty pictures and breathless pulp, and also because of that distinctively rare event in online media when someone breaks actual news, or what looks like actual news.

  Before sunset on the East Coast on publication day, a summer day of above-average temperatures from Maine to Florida, the DROP story acquires more than three thousand likes and almost a half dozen seven-hundred-word responses, via opinion writers from different publications, who alternately praise and criticize Justin Johnson’s account, even if they don’t agree on a single reason to discuss it.

  If anything, what appears to be the burning broad consensus is that it’s too soon to know whether to embrace or rebuff the vision presented. Or just flat-out mock it. Or take the dispatch on its own merits and analyze the crimes discussed, with more expansive questions about the fourth estate and humanity in present-day America. Or use the spring-back of the account’s metaphorical diving board to address other issues, like the perils of unsafe sexting. Or fourth-wave feminism and the value of consent in an age of livestreaming and “sextortion.” Or the evolution of women’s sex-positive expression, from de Pizan/Hesse to Rihanna feat. Lorde. Or the history of phrases like “benevolent sexism,” “hegemonic masculinity,” “pussy affluenza,” and why they remain in quotes for public digestion. Or the tragic history, regarding both female eroticism and rape culture, that is specific to New England, sacred turf of Louisa May Alcott, Shirley Jackson, and other chroniclers of the northeastern bloc’s transgressed young women. So the opinion writers have a field day and do all of these things.

  By eleven p.m. Eastern, on the day that the story appears, the “ClaymoreKids” hashtag cracks the ice. That same evening, Fox News airs a short piece from its Manchester affiliate, in which an excited reporter stands on the Claymore courthouse steps and paraphrases the story known so far. For gotcha’s sake, they also include a “no comment” interview from a surprised employee of the Claymore County Sheriff’s Department, with a closing pledge to remain on the case.