Fighting tears, Colleen sinks down. The one last piece of dignity she has left is that she has not yet let the room see her cry. People see the look on her face, and for a moment the room goes silent again.
Ten seconds later, Colleen’s luck really changes. So does that of everyone else who’s been leaked…for the moment.
Number six is a doozy.
The first announcement comes from Wallace’s mouth as he shouts across the room at Mattie. “Whaaaaa? You actors are messed up!”
“Oh no,” Rad says, opening the link. “This is no bueno.”
Abortion is the aftermath of sex—or some sex, anyway. It has shock value to my classmates, but, let’s face it, it’s a lot less exciting than sex itself. And sex itself is what the sixth leak hands everyone on a platter: a link to everything that’s been uploaded to or sent from Mattie Eizenberg’s Instagram Direct.
I look over at Mattie, seated on the left side of the aisle. Unlike Dylan and Josh, he’s not even pretending to be fine with it. He keeps reaching up to check that absurdly blond man bun, making sure it hasn’t fallen off. A couple of his actor friends are whispering in his ear; some are even smiling a little. But Mattie looks white. Like, Kristen Stewart white.
Rad gives me glimpses of the series of pictures as she scans through. The tasteless grape-flavored gum I’m still chewing from after lunch almost falls out of my mouth.
“Oh Jesus,” I whisper. “We shouldn’t look at these. Gross.”
But Rad keeps going. There are almost forty pics. It’s a mix of half- and fully naked pics and sexted private-parts selfies. These aren’t models or RedTube screenshots. These are girls we know. Every one of the pics is full-on amateur and real and obviously taken with a phone. Then passed to one of the boys and finally on to Mattie for him to rank.
In the pics that show faces, there are so many I recognize. Acquaintances. Class friends. Facebook friends. Worst of all, I soon see, faces aren’t necessary. Mattie has labeled every one of the nearly forty pics with a hashtag of each girl’s name—and either a letter or a number, and a symbol: #HelenMcNultyJ♠, #AmyK9♦, #MeredithAndrews5♥, #DianeJackson8♣.
“It’s a deck of cards,” Rad says. “He’s rating girls according to their value. Spades, diamonds, hearts, clubs.”
Even though I’ve seen only a couple of the photos, I’ve seen enough to know that this is bad. Really bad. I turn around and see Mattie’s looking down at the ground, somber, like he knows that the only thing holding those girls back from ripping the skin right off his body is the threat of suspension.
“I don’t know who I hate more right now: Mattie or Haven.”
Rad puts her phone down, out of view. Her face falls. “Nikki’s on here…”
“What…? Did Nik send that loser a picture the night they—?”
Rad shakes her head slowly. “No.”
“Then what?”
“She didn’t send anything. I think he took it when she was asleep or something. He found the perfect angle to show every inch of her. Worst of all, he gave Nikki the two of clubs. Lowest in the deck.”
“I’m gonna rip his tiny balls off…” I grit my teeth, scanning the crowd for Nikki.
Rad’s gaze drops to the ground, and now, for the first time in years, I see tears start to form in her eyes. “Oh my God, Anna.”
“What? There’s more?”
Rad looks panicked. “I put so much pressure on Nikki to—”
“No,” I cut her off, “this is not your fault. This is Mattie Eizenfuck’s fault. And the fault of every other sick loser bro who sent him their pictures.”
I stand and turn back toward Mattie. My mouth feels dry and my head feels light, but for the first time in days, I don’t feel anxious at all. Rage is the ultimate cure for that.
“Anna, don’t do it,” Andrew says, looking up at me. “I’ll beat his ass later.”
From behind me I hear Ms. Dominick say, “Ms. Soler, take your seat.”
But I don’t. I’m going to rip the man bun right off Mattie’s head—literally scalp him in front of everyone. I walk to the aisle and head in the direction of Mattie. I feel my hand form a fist, almost involuntarily.
Then it happens.
In the corner of my eye, I see Nikki stand up, phone in hand. She looks like she’s in shock, like she’s sleepwalking. She wavers a little, and a couple of people nearby reach out to try to stop her from falling to the ground. But Nikki doesn’t fall. She just looks at the chapel door, breaks into a sprint, and slams the door after her.
—
“Nikki?” I call over the bathroom stall.
“I don’t want to talk, Anna.”
“Please let me in.”
“No.”
“Let’s leave. We can go to my house. Or anywhere. But you don’t want to sit in there, looking at those gross things no one should look at. And I swear, Nikki. We’re not going to let him get away with it.”
Nikki breathes loudly. “It’s not just those pictures. It’s every text I sent him for the last month. Haven didn’t just hack his Instagram and leak those pics. He put everything of Mattie’s out there. Everything he uploaded or wrote online.”
I open the next stall and climb up onto the toilet to look down. She’s fully clothed, sitting on the pot. But Nikki doesn’t glance up or move.
“Why do you care what that asshole said, after what he did?”
Nikki stays silent a long time before finally looking up at me. “You’ve never been in love, have you, A?”
I think of Jethro. Then step down and wait. I’ll stay here as long as I have to.
“I haven’t been accepted to any schools yet,” Nikki says. “What if I get rejected because of this? This is going to be online forever.”
“Schools aren’t gonna see this, Nik. And, even if they did, Mattie’s the one who won’t be getting into any schools.”
We sit in silence for a minute. I send Haven a nasty text telling him to stop doing this shit now, but he doesn’t respond.
Suddenly someone else whips into the bathroom.
I know those footsteps.
Next thing I know, I hear Rad’s boot kick in Nikki’s bathroom door.
“Come on, sweetie. Let’s go home. I’m so sorry I got you into this. I’m so, so sorry. I hate myself,” she says.
I squeeze out of my stall, and the three of us melt into a group hug. If Rad weren’t so upset, she’d cringe at the corniness.
We drive Nikki home, and Rad spends the whole time saying she’s sorry. The only thing Nikki says the whole way home is You didn’t do anything, and it seems like she means it. She isn’t mad at Rad. She’s just…destroyed. The mocking, vicious things Mattie said about her to his friends might even be worse than the deck of cards.
I hate that little shit like I’ve never hated anyone.
An hour later Nikki’s in her bed. I can hear enough through her whimpers to understand that she wants her mom.
“You sure?” I ask. Nikki nods an affirmative.
Rad calls Nikki’s mom at the hairdresser, where she’s getting a blowout for some charity event tonight, and explains what’s happened. Andrea comes through the door twenty minutes later, says a harried hello, then immediately pours herself a gin and tonic and downs half of it before going up to Nikki’s room.
“Want us to stay?” I ask when she returns a couple of minutes later.
“That’s very nice, girls,” Andrea says with an unusually sympathetic, sincere tone. “But Nik should probably just rest. I canceled my event. I’ll be here with her.”
Haven lives less than two miles from Prep. Since his dad works for the DEA, he travels a lot, so Haven is usually home alone. Haven always says he could stay inside for a year as long as he had his computer and an Internet connection. After the emotional and physical beat-down Rad and I are about to give him, he might be able to test that theory.
“There,” Rad says as we turn the corner into Haven’s cul-de-sac. She points silently at the house, perched
at the end of the circle. Rad’s spent most of the past half hour saying one word at a time, grunting, barely making eye contact. She feels guilty about Nikki, but I’ve gone the other way, ready to scream at Mattie, at Haven, at anyone.
When Rad and I pull into the driveway, we hit something, and it crunches beneath my tires. Shit. I back up, trying to get off whatever the hell it is.
We get out and find that we’ve knocked two black garbage bags over and they’ve vomited all over the driveway. Some of it’s regular trash (delivery containers left over from the food Haven eats every night), but about half of each thirty-gallon bag is filled with what look like old video game cartridges, all of which seem to be for a game about that E.T. movie. (No, I’ve never seen it—sue me.) “He’s such a freak,” Rad says.
We ring the bell and knock on the door.
When no one answers, Rad yells Haven’s name loudly enough to attract the attention of a couple of neighbors, including an old lady with a Boston terrier who pops her head outside her door, then retreats.
Rad keeps knocking and calling Haven’s name. His dad’s obviously not here, and if Haven is, he’s putting on a good show. There isn’t a single light on in the house.
Rad starts walking around the side of the craftsman house. I follow. She reaches her hand behind a wooden gate with peeling white paint, just squeezing her arm inside. She unlatches the clasp and tells me to follow. It’s not the first time I’ve broken into someone’s backyard with Rad (usually there’s a pool involved), but when she leads me into the carport behind the house and starts searching around, I don’t understand.
“What are you looking for?”
Finally Rad marches over to a monstrosity of wires jutting out of a small plastic box attached to the wall of the carport. One by one she starts yanking them out of the socket and letting them drop to the ground.
Nothing happens.
“Now what?” I ask, confused.
Rad looks at her phone. Checking the time. “Wait for it,” she says, holding her middle finger in the air like it’s a universal sign for waiting, then pointing it in the direction of the back door. “Wait for it…five, four, three, two, one, zero, negative one, negative two—”
Only two seconds off the bull’s-eye, the door pops open. No lights have been turned on, but there’s no question that it’s the silhouette of a boy, not Haven’s dad.
“What’d you do?” Haven asks.
Rad walks toward him. “Figured you might starve to death before coming out, but two minutes without a Web connection, and voilà. A jerk-off reappears right in front of our eyes. It’s like Criss Angel in reverse.”
“Rad, if this is about Nikki, I didn’t know…”
“Of course it’s about Nikki. She’s supposed to be your friend. You should see her right now. She asked for her mom. That’s how bad this is.”
I think about walking up to him and spitting right in his face, and I barely hold myself back. Picturing Nikki alone in her room, crying, I chime in with the first thing I can think of. “You did that to her and you made her get all your stupid chem lab assignments? Today? Who does that?”
Haven steps into a small pool of moonlight. His face is paler, and with deeper, darker circles under his eyes, than I’ve ever seen.
“I didn’t do anything to Nikki,” he says.
Rad lays into him. “Fine, whatever, you did it to Mattie, which screwed over Nikki. You knew they were together that night. You probably knew what he was up to.”
“And you must have looked at what was in there,” I say.
“No, I swear, I didn’t.”
Rad raises her voice for the first time. “I saw your pervy virgin YouPorn browsing history over break, remember? When you hit eighteen it’ll basically be a felony. You want us to believe you just leaked a bunch of photos of naked girls and didn’t even look at them?”
Haven goes a little red. “I didn’t look. And if I did, I would have deleted any picture of Nikki, of course. But—”
“But what?”
“I didn’t leak those pics.”
“You expect us to believe that after we know you leaked Wallace’s stuff?” I ask.
“No. I expect you to believe it because I didn’t do that either.”
I look at Rad, but her eyes are fixed on her target. “Bullshit,” she says. “You told Nikki you did. You told everyone you did.”
“Everyone assumed I did, and I didn’t stop them. Wallace’s was a sweet hack, whoever did it. I wished I’d done it. Until now. Until all those pictures and the card deck came out. Most of all when I found out about Nikki’s photos. And the comments—damn. I wanted to call her and tell her it wasn’t me, but I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t think she’d believe me either.”
Rad swats the back of his head. “Of course she wouldn’t, you Gamergate ass hat. I’m not sure why I would either.”
“ ’Cause it’s the truth.”
Rad looks away from him, at me, then back at him. “Then who did this?”
“No clue. There are probably ten hackers at school who could have done it. And another fifty at other schools who might have done it as a prank.”
“Fine,” I tell him. “Who cares who’s doing it? Wanna prove you’re a good hacker? Make things right by making sure whoever’s doing this stops now. Before anyone else has their sexts sprayed across the Web.”
“I was trying to do that when you cut off my Internet.”
Haven walks over to the cable box and plugs everything back in. “I’ll keep trying,” he says, “but I’ve been working on it for hours, and there’s no way to stop it. There must have been some kind of design flaw built into the Prep for Today app, and when we all put it on our phones, it started recording everything we typed.”
“Like the Knock List?” Rad asks.
“That was just a tiny part of it,” Haven says. “After the search-term file was discovered, someone dug further and figured out it was just the beginning of what had been recorded by Prep for Today. They must have found all the files.”
I feel sick. “How long has the app been recording us?” I ask.
“We all installed it last spring,” Haven says. “It’s probably been acting as malware the entire time. You should both delete it right now.”
Rad and I look at each other, worried, then immediately reach into our pockets and dump the school’s scheduling app from our phones.
Rad looks back at Haven. “How do we stop them?”
“Honestly, there’s nothing we can do until the hacker decides to stop.”
“Can’t you shut down the stupid website or something?” I ask.
“They’d just move the data set to another one. The hacker had already knocked it over to another site—Prepformore.com. Not exactly subtle. Whoever’s controlling the files now has everything, I think. They could keep doing this until everyone at school’s data is out there. Yours, yours, mine. Everyone’s.”
—
Rad and I leave Haven’s an hour later with no better understanding of how this happened. Rad still doesn’t 100 percent believe Haven isn’t responsible for the leak, but if he’s putting on a show, it’s a damn good one. He seems genuinely broken up about what’s happened to Nikki. We made him leave her a long voice mail, apologizing for taking credit for what’s quickly becoming our shared nightmare. My stomach is starting to turn—something is very wrong.
“Should we go back and check on her?” Rad asks when we’re back in the car.
“I think she wants space now.”
“Do you want to come over?” Rad asks. “Stay over?”
“I, uh…”
“Forget it.”
She doesn’t want to be alone. She doesn’t want to have to lie in her bed and think about her role in all this, and I don’t want to abandon her right now. But I’ve been more and more nauseous since the moment Haven said this could get bigger. Since the moment he told us we could all get hit. Right now what I need is some time alone. To look through my own�
�apparently already hacked—phone. Alone.
“Honestly, I’m just wiped from today,” I say grimly.
“Fine. Suck it, whatever. Just drive me home.”
“Listen to me,” I say. “This isn’t your fault. Having sex was Nikki’s choice, but her doing that did not in any way give Mattie permission to take invasive, rapey photos. This is literally no one’s fault but his.”
Rad looks at me. Her eyes are sad and grateful.
By the time we get to her house in Fairfax, I’m exhausted from the panic I’m suppressing. And, as much as I want to comfort her, I’m also dying to get her out of my car before she sees something’s wrong with me.
Words and phrases have been popping back into my mind the entire ride: Alkie. Ugly. Dumb. And more. So much more. Things I don’t want to believe I could have written or said. But I’m more and more sure that they’re on my phone, proof that I did.
Rad takes a breath as she steps out. “Eizenberg’s name will be plastered all over the newspaper tomorrow, that little shit.”
—
Five minutes later I pull over on the side of Pickett Road and throw up. For a few seconds I get temporary relief. There’s Listerine in the glove compartment (welcome to my SAD life), so I swish it around in my mouth until it hurts.
I take out my phone.
I have to call Palmer.
I hit the number with a shaking finger. He still hasn’t said a word in response to my text asking if he’s okay. There’s no ring. Phone’s off. It goes straight to voice mail, and I hear his voice for the first time in weeks.
It’s Palmer. Do your thing.
Beep. Now I do my best impression of a normal person. Except my voice is the wrong pitch, and I’ve forgotten how to breathe while speaking.
It’s me….I hope you got my text….I hope you’re okay….Look, I know you’re going through some bad stuff. I’m sorry. It blows. But I need you to do something for me. If you ever gave a shit about me, I need you to delete all our texts, chats, all our DMs, everything. Please, don’t even look at it. Just clear all our conversations. I don’t know if this will do either of us any good, honestly. It might be too late already. Oh, and you should definitely delete Prep for Today. But if I were you, I’d delete my whole phone.
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