The minister, pale and nervous-looking, stands at the pulpit now, holding up his hands to signal that he’s ready to begin. The video quality isn’t great, so I can’t see anyone clearly. The sound is just as bad. But it’s probably best that I can’t quite make out what the minister’s saying beyond Death, better place, St. Paul’s sermon, First Corinthians.
I click on Timmy Tepper’s live stream.
…from inside the studio of Pinpoint Productions at 1112 Vermont Avenue in bee-yo-tif-ful Washington, D.C., because Prep Academy is apparently unfamiliar with Amendment Numero Uno. Today I will not be joined by my lovely cohost, Vanessa Eubanks. I don’t mind telling you that Vanessa and I recently had a difference of opinion. She thought that broadcasting the memorial service was in bad taste. I said to her, “Hey, Vanessa, I have news for you. If I didn’t have bad taste, I’d have no taste at all.” Several sources at the scene report that—wait a second, folks, hang on, hold your horses, here comes Vanessa right now. She’s opening the booth. She’s stepping inside the broadcast booth. Vanessa, I thought you’d change your mind, so I left your—
The sound that follows is unmistakable.
A bitch slap.
Followed by the sound of a pair of headphones hitting the floor, skittering across it. Followed by the sound of a cry, high-pitched but unmistakably male. And then Vanessa must yank out a cord, because all of a sudden, there’s nothing but dead air.
At least one fair thing has happened in the past few days.
My attention drifts back to the live video feeds. I can tell that the minister’s address is over. Palmer’s mother has replaced him at the pulpit. As she’s speaking, people are starting to cry.
I find Palmer’s dad in the front pew and catch my breath. Mr. Meade is bent over his knees, face in hands, shoulders heaving. He’s sobbing. The night of the crash, they tried to tell everyone it was an accident. But too many witnesses came forward: he didn’t swerve; he looked eerily calm. Finally word got out that there was a note. Only his parents will probably ever know what it said.
I click back to my texts.
Palmer glows at me in thin letters, black-and-white. Here are the random things he wrote to me in those first days, the bad jokes he made, and the sweet emojis he used. There are our thousands of exchanges over the first month, two people with really only one thing in common trying to find anything else we had in common. I keep scrolling. Here are some not-so-nasty things I told Palmer about my friends. Some pride and love I shared with him before I soured with fear and insecurity. Then comes the bad stuff, of course. The cruel, mean stuff that could ruin our friendships forever. That would stop my friends from ever coming to check on me again.
I think about that night Palmer came to my window, how I told him he made a bad choice because he was desperate. That, whatever he’d done, whatever trust he’d broken, the steroids were a thing he did. Not who he was. They weren’t the whole picture not even close.
I flip back to the memorial. The service is dismissed by the minister, and now, on a bunch of different video feeds, I see my friends’ faces as they stand and wait to file out, see the toll the past couple of weeks has taken on them. Nikki’s ignoring Rad. Rad’s staring at her ex–best friend and wishing she had something—anything—to say.
Finally my eyes land one last time on Mr. Meade, still hiding his face.
I know what I want to do.
I move toward the light—well, toward the screen on my phone. I pull up Haven’s last text and reply:
Can you come over? Need help w something. Thx
He replies seconds later:
On my way
“Are you okay?” Nikki whispers in my ear. “I mean, of course I know you’re not okay. But are you hanging in?”
“It’s good to see you, Nik,” I say, avoiding the question.
She’s at my front door, tears welling in her eyes. We hug for another few seconds, and I pull her inside. Mom waves from the kitchen, says something to Nikki about how it’s good that she’s here, and returns to the steamed crabs she’s making that have the entire house smelling like the Chesapeake Bay. Mom’s been pretty great about not letting her curiosity about everything that’s happening overpower my need for privacy.
“This is the cleanest I’ve ever seen this place, A,” Nikki says as I shut my bedroom door behind us.
“You should’ve been here three days ago.”
“I wanted to be.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I wasn’t ready to talk to anyone.”
I reach behind Nikki and grab a manila folder off my desk. It’s time. “Do you remember the summer you went to theater camp? That place in Maine?”
She looks surprised. “How the hell do you remember that?”
I offer her the folder. “Because you’re not the only one who keeps a box.”
A smile creeps across her face as she opens it. It’s the first time I’ve seen that beautiful right-sided dimple in weeks. “You kept all my letters?”
“Of course.”
“No wonder we’re friends. You’re a hoarder, just like me.”
I nod. “But, Nik, I need you to read those carefully.”
“The summer of my massive, pubescent crush on Bryan Weinstein?” she says, flipping through. “I don’t understand.”
Nikki pulls her blond hair into a loose knot and drops down onto my bed. Her face falls a little more as she flips pages. Finally she looks up at me, her eyes filled with frustration. “So…what?” she says. “You’re saying it’s okay, what Rad did to me? That I’m just as bad as she is? We were in seventh grade! It’s completely different.”
“I’m not trying to say you’re bad, Nik. I’m trying to say you were mad.”
Nikki throws the folder back at me, and her letters fan out onto the floor. “We’re really talking about this? Now? After everything? Jesus, Anna.”
“Do you really remember what happened that summer?”
“I told Rad over the phone about messing around with Bryan, and she called me an overprivileged white girl who doesn’t care about her friends.”
“You kissed the only boy she ever liked in middle school,” I say. “And then you spent the rest of the summer blaming her for not kissing him first. You wrote some pretty terrible things to me about her.”
She glances down at the papers scattered across my bed.
She stares at me. “What do you want, Anna?”
“I want you to come with me.”
—
We go back down through Steamed-Crabville, and I lead her to the basement stairs. The lights are already on, and I walk down first. Nikki reluctantly follows. We spent so many hours of our elementary and middle school years here, and when we get to the bottom, Nikki sees the third member of our girl clan. Rad stands in front of the desktop computer Haven has assembled for me down here.
Nikki spins on her heels. “I’m leaving.”
“Nik…”
Nikki turns back, venom in her voice. “Why are you doing this?”
I ignore her and look at Rad. “Are you finished reading?”
Rad slinks toward us. “Yeah. Your turn, Nikki.”
“To do what?” she asks me, not Rad.
“To show you two who I really am.”
Nikki shakes her head. “What are you talking about?”
I move slowly toward the computer monitors. Up on one of the screens are more than a hundred lines of text. Insults and slights and just plain meanness directed at my best friends, all courtesy of yours truly. “You both say I’m the only real friend either one of you has left,” I say. “But if we’re real friends, then I need you to see something.”
Turning my palm up, I direct it toward one of the monitors. “This is every bad thing I said about either one of you that was recorded on my phone. During the leaks I tried to delete it, but Haven eventually recovered every word. So you could both see it. See that we’re all a part of this cruelty. Not just Vanessa, not just Wallace, not just Timmy Tepper. It’s you, R
ad, and you, Nikki, and certainly me too.”
Nikki slowly steps back down the stairs. She holds Rad’s gaze for the first time since we came down here, then trains her eyes on the glow of the monitors. After almost a minute of silence, she turns back and looks at Rad. “Are you okay?” she asks.
Rad clears her throat. “I don’t know. Are you?”
Now Nikki’s gaze meets mine. “I don’t know.”
I suck in a huge breath—as much air as I can. “Palmer’s not dead ’cause he couldn’t handle losing a scholarship. And he’s not even dead because his parents killed him in their pressure cooker. He’s dead ’cause he didn’t have any friends he could talk to about what was really wrong with him.
“Well, I’m not going to keep lying to you two and find myself in the same place. I can’t tell you what to do, obviously. But I can tell you we’ve all been terrible to each other at one point or another in ten years of friendship. Probably me most of all, like just in the past three months.”
Rad and Nikki are both staring at the floor.
“I’m sorry,” I continue, “but does that mean we should all stop being friends now? Abandon each other at the worst moment in our lives?”
Silence.
Finally Rad glances back at the computer monitors, sighs, then looks at me again. “You’re a royal bitch. Like, the bitchiest bitch ever. I should slap you.”
I close my eyes.
“I had to say it,” Rad continues. “You deserve it. But I’m done. Moving on.” She looks over at Nikki. “What about you?”
Nikki pauses for a moment, then slowly nods.
I take another deep breath. “So, um…listen, there’s one other thing.”
Okay, this is insane, but I’m standing backstage in the Graham Auditorium, and I’m not hyperventilating. Am I nervous? Yes. But it’s not enough to stop me. Maybe it’s the multiple prep sessions with Dr. Bechdel or the Xanax in my pocket as backup. Or maybe it’s that I finally admitted to my best friends—the last, crucial piece of my confession—that I had sex with Jethro.
Talking to Nikki and Rad was a relief. Finally I vented about my fear that I had set in motion a series of events that led to my ex-boyfriend being put in a box and buried. Rad and Nikki, sensible as ever, reminded me that there were a lot of factors. Yeah, they said, maybe I shouldn’t have had casual sex with Jethro when he was so obviously in love with me. But I had the right to be honest with him if I wasn’t sure about a relationship, and it definitely didn’t give him permission to go hacking into Wallace Reid’s account and open this whole can of worms. It’s all still hard to swallow.
But I feel like I’m finally gaining some perspective.
I peek from backstage and see Mr. Touhey at the podium, introducing me. He’s wearing a psychedelic paisley-patterned shirt and an actual blazer and tie. The audience is surprisingly full, given the fact that a quarter of the school seems to be out “sick” every day now. As a way to repair kids’ attendance records after all the missed days due to the recent mayhem, Prep is offering a half-day credit to students attending tonight’s presentation. I’m searching for familiar faces (other than Mom and Dad, right in the front row) when I notice Mr. Touhey is staring right at me, waving me toward him.
There’s hardly any applause as I walk out. Asses have been parked in seats for the better part of an hour now. Besides, Prep kids are too hostile to put their hands together enthusiastically for anything short of Nichols canceling school for the rest of the year. There isn’t a person in the audience who hasn’t been touched by the leaks.
Some guy in the back yells, “Silver Pines, Silver Pines!” to the tune of “Silver Bells.” (Rad’s data leak let everyone know about my little “vacation” there.)
“Quiet,” Nichols says.
“Shut up, assholes,” Vanessa yells back from the third row. She stands, glares them into submission, then looks back at me and gives me a motion: Proceed.
I give her an appreciative look.
Mr. Touhey always says half of art is the artist presenting her work. And now that I’m bound for art school, I guess I’ll have to get used to it. So. Bombs away.
“For most of this year,” I begin, “I was working on a portrait of myself that was like a selfie but actually more of a commentary on selfies. When I was working on my self-portrait, I was thinking about how I view myself but also about how everyone else views me. The point I was making is that I have a self-image problem. I mean, who doesn’t, right?”
Two sophomore girls in the second row are now arguing audibly about something other than what I’m saying. Someone says, “You mind, ladies?”
My dad’s voice. Bless him.
I lean back into the mic, trying not to lose control of the crowd. At an orchestra performance three nights ago, there was an actual brawl among ten students in the audience, and the fire alarm was pulled after one of the trumpet players smashed another guy over the head with his brass. Tonight could easily turn into another one of those.
“Ahem, anyway,” I push on, “the last thing you guys need is for me to show you my amateur self-portrait. After all, I’m standing in front of masters. All of you.”
“What the hell’re you talking about!” someone calls out.
I nod to the stage manager, Karen, and after a couple of awkward seconds of nothing happening, the curtain opens. It’s dark onstage, and all people can see behind me now is the silhouette of a ten-foot-tall fort we’ve built with risers and temporary room dividers, hiding what’s inside. To find out, they’ll have to walk inside.
That same guy yells out, “It’s so beautiful I could cry!”
More laughs.
What he and the other laughers don’t know is that inside our little fort, Nikki and her stage crew have helped me set up every giant monitor the theater department has at its disposal and turned the stage into an immersive video experience.
“So. Who wants to go in first?” I ask the crowd.
A few dozen people stand up.
—
“We are all master self-portraitists online,” the first group of ten seniors hears as they begin their journey into the darkened tunnel of connected rooms on the stage. As they walk through the entrance, they’re hearing Radhika’s voice, prerecorded.
Photographs start fading in and out every few seconds on the video monitors surrounding the group. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Google images—curated pictures, posted on social media by Prep kids, that Haven could scrape off the Web. Happy, shiny, blissful, pre-data-leak photos. Of parties, of sports events, of vacations the rest of the world can be jealous of. Kids whisper and point and giggle when they see themselves or their friends flash up on the walls.
“We share these photos that have been taken from flattering angles with Valencia or Mayfair filters,” Rad continues as the kids wade their way into the second room of the video maze. “That show us having maximum fun with the coolest people we can get to hang out with us.”
Photos of Palmer spread across the screens now. Some are from his social media and press photos, some I took at the basketball game, some are candids of him and his friends, him and me, him and everyone else.
The freshman drama kids Nikki has helping us usher the group forward, into the next room, the final in the installation.
“And it’s not just our photos,” Nikki’s voice says. “Every word we post or tweet or snap is crafted and edited and obsessed over too. We all know what people say about social media. They say our public, online selves don’t show our true selves or what we really think about our friends.”
Comments kids have made on social media start popping up on the screens, fading in and out: You hot playa and Where u get that outfit and wish I were in Cairo wif u, jealous and bae and ½ and puuuuuuurrrrty and literally flawless and mah two faves and ur perfect and Ugh I want to be in pic and Omg crop me in and Wouldn’t want to have grown up w anyone else.
Nikki’s voice rings through the room again. “They’re almost all kind, sweet
, flattering little notes written to people, humble brags, or stuff dashed off to make us look funny, self-deprecating, cool. But none of these were really dashed off at all, the cynics say. They were all written. Put out there for your friend and the public to see.”
“So what do we really think about each other?” my voice sneaks in as the social media posts finish. “About ourselves? About each other? Well, people say the leaks have finally showed everyone else the truth about what we think and who we really are. We are bad friends, bad boyfriends and girlfriends, and not one of us is being real about who we are, even to the people we’re supposed to care about. So let’s take a look.”
Phrases and emojis start popping up fast on the screens, simultaneously read aloud by me, Nikki, Rad, Haven, Andrew, even Vanessa: such a bitch and f her and what a slut and I h8 him and with frenemies like her and need blow job will pay and I M depressed and he was scamming with that cunt and u wanna hookup and she’s on the bulimia train and it’s 420 yo, let’s check in and Oxy rules need more and I M done w/her and I beat his faggot ass and even the occasional N-word. It gets worse and worse. It gets stomach-churning.
“These are all from texts and chats and DMs and anonymous comments and anything else exposed in the last two weeks,” I say as Rad’s recorded voice reads another, one I know well: worst writer on the paper, how is she editor?
The seniors were laughing when it started. Now, a minute later, by the time they’ve seen thousands of these messages flash across the screen—some of which were written about them—it’s less funny. A few dozen rape threats and death threats and some hate speech later, there isn’t a smile or snicker left in the group.
Finally, the nastiness stops. The screens go black again.
“By our count,” I say then, “including a few that could be interpreted either way, we wrote a total of three thousand, four hundred seventy-eight terrible things about each other in the data that was leaked. And because these are shocking, and negative, and pretty terrible, it’s easy to focus on them entirely,” I say. “It’s easy to imagine that those are what we really think. That’s how the human brain works—it holds on to the negative. But here’s the thing. That number is nothing compared with the positive things we wrote.”
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