My Life as a Hashtag

by Gabrielle Williams

  I pulled my laptop onto my knees.

  And discovered that I was breaking news. Me and my school.

  ‘Whitbourn Bullying Goes Viral’ was the headline, with a photo of the front gates of our school boxed up next to it.

  The story underneath basically bagged me from here to eternity.

  ‘A series of offensive videos,’ it said, ‘simulating celebrities heaping a barrage of abuse upon a Whitbourn Grammar student has gone viral around the globe, with subsequent efforts set up worldwide to identify the student – including radio competitions in multiple countries, and a US talk-show segment – resulting in the naming of a Melbourne schoolgirl.’

  I hated the way they used words like ‘offensive’ and ‘barrage of abuse’. It was as if they were saying: Here, this is what we think of this scumbag chick who uploaded the videos. Don’t bother making up your own mind, because we’ve already made it up for you.

  I was pretty sure journalists weren’t supposed to write like that – just the facts, wasn’t that what they were supposed to report? Leave your opinions for the editorial page. Just the facts, please.

  ‘A Melbourne mother spoke to this newspaper last night after her daughter was named as the infamous “Anouk” via the “Who the Fook is Anouk” Gig FM competition.

  ‘“My daughter’s real name isn’t Anouk, by the way,” clarified the mother, who requested neither she nor her daughter be named by this media outlet. Gig FM has also removed the victim’s details from its website, due to the fact that she is a minor. “It’s just a nickname the girls use for her. But for these vile videos to be out in the world, abusing my daughter, is contemptible. Absolutely revolting.”

  ‘The mother of the student who uploaded the videos – who this newspaper has also agreed not to name – apparently tried to defend the videos when she went to visit the victim’s mother last night by saying they were “essentially harmless, but something that got a little out of control”.

  ‘“If that’s considered harmless,” the victim’s mother said this morning, “I’d hate to see what bad behaviour looks like in that family. When a child can go on to the internet, basically destroy my daughter’s reputation, and then her mother says it’s harmless, well, words can’t really describe how angry that makes me feel. I don’t necessarily blame the school – I blame the parents. They’ve recently gone through a separation, so I feel sorry for them to a degree, but the fact remains: social media can be a vicious forum, and I’m determined something like this never happens again to any child. I expect the school to take this matter very seriously indeed. My daughter is completely devastated by what has happened to her. Not just the videos themselves but also the comments, the trolling she’s being exposed to – this is vilification to the nth degree.”

  ‘One video showed Justin Bieber abusing “Anouk”. Another video showed a painted portrait of Queen Elizabeth, a corgi on her lap, hurling abuse.

  ‘The victim’s mother said the videos were uploaded in response to a party her daughter held back in June.

  ‘“If my daughter doesn’t want to invite someone to her party, she’s well within her rights. For these videos to be uploaded in response is bullying in the extreme.”

  ‘The mother of “Anouk” said her daughter came home from school yesterday at lunchtime distressed that she had been “outed” publicly on a radio station competition. The mother rang Whitbourn Grammar yesterday afternoon, but decided to go to the media after feeling frustrated when the principal refused to take immediate action.

  ‘Headmistress Ruth Willis says she is taking the matter very seriously. At a hastily called school assembly this morning, she told all students that the videos are not a reflection of the type of values Whitbourn Grammar espouses.

  ‘When contacted for comment this morning, Willis told this newspaper that respectful relationships were an important part of a Whitbourn education. “The girl who created the videos has been suspended for an indefinite period – I spoke to her parents and informed them of this earlier today – and the school is currently determining what ultimate punishment the student will receive.”’

  Suspended?

  Nice to find out a little detail like that through the internet.

  The comments at the bottom of the story ran for pages and pages – opinions voiced by people I didn’t know, who didn’t know me:

  ‘Single-sex schools breed a particularly vicious type of child.’

  And: ‘If this were my child, I’d feel deeply ashamed.’

  And: ‘To think we’re subsidising these schools. Disgraceful.’

  Pure chemical anxiety coursed through my body, clogging up my chest and making me feel brittle as chalk. I read the article, the comments, again. And again. And again. A little sign to the side said ‘756 reading now’.

  I’d unleashed a monster. I felt like an actual, physical creature was hunting me, stalking me, sniffing me out.

  I’d made the biggest mistake of my life, and there was nothing I could do to fix it.

  I was officially a Before and After type person.

  Before Jed’s party and After.

  Before Anouk’s party and After.

  Before everything went viral.

  And After.

  #

  We read a book earlier in the year for school – a great book – by this guy called Jim Crace. Harvest, it’s called, and in it, an entire village turns on three travellers who have arrived looking for shelter, blames them for all the bad luck that has been happening, puts them into the stocks in the town square, and eventually kills them.

  ‘Even though it’s set in medieval days,’ Mr Yumi had said to the class at the time, ‘it’s still just as relevant to society today. Through social media, people are jumping on bandwagons without knowing all the facts, making pronouncements, having loud opinions. People are losing their jobs because of it; some people have committed suicide. It’s one of the most frightening aspects of social media: the public shaming. I want everyone to write a response to this book as if it were set in the current day – where instead of stocks and whipping posts, there’s trolling and online harassment.’

  In retrospect, I think he was trying to make the point that we need to think twice before putting things online.

  Didn’t sink in for me, clearly.

  There had been an assumption, Mr Yumi told us, that village stocks and whipping posts stopped being a thing simply because cities got too big, town criers became obsolete, people got more sophisticated, the court system took over and people were judged according to a jury instead.

  But, in fact, that wasn’t why public shamings stopped.

  Public shamings were outlawed because they were deemed too brutal. They extinguished self-respect. After being held in the stocks, or having their back whipped raw, or having their head shaved, instead of becoming good citizens, redeemed by the village punishment, the person who’d been shamed became lost to everyone and everything. Nothing mattered to them anymore. There was no going back, no redemption, no hope.

  The things that had made life worth living for them were extinguished.

  They became a person-shaped husk.

  Press them too hard and they’d crumble to dust.

  #

  Mrs Willis came round to our house to officially tell me I’d been suspended. You know, just in case I hadn’t already read all about it on the internet.

  Harley and I sat on the couch watching the adults discuss my life, my doona wrapped around my shoulders and Harley’s arm slung over the top, keeping my doona (and me) in place.

  ‘As I said to you on the phone this morning,’ Mum said to Mrs Willis as they sat in our lounge room, cups of tea on their laps, ‘I understand why you’re having to suspend MC, but the fact is, it didn’t need to go this far – Frances didn’t need to go to the media.’

  Frances is Anouk’s mum.

  ‘I went over to talk to her last night about it all – I was very calm and reasonable – but she started yelling at me that
I was as big a bully as my daughter, and that she was going public with it because of the school’s refusal to punish MC harshly enough. And evidently it worked, because here you are.’

  Neither of them spoke for a while.

  ‘We’ve all been put in a very difficult position, now that the media’s involved,’ Mrs Willis said finally, shaking her head sadly. ‘I’m hoping that today will be the worst of it. Tomorrow probably won’t be great either, but hopefully by the beginning of next week something else will have taken over the front page.’

  Poor, misguided Mrs Willis. As it turned out, she was dreaming.

  After she left, Mum came and sat on the couch with Harley and me.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t fix things. I think I made it worse.’

  I shook my head. ‘You didn’t make it worse. I’m the one who made it worse.’

  She put her arms around me. ‘You’ll get through this,’ she said. ‘Things will be normal again in no time flat. You’ll see.’

  I sighed. Parents shouldn’t make promises they can’t keep.

  #

  Within hours of the newspaper story going to air, I’d been tied to every whipping post on the internet.

  The fake celebrities now had a new focus: me. Angelina Jolie was surrounded by all these African kids, telling them, ‘At least you don’t have to go to school in Australia: they have people like MC over there.’ Gollum was saying, ‘MC. Vi-cious,’ hissing out the last part. Lana Del Rey was singing, ‘I know you like the bad girls, honey, but seriously? You’re with MC? That can’t be true.’

  My Facebook page wouldn’t stay still long enough for me to actually be able to read all the posts pouring in from haters, trolls and people who used to be my friends.

  ‘With friends like you, who needs enemies #PoorAnouk #MCwhataB’

  ‘I still can’t quite believe a friend of mine would do something like this #MCwhataB’

  ‘You weren’t invited to a party, so you do this? #Overreact Much? #MCwhataB’

  ‘My flatmate wore my clothes (and wrecked them), stole my boyfriend, and set fire to our kitchen. But at least she’s not #MCwhataB.’

  ‘Some rando just drove into my car, then said it was my fault. But I guess I should be grateful. At least he’s not #MCwhataB.’

  Over and over. Thousands of comments.

  MCwhataB.

  MCwhataB.

  MCwhataB.

  There were also reams and reams of texts, emails and phone messages, almost all from numbers and accounts I didn’t recognise – journalists and bloggers wanting to interview me, hear my side of the story; begging me to walk out of my front door so they could thrust microphones and cameras in my face, and get me to say something to fill their sites with.

  Setting themselves up on our front lawn.

  The first of them had driven up a little after lunch, parked his car and leant against his bonnet like a pigeon settling onto a powerline. Then another one had come. And another. And more and more of them, from the newspapers, the gossip mags, the daily talk shows – watching our house, talking to each other, lighting cigarettes, checking their phones, taking photos of our house, cawing and flapping while they waited for the chance of a juicy worm.

  Me.

  Apparently there was a matching set-up on Anouk’s front lawn: journalists, camera and sound crews, all wanting to catch one or the other of us and plaster us all over the news.

  I only knew about the matching set-up at Anouk’s because of all the messages from people telling me that Anouk’s front lawn was covered in people; that her life was now officially hell and it was all my fault. Even girls I’d never spoken to at school, people from my old school, friends of friends, felt free to send me messages and texts of abuse.

  My phone, which had always felt like my lifeline, now felt like it was choking me.

  I felt imprisoned. My room was suffocating me.

  The front of my house felt like a flimsy barricade against all the people leaning against their cars wanting a piece of me.

  I could hear Mum in her bedroom, talking on her phone. ‘It’s unbelievable,’ she was saying. ‘They’ve completely taken over the street … well, she’s being very quiet, just lying in her room not saying much … Yes of course, it’s very scary for her …’

  I went downstairs to the kitchen, and opened the back door. Checked the garden. There were no sneaky journos trying to break in through the back.

  I ran through our yard and hauled myself over the back fence, splinters from the wood palings catching in my hands. Then I ran down the driveway of the house behind us and onto the street.

  I forced myself to walk. A running, crying teenager would have been too much of a beacon.

  The street was empty of people anyway. Hello, it seemed to be saying, just a normal school-day afternoon here. No one wants to interview anyone here, I’m afraid – not any of us here in our cheery homes, not creating havoc, not being hated by everyone in the entire world.

  I kept my eyes on my feet, to avoid making eye-contact with anyone even though there was no one here to make it with, my shoulders hunched inwards, trying to keep my body small. At the same time, I wanted to scream at all the houses for sitting there with their bricks-and-mortar coats, thinking they were so protective, that no one inside them would ever be hounded, ever feel pain – that none of their residents would ever feel enormous, un-turn-backable regret.

  I turned down the next street, not even sure where I was headed. My entire body was on high alert, my eyes, ears, tongue, nose, skin, the entire length of me conscious of the streetscape, scanning, picking out any dangers and feeding them to my brain. This street seemed empty too, but I could feel eyes on me, watching me as I walked. I could feel my heart banging against my chest like it was trying to get out of there. My breathing was shallow, my body was sweating even though the day was so cold, and my mouth felt sucked dry of moisture.

  My arms and legs were trembling.

  I started running. As hard and as fast as I could.

  I stumbled and fell. The heels of my palms were grazed and bloodied, gravel stuck there like it had been velcroed in. I was crying more tears than I’d even known were in my body, more tears than there were volumes of blood in my veins. I couldn’t even imagine how one person could have so many tears in them, but they kept coming, more and more and more and more, like something out of Alice in Wonderland but without the trippy Cheshire Cat element.

  Just me on the footpath with my scraped hands and no friends who would ever speak to me again.

  I scrambled up and kept running, worried that someone was going to appear out of nowhere, jump on me, haul me up in front of the mob, lynch me, and put me in the stockade.

  Running from the dangerous, buzzing swarm.

  #

  I ended up at the beach.

  My palms stung from where I’d fallen over.

  I sat on a stone wall and looked out over the water, occasionally bursting into tears and sobbing, then stopping, as if I was all cried out, then instantaneously exploding into sobs again a short time later.

  I had no friends.

  Everyone hated me.

  Everyone.

  My phone rang. Mum. I didn’t answer it.

  Mum again. I still didn’t answer.

  Dad called. I didn’t answer.

  Harley called. I answered.

  ‘Where are you?’ he said.

  I realised I was crying so hard I was unable to get words out – the most basic task, the forming of a sentence, completely beyond me.

  ‘I’ll come and pick you up,’ he said. ‘Where are you?’

  Crying, crying.

  ‘Beach,’ I managed.

  ‘Near Head Street?’ he asked.

  I didn’t know which one was Head Street. I didn’t know where I was. My only signposts were water and sand and scrubby bushes. I could be anywhere. I felt completely disconnected from everything and everyone. I felt like I could disappear and that would be the best out
come – never to be seen again, never having to talk to anyone again, never anything.

  ‘MC,’ he said. ‘I’m leaving now. I’ll come find you. Just hold on. Sit tight. I’m coming now.’

  #

  You’d think sitting watching the water would have settled me.

  It didn’t. It made me feel worse. There was so much water, so much sand, so much sky, and me, alone.

  I felt like I was crumpling in on myself. I kicked off my shoes. I could feel the winter dampness of the sand through my socks. I peeled them off. Took off my jumper. The frigid wind was harsh and exactly what I needed. Exactly right. Harsh was perfect.

  I thought about Liv. Yumi. Anouk. Hattie. If I were them – if one of them had done a video like I had, had written things like I’d written on Tumblr – I would never want to speak to them again.

  #MCwhataFriggingB.

  My feet were freezing into feet-shaped blocks in the damp sand. I wanted the cold to reach inside me, so that all the heated feelings would become like nothing, frozen solid inside my chest.

  I felt two hands clamp down on my shoulders and jumped away from whoever it was, frightened of what they might do to me – frightened that I was in danger from whoever it was who’d found me.

  Whoever had recognised me.

  ‘Hey,’ Harley said, sitting down next to me. ‘Shit. Sorry. Why have you got your shoes off? It’s friggin’ freezing!’

  I didn’t answer. I still felt like I didn’t have any words left in me. Things were bad, they were worse than bad, and there was nothing I could do about it.

  Everything was fucked.

  Suddenly I realised that there was no point in caring. There was nothing I could do, and so nothing mattered. My phone rang again and I didn’t even bother looking at it. It would be someone else I didn’t know, wanting to ask me questions I didn’t want to answer. Harley picked it up, then handed it to me.

  ‘It’s Yumi,’ he said.

  I looked at the screen and started crying again. Even the fact that she’d called was too much for me.

  Harley answered it for me.

  ‘Hey Yumi, it’s Harley,’ he said. Then he listened and I could hear a deep voice that didn’t sound like Yumi saying something on the other end. ‘Oh yeah, yeah, she’s fine,’ Harley said. ‘I’m with her at the moment. We’re down at the beach.’ Silence. Listening. More silence. More listening. ‘Yeah, thanks. Yeah, hold on, I’ll put her on.’