by Corrie Wang
Finally, I said, “Three days, Audy. You knew for three days.”
“I know.”
“That means even at the sleepover.”
“I tried to point you in the right direction. I tried to say it had to be two different people.”
“Which isn’t the same thing as telling me you knew it was Ailey.”
Audra shrugged like I could be mad all I wanted; she didn’t care. But I knew she did, because right up until a few minutes ago, we’d been best friends. Fighting—knock-down-drag-out-style, maybe—but still best friends.
“I know, but it’s not that simple. Ailey was lined up to do six different shoots with me between then and New Year’s. The pics with multiple girls in them get twenty percent more likes than the ones with just me. She’s a natural at it.
“I asked her if she made the video when those Mr. E. pics surfaced the day after she took them. She told me she didn’t make it, just reposted it. I figured whoever made the video put the DRM on it, not Ailey. I didn’t know that she was the only reason it was still online. It wasn’t like the video could do you more damage at that point. And after we got in that fight in your kitchen, I couldn’t tell you that I knew. I just couldn’t.”
“A fight is a fight, Audra. It’s not friendship-ending.”
Unlike this. I knew Audra thought not telling me about being the B&P chick was as much my fault as it was hers. I knew she thought that didn’t make her a bad friend. And I suppose I could see her logic. But Audra not telling me about Ailey? That was unforgivable.
“Friendship?” Audra scoffed. “Is that what we have? All I kept thinking for the last few months was that if you knew anything about me—the real me—you’d disapprove.”
“So why bother giving me the chance to prove you wrong.” I fought to keep my voice level. “Am I such a monster that my friends won’t be honest around me? Am I that scary?”
“Scary?” Audra laughed. “It’s not that we’re afraid of you, silly. It’s that we’re afraid of disappointing you.
“You know, Kylie, I’ve wanted to tell you something for the longest time, but I always worried you’d take it the wrong way. All this pressure you put on yourself to do the right thing all the time? Like if you don’t get a perfect grade in life it’s all for nothing? That’s not real. There is no one right way. I think the closest you can be to getting it perfect is enjoying yourself and being happy fifty-one percent of the time.”
“Are you happy, Audra?”
“Oh, hell no,” she snorted. “Clearly. But I’m working on it.”
I realized then that I had felt more connected to Audra in the last three years than I had to Ailey in the entire nine I’d been best friends with her. But I thought about what AnyLies had said: Was Audra there for me no matter what? No. And about what Mac had said on Christmas: If the Virus struck, what would I be left with? Would I have good people around to be stuck in the dark with? When it came to Audra, it was more like who shouldn’t I be alone in the dark with? But I guess my mom nailed it after all. As far as friendships went, you did reap what you sowed.
Maybe I’d taken down the video, but before my life would feel “like”-worthy there was one major aspect I needed to fix. Assuming I still could.
“I’m sorry you didn’t think you could talk to me,” I said, as tears welled up. “I didn’t mean to be a bad friend. I would have supported you as much as I could.”
We hugged good-bye.
“I know, betch. But that’s the problem. ‘As much as you could’ wouldn’t have been enough.”
There was only one place I wanted to be. I couldn’t get there fast enough. I almost pinged an Elite. Instead I ran down Fifth Avenue, dodging baby carriages and post-holiday shoppers.
Ten minutes later, my heart was pounding as much from my run as from where I was standing. During the entire last week, I hadn’t wished I could make time go backwards as much as I did right then. I knew now that there weren’t any good or bad guys in real life. Not really. It was all just life. And none of us were perfect at it. As it turned out, even the worshipped were scarred. Everyone was. And never ever again did I want to contribute to the scarring process, which meant there were a few things I needed to make right, and one more urgently than all the others.
Swallowing my nerves, I knocked on the door.
“Come in.”
Mom was at her desk with her back to me. Her closet-sized office was a mess. Spreadsheets, e-mails, and website mock-ups filled her holoscreen. Her desk was piled high with to-go coffee cups. Clearly, her “deadline” didn’t need the air quotes after all. This also solved the mystery of where all the plates in the house had gone. A dirty stack of them teetered next to her desk.
“There’s the girl I’ve been looking for,” she said, still typing. “I received an e-mail from Dr. Graff this afternoon. Something about was I aware you used an off-grounds pass this morning? Know anything about that?”
“Probably. Maybe. Yes. But can it wait till we’re all together?”
Too busy to argue, she sighed. “I guess.”
“Where are the guys?”
“Some kind of sport thing…hockey, basketball. I forget.”
It was my cue to leave. Instead I picked the empty paper cups off her desk and tossed them in the wastebasket.
“Mmm, that’s okay, honey. I’ll get those later.”
While she tried to regain her focus and quietly read her last few sentences out loud, I perused her shelf of old cell phones. How fast would she stop working if I told her about Audra and Ailey? I picked up one of the clunkier phones. She called them design “artifacts.” She swore they’d all been top-of-the-line when she first bought them and that someday they’d be worth money, the same way old turn-of-the-century, like, electric cars were. Mom being Mom, the cord was taped to the back of it.
I sat on the floor. The phone lit up when I plugged it in. All the pics on the phone were old. Like before-I-was-born old. I snorted at one of her and Dad grinning ear to ear, decked out for Halloween as an old-skool book (Dad) and an even older-skool e-reader kind of thing (Mom). Mom glanced over, probably ready to say, Can you do that somewhere else, but whatever expression I was wearing stopped her. She pushed her glasses up on her forehead. Her fingers hovered over her holokeyboard. Her gray eyes softened.
“Screw it.”
She saved her screen. With a groan, she lowered herself to the floor next to me.
“That’s right around when Daddy and I started dating. Look at his hair! There was so much of it.” We sat in companionable silence, scrolling through the old pictures. After a few minutes she bumped her shoulder against mine. “So I’ve been thinking, a lot—a lot a lot—about our last few conversations.”
“Oh gosh.” I bit my lip. “Can we please forget this whole last week?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Because it finally dawned on me that you think I don’t like you, and I need to rectify the matter immediately.”
Instant tears, all down my cheeks. They were exactly the words I’d craved hearing my mom say for the better part of the last sixth of my life. She reached for the box of tissues on her desk and handed me one.
“I hardly think you’re evil, Kyla. And to be clear, I never liked Ailey more than you. When I said you changed after you met the girls and it was like the stuff from your old life wasn’t good enough anymore?” She took a deep breath, then quickly said, “I meant me.”
I let out a short, disbelieving laugh.
“It’s true. I felt like I got left behind or like I didn’t fit in anymore. And yes, maybe just a little, that reminded me of being back in high school.
“I’m probably not supposed to share these feelings with my kid. I’m probably supposed to suck it up and commiserate with Daddy. But you and boy-Kyle spoiled me. All my friends whined about how hard parenting was, but you two were a breeze. So when we started having problems, I didn’t know what to do. There are thousands of books out there, but when it actually comes to raising
your kids, there isn’t a fail-safe manual.”
She put an arm around me. I rested my head against her shoulder.
“I can’t stop worrying that once you go off to school we’ll fall completely out of touch.” Now she reached for a tissue. “Then next year Kyle’s off too, and then the only person I’ll have to talk to around here is Daddy.”
Mimicking the inane voice that Kyle gave my avatar, the one that rose at the end of every word, I said, “And Daddy’s, like, the worst.”
Mom snorted and wrapped her other arm around me. She kissed me once, twice, three times on the top of my head.
“You will never understand how much I love you. I am so proud of what a smart, smart girl you are. And that is a fact. You are my favorite daughter.”
I dabbed at my eyes but still executed an expert eye roll. “Mom…”
“I’m not kidding. Even if I had more, you’d still be my favorite.”
“You’re playing favorites with me and your imaginary daughters? That’s not fair.”
“You’re also the funniest of my daughters.”
“I’m gonna tell them you said that.” Mom gave me another squeeze, then blew her nose. Before she could say she desperately needed to get back to work, I said, “Mama, will you tell me the story of us?”
“Now?” She glanced toward her desk but then started playing with my hair. “Seventeen years ago—”
I lifted my head off her shoulder. “That’s not how it starts.”
“Seventeen years ago,” she said firmly, “I lay exhausted in a hospital bed because a tiny being with an enormous head had just come out of me. And after they cleaned her up and put that little beast on my chest, I knew right away that I would love her even if she cried through the night every night until she was two, even if she threw tantrums in restaurants. I’d love her even if she grew up to be mean.
“I shouldn’t have worried. She never did become a single one of those things, but even if she had, I knew it wouldn’t matter. For the first time in my life, I was experiencing fierce, unwavering love. Friends come and go. Men do too—don’t tell Daddy I said that. But this little girl and I were going to be with one another my whole life.
“The next couple of years, your mommy went through a lot. And every time I felt like I couldn’t live in my own skin, because there was so much anxiety festering beneath it—”
“You felt like that?”
“Yup.” I felt her nod. “Almost twenty-four hours a day. And when it got really bad, you would come to me with your arms outstretched, smiling, and I knew no matter what happened with the stores, our finances, my marriage, I was blessed. Even during the roughest patches—”
“Like the day after Christmas?” I interjected.
“Exactly,” she laughed. “Even then, I loved you as fiercely as I did when you were that little girl who held her arms out to me when I felt like I was sinking.”
Now we each took a tissue and blotted at our eyes. Mom reached across to her room screen and untacked a tiny piece of paper. I unfolded it. It crackled with age. In my mom’s cool block printing, in faded red ink, it read:
WHAT WOULD KYLA DO?
“No matter what obstacles we face in the future, if we create them or if others do, you are my greatest strength and my greatest love. Don’t tell your brother I said that.” We laughed. She gave me one last squeeze. “And that is the story of us. To be continued.”
In January, a week after I took my video down—Wait, sorry, who took down her video? Oh, that’s right. This girl!—my parents and I went to the offices of Awareness for a Safe America, located in downtown Washington, DC. Our lawyer set up the meeting. Once we were inside, two forms of ID were needed to check in at reception. Everyone’s tech was remotely powered down by security. When we were deemed nonthreats, we met with the head of ASA’s public relations department, a Ms. Smythe—no joke, just like in a spy movie—who explained that, contrary to what our lawyer insinuated via e-mail, ASA wasn’t entrapping people.
“We’re a watchdog group,” she said. “A privately funded corporation that works in conjunction with Homeland Security. Since technology isn’t growing in a bubble, ASA’s job is to hold the criminals that grow with it accountable for the very traceable, very real, very evil—I don’t think I’m overselling it by using that word—footprints they leave on the stream.”
Cool. Ms. Smythe was one of those people who called the Internet the stream. I imagined her riding the building’s soundless elevator to a pod in the basement every night, attaching a giant hose to her back, and powering down.
“While we sincerely apologize for your inconvenience, I hope you will view it as forgivable. There’s no end to the benefits of monitoring men who frequent or set up child pornography sites. Or, when it’s true—we’re reevaluating our vetting process as we speak—of pulling teachers who slept with their students out of schools. As stellar as you are at debate, Kyla, even you can’t argue against the advantages of preventing grown men from befriending children on apps that were meant for ages two to six.”
Clearly, Ms. Smythe didn’t know who she was dealing with. Or maybe she did. As I explained how that was heroic and all, but that there were still five other girls suffering through the mess Jonah Logan had made of their lives, she replied that she’d already signed them up for a pilot software program that erased selected materials as soon as they reemerged online—i.e., the other girls’ un-DRMed sex videos.
When we left, Mom got all teary-eyed. “That was spooky and terrifying, but honey, I am in utter awe of how awesome you are.”
I wasn’t as impressed. When I’d asked about Mr. E., Ms. Smythe had said, “We’ll look into it. But in his case, I fear the damage has already been done.”
Awareness for a Safe America had done that damage. Them. But this was politics, wasn’t it? And if this was where I was headed, I needed to learn the game. Maybe today there was nothing to be done, but someone worked above Ms. Smythe. There was always another channel.
Speaking of politics, while, ahem, I did take down my video, I was not the recognized valedictorian of my high school graduating class. I should have been. I had the highest grade-point average. But a few days before the ceremony, Dr. Graff called me into her office for one last visit. With her unblinking eyes, she informed me that though I was technically valedictorian, due to the circumstances in December my giving the commencement speech would be too controversial. It would open the school, and myself, up to too much scrutiny and negative publicity. So it was that Jessie Rosenthal, with her lousy 3.89 GPA, her three senior-elective art periods, and her crap British accent, won the honor of being the class speaker at graduation.
And actually?
She crushed it.
“We’re all about to go off and see and do many miraculous things, but I’d like to spend a few minutes now reminding you about what we don’t see….”
While she spoke, she scrolled through photos from a series she called the Humanity Project. It was the man in the diner, and the woman feeding the birds, but also a woman putting on makeup on the train, a man walking his bicycle, a mother with her five children staring into space as they waited to cross the street, all these lonely souls, moving through the world, crying out for a little contact and a little something good to happen.
“…In conclusion, I’d just like to remind everyone to be kind, to be mindful of those who don’t have what we do, and for heaven’s sake, to look up.”
As an added bonus, I still got called up onstage for having perfect attendance.
In college app news, two days before the admissions deadlines, Mom and I contacted twelve different admissions offices and begged them to let me resubmit the essay portion of my application. It turned out to be no big deal. Apparently, Scholar screwed up constantly and students were always pleading to upload new documents.
Still, I didn’t get into Harvard.
But I did get a partial ride to Yale.
I was also in that year’s class of summer
White House interns. Funny, but as it turned out, I think my sex video nudged me into both places. In their acceptance e-mail, the head of the White House review committee told me she was “moved” and “overwhelmed” by the video addendum to my application, and that she was “excited” to have such a voracious crusader on board. In my reply, I thanked her for her kind words and said it was only too bad that my teacher, Mr. Ehrenreich, had been a casualty of the whole ordeal.
I’ll get Mr. E.’s record expunged yet. After all, I’m the girl who took down her video!
Okay. That will be the last one.
Although, actually? I didn’t take down the video.
Yes, I deleted it from Ailey’s Doc and YurTube faster than you could blink, but not before transferring it to my Doc. A few days later, I posted it to Whattodo.org along with my story—this story. Of course, the video had a DRM on it, and Mr. E. was no longer tagged to it, but if at some point in all our lives we’ll be attacked online, we need to muster every resource to fight it. And there’s nothing I love better than a good fight. (Or at least a good theoretical one.) Besides, a friend once told me I’d be an idiot not to use the incredible platform I’d been given.
Speaking of Audra, the photos for her big New Year’s Eve reveal were staged on her parents’ dining room table. I didn’t see them right at midnight on New Year’s. I was too busy toasting my mom and dad. But I did try to flip through around one a.m. Unfortunately, a billion other people must have too. All the traffic temporarily crashed her site. When I saw the pics the next morning, I had to admit that Audra looked beautiful. The photos were tasteful, fairly showy, and yet coy. I’m not sure any of that mattered to the Parents.
As I’d hoped, Sharma said that Audra showed the Parents the photos on the dining room wallpaper screen after yet another nonpescatarian dinner. Audra’s bags were already packed and waiting by the front door. Which, from Sharma’s telling, was a good thing as, shortly after the Parents viewed the pics, Audra was no longer welcome in the Rhodes brownstone. Apparently, she’s lived quite happily in her one-bedroom Williamsburg apartment ever since.