I know all you vegans out there think I’m the wickedest person on the planet, but I love being the meat queen, showing up at a Sunday barbecue loaded down with ribs and sausages. Mostly, it’s for my teammates on the campaign. Whoever thought work would be this much fun?? I’m, like, doing blog searches to see who has bad stuff to put out against My Candidate, like anyone could, and the whole world wouldn’t know it was the biggest crock ever. But everyone who meets My Candidate thinks Mr. President four years down the road, so we have tons of media and money and everything. And I’m, like, Saint Joan on a charger, going out and looking for dragons who want to attack us.
It wouldn’t take a sophisticated code breaker to realize who Petra was, or who her candidate was, based on her posts. In fact, as I skimmed the comments, it was clear that many of her MySpace friends knew that the candidate was Brian. There was competitive ribbing from Hank Albrecht, the guy working for the incumbent. There were passionate pro-Brian posts. And then there were quite a few people who wrote about altogether unconnected stuff: dogs, clothes, favorite restaurants.
Petra wrote about Mr. Contreras and me. I was code-named DC, for “Detecting Cousin.”
Every now and then I go over to see Uncle Sal, not that we’re really related, and DC, who really is my cousin. She’s, like, almost my mom’s age, isn’t that weird? Uncle Sal, who my detecting cousin only calls “Mr. C.,” he can’t get enough of my dad’s company’s ribs or of me. My cousin is jealous of me, isn’t that fun? Uncle Sal likes to flirt with me, and it used to be her, you know. Sometimes they seem like an old married couple having the same kind of squabbles everyone’s parents do. Oh my God, we all may end up like our parents, isn’t that freaky?
I went over yesterday, and Uncle Sal was scolding DC for wanting to go talk to this old gang leader who’s doing a hundred years for murder or whatever. And she’s, like, it bugs me that people are too pissed off at me to answer the simplest questions, and I’m, like, so put on your big-girl underpants and move on. And Uncle Sal thought that was hysterical and laughed his head off. So DC got really huffy but was trying not to show it. I mean, I thought being a detective was more dramatic, like solving murders, collecting clues, not going out to prison to talk to some kind of ignorant black gangbanger.
I remembered that episode, and it made me angry that Petra had put it out for the whole world to read about. I made a face at the computer screen. “Put on your big-girl underpants now, V.I.,” I muttered, and read on.
I focused on her posts about the work she’d done for Brian, wondering if any of dragons she’d been sent to slay would turn out to be biting back, but they seemed innocuous enough. She had tracked down a rumor that Brian had been seen in a Rush Street leather bar. She’d handled a post that he’d taken money from someone who’d been arrested for selling kiddie porn.
She’d written about DC breaking into her apartment the night she dropped her keys by the front door. And then we came to the Navy Pier fundraiser.
We had this huge fundraiser, and I am, like, a superstar because My Candidate chose one of my guests for his big photo op. My guest was a World War II hero, and he wore all his battle medals and everything, and was on the front page of a bunch of papers, including the Washington Post, which my dad always says is a liberal rag, but it’s so important. Anyway, I’m, like, a star at the campaign, even though it was a total fluke, but the head of the campaign, who we all call the Chicago Strangler, was superimpressed and pulled me out of the NetSquad to do special assignments directly for him. Some of my coworkers are a little huffy, ’cause some of them have been with My Candidate from Day 1, and I’m a Joanie-come-lately. But, well, that’s life.
Up through that post, Petra’s tone had been like her speaking voice, breezy, confident. A few days later, she wrote more soberly.