She lifted the things one by one: the Tesla Model S, the little green army man with a bazooka, the amethyst geode, the Fender guitar pick. As she grabbed it, she heard Isabeau gasp downstairs and say, “Oh, my gosh.”
Nessa ran down the stairs, the pick still in her hand, and when she got to the living room, Isabeau’s expression stopped Nessa dead. The now--familiar feeling of alarm filled her stomach.
“Oh, shit,” Isabeau said. “Oh, this is so bad.”
“What?” Nessa demanded. Isabeau rose from the floor and pulled out Nessa’s desk chair in front of her desktop computer.
“Go to NessaDonati.com.”
“But—-”
“Just do it!”
Nessa sat, put the pick in her pocket, and typed the URL into the address bar, then watched the website materialize. The home page of the site was a fairly generic splash page with the following menu items: Show Blog Appearances Game Photos. Had Altair put this site up without her knowledge?
She looked at Isabeau, whose expression was tense and worried, her eyebrows knotted.
“You better look,” Isabeau said.
On the Show page, it listed the times she was on the air. Under Blog, it said Coming Soon. She was beginning to think it was Altair, until she clicked on Photos.
There she found dozens of nudes: her legs spread--eagle, having sex in every position imaginable and some she couldn’t imagine, and even grosser things. Hustler--grade stuff. Of course her head had been Photoshopped onto the airbrushed bodies. She didn’t look anything like that. But it was more than a little unsettling to see herself in that context.
She glanced again over her shoulder, and Isabeau met her gaze.
“That’s not the worst of it,” she said, reaching for the mouse and clicking on Game. A headshot of Nessa appeared, filling the screen. Beneath the headshot were instructions: Use your mouse buttons to punch Nessa’s face. If you knock out a tooth, you win!
Just to see what would happen, she clicked the mouse, and fists shot out, punching the face. Each punch made her eyes swell a little more, bruising develop, blood come out of her nose, eventually knocking out a tooth. Fireworks exploded on the screen, accompanied by the words You Win! The effects were spectacularly realistic.
She scrolled further.
New Rape Game Coming Soon!
“This is beyond trolling,” Isabeau said in a hushed voice. “This is menacing. It’s threatening. It’s personal.”
Yes, it was. Nessa turned the pick over in her hand, and the silver BIG written on the back of it suddenly grew in her brain, filled the room and her consciousness as “Dead Wrong” blared in her mind. That song. It was by Notorious B.I.G.
BIG.
She had to do an Internet search. Alone. Now.
“I’m going to take a bath,” Nessa said, snatching up her laptop.
Isabeau’s eyes traveled from the computer in Nessa’s hands to her face.
“I’ll be back down in a little while. I need to calm down. Okay?”
“All right,” Isabeau said.
Nessa went upstairs and locked herself in her bathroom and opened her laptop. She navigated to the California state prison website. After almost an hour of searching and being bounced from one worthless, confusing, badly designed website to another, she finally had to plunk down $4.95 for seven--day unlimited access to governmentsearch.com. Then Nessa finally had the information she needed and dreaded.
He’d been paroled fourteen months ago.
Nathan. Her high school classmate who’d served seven years in Chino, effectively blowing his full--ride football scholarship to USC. For raping Nessa.
She sat shaking in her bathroom using her vape pen. It was a poor substitute for what she really needed, what her very cells cried out for, which was a shot. She kept having to swallow to keep up with the constant salivating, to tamp down the germinating nausea that mimicked withdrawal.
It was clear to her that Nathan had posted the Rosie trivia question to let her know he knew who she really was. But did he know where she was? That she was in the middle of Kansas?
No, she reassured herself. If he did, he’d have shown up in person.
Right?
He was terrorizing her to try to flush her out, to expose her, or more specifically, to make her expose herself. So the cops would find her and haul her off to prison now that he was out. He would finally have his revenge.