“Daddy…?” My voice did this weird quaver. “Seriously?”
“It’s not her,” my brother said.
“Sung…” Mom interceded.
“I said go to your room.” For a normal person it wasn’t shouting, but for my dad it was. Softer, he said, “I need a minute. Okay? I need a minute to process this and speak with your mother. Kyle, go to your room. You too, Kyle. Both Kyles. Rooms. Now.”
It would have been funny if it just wasn’t.
I spent the next half hour wheeling around my room in my desk chair waiting for my parents to knock and say they had somehow fixed this. How, exactly, was beyond me. I’d been tagged in 4,749 posts. I had 536 new Connect requests and 133 private messages, and 2,652 people had commented on a link I was tagged in. I was trending.
I chewed on a cuticle, very much wanting to cry. I txted my brother instead.
moi Thanks for not asking if it was me in the vid, Kyle.
boi-k Duh, Kyle. You’re my sister
I know you wouldn’t
OBV
I mean, duh.
Yes, my brother resembled an enormous bipedal puppy—I was always tripping over a techie toy he’d dragged out then forgot about, and if I left food in the open it was eaten—but I was still convinced he was the best part of me. I sent him a pic of two babies hugging. To which he replied:
boi-k You don’t think they forgot about dinner, do you? I’m STARVING.
At least some things hadn’t changed. On my Doc I typed, What would Malin do? and then Quipped it.
The girls could tease me all they wanted, but President Malin was my hero. In her first term she’d pushed through more legislation than any other president in history. She’d declared a fight to end date rape in her lifetime. She’d launched the Global Water Resuscitation Program by going on record as not having used a disposable feminine product in over twenty-five years. I mean, with one speech she’d changed the entire feminine product industry. (I preferred the Regal Cup?: For the New Woman’s Body.)
(Sorry. The Regal Cup thing was too much. I’ll be done now.)
President Malin wouldn’t be helplessly chewing on her cuticles. She’d put on her thinking sweats (or the closest facsimile thereof), swipe her Doc to share mode, put her room screen to 3-D touch, and find her hater. So that’s what I decided to do.
Park Prep was known for its small class sizes. How hard could it be?
Correct answer: extremely hard.
It would have been easier to find the people at Park Prep who hadn’t commented on the video or linked it. Now when you looked up my G-File, you could see that Kyla Cheng’s friend Charity Knowles thought: Ha! What a TRAMP.
Charity had shared my hand sanitizer in Civics all last year. Just yesterday she’d cooed how much she liked my blazer. Now I was a tramp? My mouth was briny with anger. No matter how far down I scrolled, not a single person questioned the video’s authenticity. And not a single person defended me.
“Won’t you look ridiculous, Charity,” I told her profile pic, “when I prove it’s not me?”
In debate Coach Ota told us to find the facts first, then craft our narratives. So what did I know about the video?
First—surprise, surprise—it had been posted as Anonymous. Mine was the only video this user had ever posted. And the time stamp on the account’s creation was yesterday. When I swiped into the user’s profile, I knew more, especially since it was set to “open” (amateur). In fact, in two swipes I knew Anonymous’s name.
Now who the H-double-L was Ennie Li Sunmaid?
On my room screen, a preset girl avatar popped up next to my personalized avatars. Underneath her it read: Contact: Ailey.
Asked my dad, preset girl said. He knows of no software that could make vid. If you need to talk, I’m here.
Great. Thanks. Block.
What kind of a name was Ennie, other than completely gender-neutral? I knew an Annie in elementary school, but she was the sweetest thing ever, plus she moved to Buffalo in the third grade. I swiped to another screen and searched for Ennie’s G-File.
No matches found.
He/she didn’t have a G-File? That meant there was no proof of his/her existence anywhere online. What, did a senior citizen have it out for me?
I swiped back into Ennie’s YurTube profile and found the e-mail address that had been used to create the account. My stomach got all squishy. Whoever had made the video had a bigger grudge against me than I’d imagined. Ennie Li Sunmaid wasn’t a real person’s name. It was just nonsense to fill in the name fields—phonetic, creepy nonsense.
The alias they chose was @AnyLiesUnmade.
My eyes filled with stress tears. I angrily wiped them away and swiped into my messaging program. Who needed facts when I had a direct line to this AnyLies? I pulled up the no-name-sender thread from the morning countdown, and before I could think better of it, I added a line.
moi Why are you doing this to me?
Then I waited.
Mom called upstairs to tell us she’d put soup on the stove. Across the hall, Kyle’s bedroom door smacked against the wall. Next second he was thundering downstairs. I shouted back that I wasn’t hungry.
Then I waited some more.
Suddenly, into the silence of my bedroom, my FaceAlert notification rang. Without thinking, I hit accept. To FaceAlert you needed my Doc digits, and those I kept private. Only about four hundred people knew them. As I waited for the FaceAlert window to connect, I stared at the AnyLies txt thread. I almost felt AnyLies staring at her screen too.
“You’ll fix this, Kyle,” I murmured. “You’ll fix this.”
As if in reply, my room screen emitted a high-pitched laugh. The FaceAlert window was still black. I glanced at the contact. The number was blocked.
“Hello?” I enlarged the window. “Your FaceAlert’s not working. I can no puedo see you.”
There was a digital beep. It sounded like the recording video sound that most Docs made.
“Oh my gosh…”
Someone was filming me.
I tried to push back, out of sight of my screen’s camera. The wheel on my desk chair caught on my rug, and the whole thing tipped backwards. My arms pinwheeled. I righted myself, but just barely. As I tapped frantically at the disconnect button, whoever was watching me said in a joyously evil singsong, “Kisses.”
I couldn’t push air in or out fast enough. I closed out of FaceAlert. I shut down my room screen, then powered off my Doc entirely. I closed my blinds and checked the locks on my windows. I couldn’t have felt more exposed than if you’d shoved me into the middle of Union Square naked. And no matter how secure I made my room, I couldn’t stop hearing that voice. They must have used a voice changer, because no human vocal cords could reach that high a pitch.
Kisses.