He pulled a headphone forward off one of his ears.
“No, you don’t get to talk to me anymore. You don’t get to send me cute pics before you go to bed or make plans with me of what we’ll eat for after-school snack. You don’t get to call me crying every time you fight with your mom. You don’t get to be my ‘just friend’ anymore.”
Behind us, the girls moved in, their shoes crunching on the snow. I couldn’t believe it. Mac thought the video was real. Me. The girl who covered her eyes during sex scenes in movies. The girl who refused every single one of his advances, even though it would have been much easier and more enjoyable not to. She had suddenly up and done this? With her teacher?
There was little doubt it was me, except for the important fact that it wasn’t. I thought that’d be clear to anyone who knew me even a little. Panic and rage coursed through my body in equal measure.
“Kylie, honey,” Fawn said. “Let’s go.”
At their approach, Mac’s eyes took on that faraway, heavy-lidded it’s all the same to me gaze that his primos were so good at. It was the expression he wore on constant at Prep. The one that covered up how funny, sweet, and silly he was when he wasn’t surrounded by kids who had their own assistants and drove beamers.
As calmly as possible I said, “Macky, you know that isn’t me in the video.”
Still not meeting my eyes, he gave me a slow, lazy smile. I’d seen this before too. It was the same smile he gave Avery Gibson the time Mac pulled Avery’s soda can out of the trash—Mac hated when people didn’t recycle—and Avery saw and said, “Hey, Rodriguez, if you’re that desperate for the deposit money, I’ll just txt you some credits next time.”
And Mac replied, “Hey, Avery, eat SHT,” and then whipped the can at his head.
“No preocupes, princesa,” Mac now said, calmly, like he was over it. “I should have seen it coming, right? Only, you know the part that gets me? All these months, you’ve acted like I was the slut.”
I felt the sting of his words as sharply as if he’d smacked me.
“Hey,” Sharma said.
“No,” Fawn snapped. “You don’t talk to her like that.”
She began to push past me, but Audra grabbed her back. Mac held his hands out, like You want me? Come get me. Luckily, a cab pulled up. Mac’s cousin Rupey was hanging out the passenger-side window. Two of his other cousins were in the back. Rupey and Mac slapped hands.
“Have a nice life, Kyla.”
Mac was the only person who ever called me by my real name. His voice cracked a little when he said it. He hopped into the backseat of the cab, exchanged a series of handshakes with all the primos. Then, because whenever we were in the same space that’s what they tended to do, his eyes flicked to mine. How could you?
Before the cab pulled away, Rupey spat on the sidewalk at our feet. Now the tears came. If Mac believed this, who wouldn’t?
Fawn immediately absorbed me into a hug.
“I’m fine,” I said, angrily wiping my eyes.
Audra stared after the boys, then shook herself a little and said, “Let’s take you home.”
Home. All I wanted was to put my head in my mom’s lap and have her stroke my hair, like she did when I was little and had woken up terrified from a bad dream. Sharma handed me a half-used tissue from her pocket. I gratefully blotted my eyes with it.
“No, not yet,” I said. “We have to go to Sharma’s and figure out what the H-double-L just happened.”
Since I’m sure everything will be different by the time you read this, allow me a mini ancient-history lesson for the young’uns in the audience. Once upon a time there was something called the Internet.
I’m kidding! I won’t go that far back.
As you do know, the first site to do Worldwide Facial Recognition was ConnectBook. Anytime someone took a picture, everyone in it—even twenty rows back—was tagged. So a day shopping in the city meant a hundred different tourists’ vacation photos now attached to your profile. You had to un-star them or, like, click diss-connect in order for them not to show up in your feed. I can’t remember. There was a lot of starring and clicking back then.
Worldwide Facial Recognition (shortened to WWFR, pronounced “Woofer”) was controversial from the start. A cheating husband was the first to sue. He and his mistress were captured in the background when some kid took a pic with his first car. As soon as the kid posted the pic online, BAM! The wife saw the husband tagged—along with the wife’s best friend.
Oops.
Wife divorced husband. Got millions in settlement.
Double oops.
The cheater claimed Woofer ruined his life. The court of public opinion said he did it to himself by cheating in the first place. ConnectBook said he could have selected to opt out of Woofer under his account’s personal settings. The lawsuit worked its way up through the court of appeals to the door of the Supreme Court. In a five-to-four decision, the court ruled that Woofer didn’t infringe on an individual’s privacy rights. After all, anyone at any time could opt out.
Nobody opted out.
Instead the world got smaller, or so says my mom. She says Woofer changed everything. In a few months, those star-stalker e-mags became obsolete, because you could now go to your favorite star’s CB fan page and watch him move real-time through the world. It was lose-lose for undercover cops. And it became near impossible to lie to your parents about, say, “sleeping over at Sharma’s,” when you were out at a salsa club with Mac. (Lesson learned on that one.)
ConnectBook patented their 3-D-based, surface-texture-analysis tech so when Goog started attaching Woofer photos to G-Files, ConnectBook sued and won. Now to access Woofer, and all the star and fellow-man stalkery it allowed, you had to be a CB member. ConnectBook’s user numbers exploded. It’s estimated that 94 percent of the people in the world have a CB account.
Mom said it was the nail in the coffin. Thanks to Woofer and the new personal holographic devices, i.e., PHDs, i.e., Docs (get it? Because they’re PhDs?), no one would ever look up from their tech again. Randomly pull up any Woofer tag from the first year it came out, and nine out of ten times that person was staring at their device. After that, audio txt took off. I mean, who liked looking at pics of people looking down?
Now, as we silently filed into Sharma’s brownstone and down into the garden apartment that was her lair, I figured someone must have pulled a Woofer video to make the one of me and Mr. E. And all I knew was that whoever did this had it backwards. I’d be over this video in a matter of minutes. They’d be the one who’d live to regret it.