The Takedown Page 17

  I could practically see my profile on her screen.

  “Nah,” Mac said. “This isn’t Jessie. Jessie’s messed up, but I mean, she’s not a bad girl.”

  He said it like he held some deep understanding about the inner workings of the beast. I thought back. Wasn’t there a rumor that Mac and Jessie hooked up, when was it, sophomore year? At the Halloween dance? Oh, yuck. As if Mac could see me working through my memories, he quickly pushed on. All eyes flicked to him.

  “Isn’t it obvious what the connection is?” As if he were on a job interview, he sat up straight and folded his hands in his lap. He cleared his throat. “I mean, running the odds alone…the similarity is the guys. Both are teachers, both are young, both were caught with students, and both are in situations where they had to be aware the videos were being filmed.”

  “What are you getting at?” I said.

  “Bonita, you’re too innocent for your own good.”

  “I happen to like her that way,” my dad said, straight-faced.

  “Me too.” Mac wiped his hands on his pants. I could see the sweat beading on his forehead from across the room. “All I meant was, Kyla, you keep assuming that because it’s not you in the video, it’s also not Mr. E. It isn’t like someone captured vid of Mr. E. shooting hoops and overlaid it on some porn star doing it. That’s him in the classroom with a girl. You’re spending all this time looking for who made the video, but you haven’t once considered that it could have been the person who participated in it.”

  “Whoa,” Kyle said.

  “I always did think Mr. E. had a crush on you.” Fawn nodded.

  Mac continued, “Is there a way to find out if the other profess taught any extracurrics? I bet you anything he did video effects like Mr. E. Maybe they’re old college buddies that send each other vids of themselves with their hot students.”

  “Mr. E. teaches video effects?” I asked. “How didn’t I know this?”

  “B-slash-C the only electives you take lead to you in the Oval Office,” Sharma said, looking at me over the bridge of her glasses.

  “But then who’s AnyLies?” Mom asked. “Mr. Ehrenreich couldn’t have wanted this out there. Whoever made the video has an issue with you.”

  It was a good point. And almost exactly what I had been thinking, but when Mom said it, it was attached to her same refrain of what has my daughter done to deserve this.

  “Mama,” I said. “Let’s pretend not everyone hates me and look at this objectively.”

  Mom’s eyes narrowed. She collected a few plates, then left the room. Dad pinched the bridge of his nose. Yup, I was going to get it later.

  Into the ensuing tension, Mac shrugged. “Who knows what Glamour Stubble does outside Park Prep? He used to date Ms. Valtri, but I guess recently he’d been going out for happy hour with Ms. Tompkins.” That I didn’t know. “I mean, double-dipping in such a small pond? That’s just estúpido. Anyone could have found this video and run with it. Take your pick of girls at school who are jealous of you, Kyla.”

  “Or maybe Mr. E. got hacked,” Dad said.

  From the kitchen came sounds of plates being slammed into the dishwasher.

  “Right.” Mac cleared his throat. “All I know is these videos aren’t a hundred percent fake. Never mind Ellie Cyr’s footage. You gotta find the original source videos of the men. I’m telling you. Mr. E.’s no innocent victim.”

  I looked at Sharma. She didn’t crush on him like I did, but Mr. E. was her favorite teacher too. She sighed and pushed up her glasses.

  “I’d say not enough data. But regardless of what the connection is—teachers or students—maybe there’s more of these videos out there.”

  Once everyone left to get back to their post-Christmas afternoons with their families, we four Chengs went to a strained Sunday dim sum brunch out in Flushing. Thanks to my earlier snap, Mom was full-on silent-treatmenting me. I thought a noisy, crowded banquet hall–style restaurant would be the perfect relief, but even in that delectable chaos of steamed buns, squeaking carts, and multigenerational families, I could feel the tension crackling between us. Though we ordered equivalent amounts of food, in comparison to all the other families ours seemed small and unhappy. So I waited until we got home, having spent an appropriate amount of awkward time silently window-shopping in Queens, before I tried to escape. I found her in her office.

  “S’okay if I go to Audra’s to work on my college essays?” I lied.

  “Do whatever you like, Kyle,” she said, keeping her back to me.

  “Sorry I snapped at you,” I said, still from the doorway. “I’ve been stressed.”

  “I never use that as an excuse to snap at you. And it’s not only today. Sometimes I feel like I don’t even know my own daughter anymore.” Whose fault was that? She shook her head sadly. “What will happen when you go away to school?”

  Remember how I wrote that I didn’t bumble my words around cute boys? Well, unfortunately, I didn’t bumble them around my parents, either.

  “What are you afraid will happen, Mom? I know you think I can’t possibly get worse.”

  “Kyle…”

  “It’s true,” I said, suddenly shaking. “I know you think I’m like Violet Mitchell and all those other girls you despised. I’m sorry I’m not some nerd, that we never got to bond over how awful high school is. But now you can be happy. I’ll officially be haunted by it for the rest of my life just like you.”

  This didn’t come out as cleanly as it’s written. My eyes started to tear up and my voice turned shrieky the first sentence in. Beneath her now-fashionable hubcap-sized glasses, Mom’s eyes went wide with shock. As much as I’d been thinking Mom looked older of late, she suddenly looked very young and innocent and wounded.

  “And you wonder why I worry about you?”

  “Now that you mention it, I do. I don’t feel like I’ve changed all that much.”

  Mom laughed once: “Ha.”

  “I think I’m a good person who tries to make good decisions. In fact, I’d have thought I was doing pretty okay, until you started making me think I wasn’t. So what is it, Mom? What is it about me that you don’t like?”

  Mom reached for a tissue, shook her head no, like she wasn’t going to humor this line of questioning.

  “Oh, great,” I goaded. “That’s helpful.”

  “It’s how you treat people,” she burst out. “As soon as you met the girls it was like everything about your old life just wasn’t good enough anymore.”

  “You mean Ailey? I know you liked her, but she drove me crazy, Mom. I’m your daughter.” A huge sob escaped me. It was only through force that I continued speaking. “You’re supposed to go along for the ride with me, no matter what. You’re not supposed to pick some other kid over your own.”

  This was a conversation we should have had over a nice calm mother-daughter lunch. I’d been imagining how it would play out for years. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t supposed to be nasty.

  “I’ve never preferred Ailey.” Mom kept wiping at her eyes. “I just don’t like—”

  “Me,” I finished for her.

  She didn’t correct me, but instead said, “I worry everything comes too easy for you.”

  “Too easy?” I hiccupped a laugh. “I’ve watched you like me a little less every day for three years. I’ve tried to excel at everything to make you proud and make you change your mind. Instead you hate me. Tell me how that’s easy?”

  Tears streamed down my mom’s face; her shoulders shook with her effort not to break down and sob. Add this to the list of things that made me a terrible person: on the day after Christmas, I made my mom cry. I bolted down the stairs, and ran right into Dad.

  “Kylie…”

  Wiping my eyes, I grabbed my EarRing from the hall table, dodged him, and hurried out the door.

  I understand if you don’t want to keep reading. When I get to this point in the story, I hate me too.

  Question, oh silent, unseen reader. H
ow am I supposed to act? Because I don’t know anymore. If I’m only sweet and endearing, you’ll never respect me. If I take charge and am in control, you’ll think me aggressive. If I embrace my sexy, I’m a skank. If I embrace my inner dork, I’m ostracized. If I’m wildly popular, it’s the same.

  Minus a couple of hiccups, I thought I’d been acing this teenage stuff by me being me, but then I got this for it—see previous 209 pages—and everyone rejoiced.

  So you tell me. How will me being me offend you the least?

  A tap of my Doc and I was through the turnstile and on the train. And today I didn’t care who Hey, Neighbor!-ed me. I was all-caps PISSED. So I ignored the golden rule about sending angry txts and didn’t wait a twelve-hour period before letting my thoughts fly AnyLies’s way. And the whole time I txted, all I could think of were those pics of Jessie in Istanbul. AnyLies or not, she got to traipse around Europe/Asia, probably filling suitcases with wonderful trinkets and fashions, spending time with her whole family. Meanwhile, my family’s busy schedules meant half our conversations were over txt and most meals—even when we spent them speaking—were eaten at separate times and in separate rooms. Thanks to her private driver and elitist lack of presence online, Jessie could escape RL and her online worlds whenever she wanted. There was no escape for someone like me. Jessie had it made. And what was she doing? Moping.

  I don’t want to write what I said to AnyLies. Or admit that I sent a similarly nasty stream of txts to Jessie. It’s too shameful. I will say that the first txt in the AnyLies series was:

  moi Hey, hater, FCK you.

  I continued that I bet she was the kind of person who commented on her own posts with fake profiles so it looked like she had friends. I accused her of all the issues that might prompt someone to make a video like that in the first place—mommy issues, daddy issues, self-image issues, social issues. It went on and on, only becoming more juvenile and mean. I could feel her reading it. So I was as hurtful as possible.

  Yeah. I know.

  But wasn’t this what everyone expected of me? Why keep trying to exceed my mom’s expectations, when I could just live down to meet them? And no, I didn’t feel bad about it. AnyLies took me on, remember? She’d asked for this.

  Seventeen stops went by on the Q train as I txted her. When I looked up I was in Coney Island, two stops past where I was supposed to get off.

  It was dark out when I left the Slope, but as I stood alone on a nearly empty Coney Island train platform, it felt like an entirely different kind of night. Like the it’s-too-quiet scene in a zombie flick right before all the undead came pouring out. And it was freezing. The two previous warm days must have been a citywide hallucination. Because tonight there was no doubt it was winter. It was so cold my anger couldn’t burn it off.

  In my dramatic departure from home, I hadn’t grabbed a coat. All I was wearing was a light wrap. As I made my way down to the street, I was shivering so badly, my EarRing kept popping off. Still, when I got to Brighton Beach Avenue, the sidewalks were littered with groups of loitering men. At first I felt relieved to see bodies, but five minutes into my walk, I quickened my pace and turned off automatic Translate, wishing it also shut off all the multilanguage catcalls I was receiving.

  “Distance to destination?” I asked, as my EarRing told me to turn right.

  “Twelve blocks,” the GPS calmly responded as three guys in heavy parkas broke away from their street corner and started following me.

  “Excuse me, miss,” Camo Parka called. “You cold? You look cold.”

  I swiped into the 911 app on my Doc. My aching, frozen thumb hovered over the dial button. I was surrounded by stores, but at seven o’clock on a Sunday most of them were already shuttered. A train rumbled past on the elevated tracks overhead. GPS told me I had eight more blocks. This was karma. Mugged was what I got for being terrible. I walked faster. The parkas kept up. I remembered Mom saying that before EarRings, people used to look at their Docs to follow GPS. How before that, people didn’t have GPS at all.

  “What would they use?” Kyle had asked, taking the bait.

  Winking at me, Mom had replied, “Actual. Paper. Maps.”

  “That’s just stupid,” Kyle had said, floored.

  Let’s talk about men for a minute. Normally, I didn’t subscribe to the all-men-are-pigs theory because I had three men in my life who proved it very wrong. But men could act like cave dwellers with no repercussions, while I had a hater after me because, best I could piece together, I was conceited.

  “Hi, gorgeous.”

  “Hey, beautiful.”

  These guys weren’t like the stalker outside my house. They didn’t know me from the video. They were just jerks. How would they feel if they walked down the street and women aggressively solicited them? Didn’t they go home to girlfriends, wives, mothers, daughters? Didn’t they know those women in turn dealt with this shitey male attention?

  “Five hundred feet until you have reached your destination,” my Doc calmly said.

  “Excuse me, miss, you lost? You need some help?”

  “You need a boyfriend?”

  “Turn right at 245 Ocean View Avenue. Turn right, now. Welcome. You are here.”

  What difference did the video make? As a female, I’d always be dealing with this sort of aggravation. For some reason, that thought calmed me down. But it didn’t make me feel any safer as I faced the RingScreen of Mr. E.’s building. The parkas stopped a few paces away and lighted smokes. It was a Sunday, the day after Christmas. Mr. E. was Jewish, but he could still be gone for the holiday at a friend’s or a girlfriend’s. I could also picture him, staring at his screen in horror, quietly tapping deny.

  “Come on, Mr. E.,” I murmured, teeth chattering, as I pressed the button again.

  “Don’t worry. We’ll keep you company.”

  “I’m okay, thanks,” I said, pressing the button again, again.

  The parkas laughed.

  “You more than okay, sweetheart.”

  “Looks like your boyfriend no home. You want a new boyfriend?”

  I’d had enough.

  “What is wrong with you?” I whirled on them. “I still shop in the juniors’ section at Macy’s.” (FYI, not really). “You should be looking out for me, not harassing me.”

  “Baby, I am looking out for you,” Camo Parka said. “Or at least I’d like to.”

  As he came and leaned next to me, I held my finger down on the buzzer. Why hadn’t I dragged one of the girls with me? Or Mac? Or my brother? Because Mr. E. wouldn’t be honest if you weren’t by yourself. Cheap cologne filled my nostrils.

  “I’ll look out for myself, thanks.”

  ADMITTED, the RingScreen flashed. Next to it was a smiling photo of Mr. E. As relief swept over me, so did the acute knowledge that this was a horrible idea. As I pushed into the lobby, I heard Mac calling me naïve. Mr. E. actually might have made that video, meaning he wasn’t like these parka guys. He kept his creep hidden.

  And maybe that was worse.

  Either way, I was about to enter his lair.

  “I’m guessing you’re not here to give me a fruitcake, Ms. Cheng?” Mr. E. shouted.

  He met me at his apartment door. I think he would have kept me out in the hall, only the thudding music coming from the apartment across the hall made conversation, let alone thought, impossible.

  “Sorry, what?” I shouted back.

  With the same expression of resignation he wore when he packed up his desk the morning the video dropped, Mr. E. reluctantly invited me inside.

  We awkwardly negotiated space in the hall as he locked the door behind me. Mr. E. smelled stale, like cigarettes and alcohol and unwashed hair, and like something else that wasn’t a scent as much as it was an aura. Mr. E. reeked of misery. I was also pretty sure he was drunk. I followed him into the living room. As a testament to shoddy building practices, the volume on the music across the hall only equaled one or two bars quieter. After scooping a pile of clothes off his ratty s
ofa, he gestured for me to sit.

  The apartment probably listed as a one-bedroom, but the entire space wasn’t much bigger than our kitchen. Mr. E.’s living room fit a couch and a coffee table with only an inch between them. A wood-paneled bar separated that space from a kitchenette that was about the same circumference as our living room screen. Dishes were stacked in the sink. Apparently, considering the takeout containers that were piled everywhere—kitchen counter, living room floor, cheapo bar—the appliances either didn’t work or were never used.

  Using his shoulder, he popped open a door off the hallway and tossed the clothes into an even tinier bedroom, onto an unmade single bed—a single bed! Then he grabbed a beer can off the fake-wood coffee table, rattled it side to side, and took a slug. An entire case of empty cans littered the apartment.

  “Sorry to intrude, Mr. E.,” I called as he retreated into the kitchen, “but I’d like to know why you told Dr. Graff the video was a fake.”

  “Because it is fake, Ms. Cheng,” he shouted back in order to compete with the bass that was now making the apartment throb. “Or part of it is. I mean, what was I supposed to say?”

  When I’d imagined Mr. E. outside of Prep, I’d pictured downloads straight from an e-mag. Hot, intelligent twentysomething females sidling up to him at fancy Manhattan cocktail bars and ubercool, little-known Brooklyn speakeasies. Thick eyeglasses, ratty beard, dingy apartment didn’t compute. He was an adult. Get it together already.

  Mr. E. picked up a sponge, sniffed it—winced—and lobbed it at the trash. It hit the floor with a wet thunk.

  I was a stupid girl. This afternoon, I’d imagined us sitting at his fancy kitchen island—because who would want an apartment this far away from everything unless it was dope?—drinking espressos, syncing our Docs, and solving the SHT out of this mystery.

  “Was it—you don’t have to tell me who—but was it another student in the video?”

  There was no denying that Mr. E. was a flirt. Glancing around his crappy apartment, I couldn’t help thinking that the adoration Mr. E. received at school was probably the best thing he had going for him.