The Takedown Page 5

  “Ailey…”

  “No. That’s okay. I understand why you’d think it’d be me, I guess. But I still think you’d better go.”

  I didn’t move.

  “I’m sorry, Ailes.” The nickname erased her frown lines and brought her shoulders down an inch. “But logically speaking, if it’s not you, I couldn’t think of anyone else who might have it in for me. I mean, other than maybe Jessie Rosenthal…”

  Ailey made a face. “Yuck. Jessie. Ellie, for some reason, adores her. I think she’s all-caps SO pretentious. And, just, so weird. I tell Ellie all the time that Jessie’s not right, but she won’t listen to me.”

  “Not right?” I asked as I scrolled my contacts for Jessie’s info. “How do you mean?”

  “Ellie told me Jessie keeps these ‘human projects’ on her Doc. They’re, like, collections and videos of these people that Jessie stalks around the city. Ellie said there was one of this man who always eats alone at the same diner every night. This woman who feeds the birds in the park. Jessie woofers them, so now she knows everything about them. ‘Human projects.’ It gives me the creeps. You don’t think…”

  I shivered. Weirder than Jessie’s human projects was that in thirty seconds of searching, I’d found zero ways to reach her. No e-mail, profile links, Doc digits, nothing. How was that possible? Thanks to Park Prep’s alumni breeding program, my Doc was constantly updating my classmates’ contact info. I could txt the entire student body, going back twenty years, if I wanted. Yet for Jessie all that came up was a physical address in Brooklyn Heights. What good was that?

  Also, there was her Quip stream. It said she hadn’t logged in for two months. Still I sent her a private Quip asking her to txt me, then sighed and tossed my Doc on Ailey’s desk.

  “I don’t know what to think.”

  “So you came here?”

  “I just thought maybe you were still mad at me for—”

  “Scraping me off like something nasty on the bottom of your shoe?”

  “I wouldn’t describe it like that.” I laughed. “Okay, maybe I would. But I mean, people grow apart, Ailey.”

  Ailey was fidgeting with her bra strap, a lacy lime-green number, way fancier than anything she’d owned when we were friends. The Amundsens’ household was like a thousand degrees. I took off my hat, scarf, and then, after another second, unsure how long I really wanted to stay, my coat.

  “You think we grew apart?”

  “I dunno. I mean, I guess we just grew different. I’m sorry, Ailey. Chalk it up to being fourteen?”

  Ailey flapped a hand, waving away my transgressions.

  “Of course. Forget it. That’s all nothing now, for real.”

  It was then, as we sat there, not meeting each other’s eyes but uncomfortably smiling in each other’s direction, that I realized something strange. Ailey wasn’t on her Doc. And Ailey was always on her Doc. I’d checked mine at least twenty times since I’d been there, and I wasn’t nearly as Doc-dependent as Ailey. In fact, I didn’t see her Doc anywhere. She must have stashed it somewhere when I came in. But why would she do that?

  I popped out of my chair and opened her walk-in closet just like I used to, pretending I wanted to admire her boring shoes and sweaters. Ailey got stuck with the smallest bedroom in the brownstone, but glass half-full, it had the largest closet. When I was out of sight, I checked the floor and along her shelves. No Doc.

  “Oh holy gosh,” Ailey squealed. “I know who it is. Who’s the one person who could get their hands on video-editing tech like this?”

  You? I wanted to say, but instead guessed, “Reed Winters? He’s doing that internship with Magnus Pictures.”

  “No.” I could hear Ailey shake her curls with exasperation. “Don’t get frowny face, but it’s Sharma. It has to be.”

  “Sharma?” My head rocked back in surprise. “Why would she do something like this?”

  “Because she equals the fourth friend. Like Abel in Twilight Girls. Nobody cares about Abel. Who needs more motive than that? I mean, how much do you trust any of the girls, for that matter?”

  Ailey said it innocently enough, but it was still trash talk. And nobody trash-talked my girls but me. Before I could stop myself, I snapped, “Sharma isn’t the fourth anything. We’re all integral.” Then I lied, “Plus the girls are outraged about this. They have my back, always.”

  “Of course they do,” Ailey said quickly. “Sorry. I was just thinking out loud.”

  This was pointless. Ailey’s closet was identical to Ailey: long, slim, and hiding nothing. I went back into her room and began to gather my stuff.

  Above her desk she still had her Wish Board. A rinky-dink corkboard that always held dozens of cutout images of cars she liked, houses she wanted to live in, and boys she had crushes on. It had dwindled over the years as printed materials became harder to come by. Now the board was filled with photos of her and Ellie Cyr. Actual printed photos. Apparently, they did everything together. Ball games, Coney Island, the ballet, sleepovers.

  “I can’t believe you still do this.”

  Something constricted a little in my chest. Maybe it was that I could so easily envision myself in those photos replacing Ellie. If I hadn’t ditched Ailey, it would have been me. But I guessed things had all worked out the way they were supposed to. Seeing the girls’ pretty, happy smiles, I knew that Ailey had clearly found her people. People who, unlike me, wouldn’t dump her because better ones had come along. And then I noticed something else: almost in equal number to the shots of Ailey and Ellie were pics of Ailey with a boy.

  I lightly touched one of those photos as if it were an ancient artifact. In it, Ailey and the boy were wearing enormous sunglasses, hugging. The photos made me notice the dried roses pinned next to the board. The lone teddy bear on her bed where a pile of childhood ones used to be. It stopped me in my tracks.

  I gasped. “Ailey, do you have a boyfriend?”

  “Triple smiley face,” she said as an actual smile lit up her features. “I hoped you’d notice. We met at the Y. He’s a lifeguard and goes to that new charter Learn in Excellence. That’s part of why Mom takes my Doc away when I come home. He’s on it, like, equal sign, always. ‘Homework first, Ailey.’”

  And that was why Ailey didn’t have her Doc.

  I had an urge to rip up the pic of Ailey’s boy. I don’t know if it was jealousy for the normalcy of it all, or that the boy looked wholesome—obv no checkered past there—or that Ailey was so clearly happy. She stayed good, didn’t abandon anybody, and she still got the friends, the boy, and the smooth complexion. For the first time I had a tiny sense of how she must have felt when I dumped her. It was a thick, gooey kind of awful—like existential tapioca.

  “Congrats, that’s awesome,” I said, trying for the enthusiasm I didn’t feel. “B-T-W what did your mom have to say about the video? Did you show her yet?”

  “Gawd no.” Ailey laughed. “She gets worked up enough when we talk about you. I didn’t want my next two days equaling a dissection of every lurid detail of your downfall. Is it weird? Knowing so many people are watching you? I mean, it already has over forty thousand views.”

  Forty thousand views? At Sharma’s it had been in the low single-digit thousands. Maybe if someone hadn’t watched it twenty-seven times and shared it with her thousand friends, I wanted to say, it wouldn’t be at forty thousand views. The warmth I’d felt at being back around Ailey burned off.

  “Ailey, it’s hardly a downfall. I had over a hundred likes on my outfit before I left the house this morning. Fifty thousand views is nothing. I’ll post one old video of me and the girls at Fire Island this past summer and the Mr. E. video will be buried in no time.”

  I put on my hat and scarf. I shouldn’t have come. I should have just txted. This was why I cold turkey stopped talking to Ailey. Faced with her saccharine good-girl personality I always, all-caps ALWAYS, said something that made me hate myself later.

  “Oh, sorry, I know, I just meant with your coll
ege apps in and all…”

  My knees turned liquid. As discreetly as possible, I steadied myself against Ailey’s desk. My applications. Everyone knew admissions boards began at your ConnectBook page before they even glanced at your app. I mean, what was a more truthful depiction of a person than their CB profile?

  I could feel Ailey watching me. So although I was finding it hard to breathe, I zipped into my coat and managed a breezy laugh.

  “I haven’t hit send on those yet. I have lots of time to figure this out. You know me. Tenacious is kind of my thing. I know you have to get going. Sorry I barged in on you, Ailes.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind. It was nice. Kyle, for what it’s worth, I swear I didn’t make that video.” Ailey bit her lip, and for the first time since I arrived, her eyes met mine. Swear. There was no lying when you called a swear. Or there didn’t use to be. “And hey, seriously, let me know if you need anything.”

  The best argument was always the most logical. I’d known Ailey since kindergarten. She wasn’t a liar, which meant she was telling the truth.

  What was I going to do?

  “I want to warn you, what you’re about to see isn’t pretty, but it’s not me.”

  Ailey said she probably wasn’t going to “that thing in the city” anyway and did I want to hang and stay for dinner? But seeing as dining in a group where two out of the three people hated me was the most unappetizing idea ever, I demurred.

  Now I was home. Three pairs of Kyle’s shoes were strewn across the living room floor. Mom’s crocheting sat in a lump next to the couch. Dad’s basswood replica of the Brooklyn Bridge was spread out on the coffee table. Half-burned-out strings of colored Christmas lights blinked haphazardly from the mantel and windows. Our house was a mess. I’d never been so happy to be anywhere in my whole life. Finally, my people.

  “Honey, what’s going on?”

  Kyle and I had waited an excrutiating hour for Dad to get home before we called both our parents into the living room. Mom had on the same expression she wore that time Ruichen Li shoved Kyle into the street when we were kids. I hadn’t even shown her the video and she looked ready to end the world.

  “Please don’t tell me this is about shoes,” Dad said. “If we’re not having dinner because you ordered another pair of expensive no-refund, no-return vintage shoes that pinch your pinky toe, I’m going to be one big unhappy face.”

  “Frowny face,” Kyle and I corrected together as Dad grinned.

  When my dad was younger, he was in a Chinese gang in Flushing. Now he was a librarian who had R E A W tattooed in Old English on his knuckles. It stood for “Read ’Em and Weep.” He was better at gaming than Kyle and, in all honesty, he was probably hipper than me. His misspoken slang was solely meant to annoy us.

  “Sung, this isn’t a joke,” Mom said. “Less levity for once, please. Kylie, you’re scaring me. Enough with the preamble.”

  I used my Doc to bring up the link on our hub.

  “Kyle, tap play.” I couldn’t stay for it. Maybe it had to be stuck in their memory banks, but their watching it didn’t have to be stuck in mine. “Call me when it’s over.”

  I motored into the kitchen.

  “What the—?” Dad immediately sputtered.

  “Kyle, what is this?” Mom called.

  “A fake video, remember?”

  I rested my forehead against the refrigerator door. I already felt exhausted by the effort it would take to convince my mom the video wasn’t real. When Dad bellowed, it was my cue that the video was over. I pried open the fridge and grabbed a beer. Dad would need liquid strength to help me deal with Mom’s ensuing atomic freak-out.

  I slunk back to the living room. Kyle gave me a weak smile. Mom was still staring at the screen, stunned. I handed Dad his beer. He waved it off, pointed at the stairs.

  “Go to your room.”

  “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.