The Takedown Page 8

  Every year, Mr. Hugh, the AP Government teacher, dressed up as Santa Claus. And for the past three years, I’d dressed up as Mrs. Claus. I’d been looking forward to this since the previous year’s party ended.

  I breezed into the library, my arms filled with shopping bags I’d wrestled out of my cubby. Last week I’d convinced a card store on Seventh Ave. to donate fifty rolls of wrapping paper and nearly a bushel of ribbons and bows. I couldn’t wait to see the kids’ faces when they got a load of their fancy swag bags.

  “Hey, everyone.”

  I set down the bags. The library was empty.

  Ms. Tompkins, the librarian, came over with a garbled cry of distress.

  Thanks to Dad, I had an affinity for librarians in general, but I loved Ms. Tompkins in particular. She sat alone in a tiny room that looked across the hall at where the old library used to be before it was turned into a student café. She also geeked out over the Suicide Games series and gave all-caps GREAT e-book recommendations that my suggested-likes lists had never even heard of. And she always bought cookies for our Community Club meetings.

  “Brittany asked me to tell you that they’re wrapping presents in Mr. Hugh’s classroom.”

  Brittany was the vice to my presidency. She was a know-it-all junior who I might have admired for her overabundance of well-meaning if she weren’t so utterly lacking in imagination. We got along fine as long as we worked on entirely separate projects. Suffice to say, we had not run on the same ticket.

  “Okay.” I started to collect bags. “Thanks.”

  “Wait.” Ms. Tompkins held me back. “Kyle, she also wanted me to tell you…they’re impeaching you.”

  I laughed. “What?”

  “They have Dr. Graff’s approval. Brittany’s going to be interim president.”

  There were a thousand things I wanted to say, like how this fall when I told the group I wanted to tackle a major community-wide project before I graduated, Vice President Brittany Mulligan’s best idea was sticking dog-waste bags onto every garbage can in Park Slope—i.e., Brittany Mulligan thought dog poop was our community’s biggest issue. Not to mention she nearly failed algebra freshman year and her voice had more whine in it than Uncorked on Fourth Ave. How was she going to stretch the budget? How was she going to convince local businesses to donate nearly all our supplies? Have I mentioned she thought dog poop was Brooklyn’s biggest problem?

  The rest of what I wanted to say was curse words.

  I managed a shrug.

  “Good prep for politics, huh? I’ll just do the behind-the-scenes stuff.”

  Ms. Tompkins was staring at me like I’d just told her I’d never read the Narnia books. Sympathy mixed with remorse mixed with awkward.

  “Oh.” Even I could hear the awful hurt surprise in my voice. “I’m, like, totally out. But I started the Community Club. I’m not even allowed to go to the party?”

  She gave the barest shake of her head, no.

  “But who will be Mrs. Claus?”

  I knew from Ms. Tompkins’s expression exactly who was going to be Mrs. Claus. I set the bags back down, redid my ponytail, and tried to tell myself that the important thing was that the party was still happening.

  “Kyle, I’m so sorry.” Ms. Tompkins squeezed my arm. “For the record, I told them I disagreed with their decision. Especially considering how much time you put into the club. If it makes you feel better, I didn’t let them take the cookies.”

  Her gaze flicked to the door. I turned in time to see Brittany backing out of the room, her eyes wide with horror, trying to make a silent escape.

  “Oh, hi, Kyle.” Brittany bumped into the door frame, then rubbed her elbow. “Sorry to interrupt. Just came to see if you’d brought, well, those yet.”

  She reached toward the shopping bags that were still sitting at my feet. The shopping bags full of lovely free goodies that I’d scored for the kids. I stepped in front of them. Brittany stepped back.

  “You know,” I said, “the Community Club bylaws state that you can’t just decide to impeach a person. You have to have a two-thirds vote, otherwise it isn’t legal even if Dr. Graff gives her approval. I should know, seeing as I wrote them. The whole point of Community Club is that we’re student-run, Brittany.”

  “I know what the point of Community Club is, Kyle. You remind me of it every week. And for some of us, excessive dog waste is important, okay? Have you tried running in the park lately?”

  “Girls,” Ms. Tompkins warned.

  But Brittany was on a roll.

  “And for the record,” she continued, “you can contest it if you want, but I have a two-thirds vote. Or I will. Because maybe you get things done, but you’re pushy and impatient and there are nice ways to say your opinion, you know. I’d rather get nothing done but know that people like me than solve every problem in Brooklyn and have people think I’m a BTCH.”

  As soon as she finished speaking, her lower lip began to wobble. She inched toward Ms. Tompkins for safety. As if I might physically hurt her. Why use violence when I had words? Ms. Tompkins was too stunned to say anything. I wasn’t.

  “Congratulations, Brittany. With one speech you set the women’s movement back a hundred and fifty years.”

  I picked up the bags of wrapping paper and held them out to her. After a very hesitant moment, she took them from me.

  “Don’t be stingy with the bows,” I said. “And don’t worry; I won’t contest the impeachment. I wouldn’t want to be a part of any club that would even consider having you as president. I’ll start my own community club, again, after the holidays. So get ready to lose enrollment, because don’t kid yourself, Brittany. Nice or not, nobody likes you. Later, Ms. T.”

  I was out in the hall before Brittany figured out her comeback.

  “You’d better watch your back, Kyle. That vid isn’t even the start of what’s coming your way.”

  I wanted nothing more than to wedge myself into a cubby and hide beneath my coat until everyone else went home. But a cluster of boys started cracking up when they saw me. Chief among them was Derek Boger of the nine-hundred-times-viewed Mr. E.–and–Kyla Cheng remake video. Park Prep’s faculty loved to tell us that in ten years most of us would be leaders in our chosen fields. I’d always felt proud of that thought. Now it terrified me. This was the best and brightest?

  “I like clothes,” Marcus Graham mimicked.

  “Excuse me, milk brains,” I said as I pushed through them. “Victim of a spurious and fake defamation campaign trying to walk here.”

  Only once I was a good ten feet away did Derek call out, “Slut.”

  I stopped. Inhaled deeply. In debate there was nothing worse than an opponent who refused to get riled up. So, with a cheery smile, I turned. It’s all about the ruse, right?

  “That’s it?” I asked pleasantly. “Come on, Derek. You attend one of the most prestigious high schools in the country. Put your parents’ tuition dollars to use. If you can’t be clever, at least be intelligent.”

  Farther down the hall, an overly thin, black-clad form came out of a classroom, saw us, and then hurried away in the opposite direction.

  Jessie.

  “For example,” I said as I backed away, toward Jessie, “your video might have a few hundred views, making you popular for an afternoon, but mine has a few hundred thousand, so you erroneously call me a ‘slut,’ but I can truthfully call you a ‘nobody’ or a ‘waste of space’ or, if we’re sticking to single words, ‘forgettable.’ I could get personal and say ‘acne.’ Or, if you want to talk sex lives, ‘virgin.’ Or I could play it infantile and simply say, ‘F you, Derek Boner. I never should have let you copy my Civics homework all last year.’ See? The possibilities are endless.”

  Derek blinked a few times, stunned. Crickets from his crew, until in unison they burst out laughing—at him. Alex Stu jogged over and high-fived me. Farther down the hall, Jessie turned the corner by the framed photo of Park Prep’s first graduating class. It had been taken over seventy
-five years ago, when suspenders seemed to be a thing.

  “Ta-ta, boys,” I said, then called out, “Jessie, wait.”

  I trilled my fingers, then hurried down the hall. Jessie didn’t wait. When I turned the corner, she glanced back, then cut a hard right and sprinted down the spiral staircase nicknamed Ankle Breaker thanks to more than a few incidents involving Doc-focused students. I leaned over the railing.

  “Jessie, hold up.”

  Now she took the stairs two at a time. And normally I would have laughed to see her tottering like that on her vintage Manolos, but I was too annoyed, plus lightly vertigo-stricken.

  “Please don’t make me chase you.”

  Holding on to the rail, I ran down Ankle Breaker, cursing under my breath. On one, I bumped into Ellie Cyr.

  “Oh,” she said, surprised.

  We did a side-to-side shuffle, trying to get around each other. I couldn’t tell if it equaled purposeful or not. Either way, by the time I’d followed Jessie outside, she’d already hopped into a black sedan. It wasn’t an interborough taxi or an Elite. It was her personal car, with her personal driver. I ran up to the window as the car pulled into traffic. She gave me a weird grimace, mouthed what looked like “Smile,” and then sped away.

  Discreetly as possible—plugging one nostril, inhaling; plugging the other, exhaling—I did Audra’s insomniac breathing exercises all the way to the train. Audra swore it soothed her enough to occasionally sleep. And while I didn’t feel the least bit calmer, I figured the added oxygen couldn’t hurt my psyche, unlike remembering how placid Jessie’s face was as she was driven away.

  It wasn’t until the B train emerged aboveground to cross the Manhattan Bridge that I began to feel like a semiadequately capable person again. Attempting to leave my drama in Brooklyn, I focused on the girl across from me, who was in the cutest parka. I Sourced her to see where she got it, then used the Woofer-based Hey, Neighbor! facial-scanning app to see if she was in fashion. But she must have Hey, Neighbor!-ed me first. Her CB profile showed that she was watching my video. Ten clicks later, my Doc dinged as I was tagged in a pic—sitting as I was still sitting—above the caption: That sex vid girl sitting across from me on the B train.

  Instantly I uploaded a pic of her to CB with the caption: Thanks for making your burrito my problem #fartsinsmallspaces.

  Woofer took care of the rest. Her Doc whistled. She glanced at it, then quickly looked at me, huffed, and moved down the train. I was too busy Hey, Neighbor!-ing other people to care. It wasn’t just her. The next person and the next and the next—in fact, the entire car of nearly sixty people—were watching my video. Chains like this were common. But I’d never been the subject of one.

  I got off at West 4th and decided not to transfer to the A train, even though it was two stops too soon and meant a fifty-minute walk. Outside on Sixth Avenue, it felt even warmer than it had in Brooklyn and to prove it, the sidewalks were coated with an inch of gray slush. Still I put up my coat hood. If that was what public transportation was going to be like, I guessed I’d better get used to hoofing it.

  Almost an hour later, I stepped inside the enormous open-air atrium of Eden’s entrance. It was like entering a hybrid of a space-agey future utopia and the coolest parts of Brooklyn. There was a hotel, gourmet food shops, restaurants, cocktail bars, and an entire floor that was a play zone for kids. The level I was meeting the hacker on was an open-air market, with food trucks, sidewalks, and trees that wove throughout. As hologram snowflakes fell, requisite holiday music was piped into the air. Around every bend were Expert desks and displays of Docs to buy.

  As a backdrop, the largest screen in the world—no, literally; it was in Guinness—showed the most popular G-File users who were doing their last-minute Eden holiday shopping right at that moment. Presently, it was the two-time YurTube Planet Award–winning actress Lucy Helen Banks. The screen showed the most-viewed clip from her latest film.

  How cool was NYC?

  For the umpteenth time I wished the girls were there. Cool or not, I was dead nervous. I’d never met a hacker before. I mean, other than Sharma. And Sharma showered with her Doc because she was afraid she’d miss something.

  We were supposed to meet at 4:30. It was currently 4:16. Sharma txted, Don’t laugh, but that she’d met this hacker through an apartment-decorating game. I wandered around the market. At 4:18 I bought a lemon bar for Kyle. A minute later I ate half of it. I still had ten minutes to kill. So I did something stupid: I txted AnyLies.

  moi They won’t let me be Mrs. Claus.

  I know this doesn’t read like the smartest move, but if you had a direct line to your hater how would you not txt them?

  No response.

  I didn’t stop, or more like I couldn’t stop.

  moi Or even go to the party.

  I look forward to it all year.

  Brittany Mulligan is the new Mrs. Claus. She has the charisma of plastic packaging.

  I didn’t explain that I was talking about Community Club, figuring my hater went to Park Prep and would simply know. If not, then, well, that was one big clue, no? Also, I really hoped my hater was Brittany Mulligan and that she’d read that last line. But still no response. Maybe AnyLies was busy, but I didn’t think so. I gave it one last try.

  moi Why do you hate me so much?

  Now the reply was instantaneous.

  So many reasons.

  moi Like?

  You are everything that is wrong with everything.

  moi So we know each other?

  You can say I despise you from afar.

  No, that wasn’t creepy. I thought about all the people I interacted with but didn’t really know, at debates, Model UN, volunteering, my clothing swap.

  moi Contrary to whatever it apparently seems like, I’m not a bad person.

  Keep telling yourself that.

  Annoyed, I swiped the thread away. It was 4:30. I positioned myself in a very visible spot at the entrance to the market. I assumed the hacker had viewed the video and my profile. Spotting me wouldn’t be hard. A minute passed. Another.

  At 4:40 I walked toward an expensive izakaya and stood next to a bench outside. Pretending everything was normal between us, I snapped a pic of the menu and sent it to Fawn. She was hard-core about boycotting overfished fish.

  moi Sashimi of the day is yellowfin tuna.

  She’d combust.

  “That’s lab tuna,” a soft female voice behind me said. “Not natural-caught. Twice the taste. Triple the price. None of the murdering-endangered-species guilt. You even think about turning around, I virus your Doc.”

  “You’re the hacker guy?” I asked.

  “Gender bias much?”

  I risked a glimpse. Dyed-pink hair and what looked like an Eden tie and name clip, which she detached and shoved in her pocket. So she was an employee. Hiding in plain sight. Nice.

  “I said don’t turn around.”

  “I’m not allowed to see you, but you can hack my Doc?”

  “Didn’t hack your Doc. You use holoscreen to txt. Anyone within five feet can see your message. Not smart. Name’s Ivy. Watched your vid. It just tipped six hundred thou views. Speak.”

  “Uh, okay, for starters, can you tell me anything about the person who made it?”

  “Who made it?” I could hear her smirk. “That’s how you’re swinging this? All right, already asking the wrong question. This is out there. Done. Question is: How to recover? Next question. Go.”

  I needed to sit down. But in order to sit on the izakaya’s bench, I’d have to turn around. And since I didn’t want to disobey Ivy’s rule a second time, I put a steadying hand against the wall and knelt on the bench instead, like I was worshipping the menu.

  “I said, next question. Go.”

  “Geez, okay. Gimme a sec to think.” Mac teased me that I spoke and processed things so fast he was always three thoughts behind me. (Or he used to tease me about that.) Now I knew how he felt. “Pretend I’m not asking the wrong quest
ion and where the video came from does matter. I mean, it’s a DRM. I go to a small school. There might be a chance I can delete the source file—”

  Ivy cut me off. “Gold Goes with Everything told me the orig IP was fragmented. Said defragging’s in progress, but that takes a few days, min. Is there a time stamp on the vid? Could use your GPS history to prove you”—I could sense her forming air quotes—“‘weren’t there.’”

  “No. There’s not a time stamp.”

  “Hmm. Too bad. Gold Goes with Everything also said the YurTube account was fresh?”

  “Wait. Who the H-double-L is Gold Goes with Everything?”

  “Our shared contact.”

  “Sharma?” She’d been working on cracking this without telling me? “That’s her screen name? Gold Goes with Everything?”

  The girl tsked. “Your privacy-protection etiquette needs serious CPR. You never tell a hacker another hacker’s name. It’s, like, the first rule of hacking. And I see you looking at me in the mirror on your Doc. Keep it up and I will ruin you.”

  “Worse?” I snorted. “How? Fine. Sorry. Yes. The YurTube account was freshly made. They used an alias. AnyLiesUnmade.”

  “Creepy.” I imagined Ivy’s frown deepening. “There is one possibility. Heard whispers about software from Asia—Korea or Japan, maybe—that lets you do face forgery. None of my contacts has it in hand. Or if they do, they’re not saying. Thought it was a myth. Said to be gove’ment grade so it means this AnyLies has mega coin and mega connects.”

  Holding my Doc up, I holoscreened my messages.

  “Any way to attach this contact to a person? AnyLies and I have been txting.”

  “That sounds unsafe.” Ivy tsked, but then, too intrigued not to look, she added, “It’s not a contact. If they were txting via a Doc, and they blocked it, that field would read ‘Contact Unavailable.’ You’re dealing with an old-skool cell phone. If it were a smartphone—thanks to GPS—it would still show a phone number. I bet those messages are coming from an old-old-old-skool burner cell. They’re so low-tech, Docs don’t even recognize their existence. That’s completely untraceable. Mama’s smart.”