The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(7)
Ryan Harbinger: calista i think that u r perfect
Jonas Everett: LMAO
Nick Brix: wut the fuck
Emma Fleed: Cally Broderick is Hott!!
Steph Malcolm-Swann: callie brodrick is a Bitch u guys
Tristan Bloch: Where did you get that.
Tristan Bloch: I didn’t write that.
Emma Fleed: and hes a liar to? lol
Damon Flintov: fuck this fag
Dave Chu: guys ur being kind of mean now.
Ryan Harbinger: hey yo trisstain were just telling u the truth
Damon Flintov: trisstan block is a fat freak perv
Jonas Everett: he he
More and more new comments flashed onto the screen.
“This is getting harsh,” Abigail said cheerfully. “Ryan Harbinger must really want to fuck you.”
Once when Cally was a kid, her family had gone water-skiing at Lake Tahoe. When it was Cally’s turn, her mom had jumped in too, floating beside Cally in the cool water as she guided her feet into the skis’ slick rubber fittings and handed her the rope. Then her mom had swum to the boat, climbed aboard, and leaned over the stern to grin and wave so energetically it seemed that she would crash into the lake. Cally had clenched her teeth and waved back, believing she was ready. But when the boat took off, she was paralyzed, unable to stand, unable to release the rope. The water coursed over her body, flooding her nose and her mouth, and she knew it then: the world was going to drag her where it wanted. When the boat stopped and the water subsided, she coughed and gulped the air and was surprised to find that breathing was something she was still allowed to do.
She might have set this in motion, but now it was dragging her behind. She watched the comments fill the screen.
Damon Flintov: hey triss. if i had a face like yours id shoot myself
13 people like this post
Ryan Harbinger: bwa ha ha
Elisabeth Avarine:
Cally curled up on Abigail’s bed. “Turn it off.”
“What’s your problem?” Abigail said. “They’re defending you. Ryan Harbinger is defending you.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have shown it to him.”
“Oh, come on. That note was disgusting. It was like sexual harassment or something.”
“I think I ate too many Red Vines.” Cally got up and went into Abigail’s bathroom, which was newly remodeled in expensive white marble. Like magic, the bathroom had transformed into a shrine, but Abigail hardly seemed to notice it. To her it was just a place to pee in the middle of the night.
Cally leaned over the toilet. She saw Tristan’s crane and Ms. Flax’s sad eyes and her own name inked in delicate blue. She wanted to puke but couldn’t. She told herself that Abigail was right—the note was disgusting and she’d had every right to report it. And Tristan Bloch had brought it on himself. He’d laid it all out on paper, for anyone to read. What did he expect to happen?
She moved to the sink, rinsed her mouth and hands with water from Abigail’s brushed-chrome tap. In the mirror her eyeliner looked suddenly clumsy, a painted-on frame around little-girl eyes. Her cheeks were wan under their bursts of blush.
In a line beside the sink stood three washcloths folded into origami fans. This sight made her queasy again, so she shook one fan open and scrubbed it over her face. She picked up the other two, shook them, and folded them in sloppy squares like the washcloths in her bathroom at home, which made her feel better and worse at once. Even if she’d wanted to, she had no idea how to refold them. There was someone who’d know how, but to talk to him would be to lock herself into that airless room forever and throw away the key.
“I thought you fell in,” Abigail said, spinning toward her in the desk chair, when Cally returned to the bedroom.
Cally grinned, remembering with sudden force that Abigail was her best friend in the world. “Let me,” she said, and went over to Abigail and leaned over the keyboard to type:
Abby Cress: Hey tristan I talked to cally and she says FUCK OFF you make her sick and fuck your gross note too NO THANK YOU!!!
When Abigail laughed, it sounded like mercy.
Then they went to YouTube to watch a cat try to scramble out of a claw-foot tub, its panic hilarious. They watched the clip five times, collapsing on each other in laughter, before Abigail sent Cally to the mini-fridge to find her brother’s beers.
As she popped the tabs on the cold silver cans, Cally began to feel free. Powerful. She began to believe that Tristan Bloch would fade away, that already he was folded into that square of paper, pale and insubstantial as that barely blue ink. Already, he was almost nothing.
—
From then on, Tristan spent his lunch periods outside, walking the edge of the schoolyard where asphalt crumbled into marshland. He kept his head bowed, and when he came back inside, his ankles were purpled with mud.
Nobody bullied him at school. Nobody minded him at all.
And every afternoon, Cally and Abigail watched from Abigail’s bedroom as the Facebook posts continued, flashing onto the computer screen at an inexorable pace, gleeful, hateful, now from people they didn’t even know. Sometimes Tristan wrote back, defending himself angrily or desperately, but each comment he posted only renewed the energy of the attacks.
Someone would stop it, Cally thought. Tristan would close his account. Tristan would tell. Or some adult—his mother, Ms. Flax—would sense something wrong, venture into the Facebook world and see what was happening, pull them all back from the brink.