The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(74)
Abigail Cress: I texted your mom and she said u r ok. I’m glad.
Abigail Cress: It’s not that I’m not thinking of u. Believe me I am.
Abigail Cress: I know I should come. I will when I can. I still <3 u Em, promise.
So many declarations, so many promises. Yet she’d been in the hospital for a week and seen no one but her parents and Elisabeth Avarine. It made no sense. If her friends loved her, where were they? If they wanted to see her, why didn’t they? Emma knew that she was missing a piece of the puzzle—something must have happened that was keeping them away.
On her phone she clicked the Instagram app. She saw that she was tagged in sixteen photos. Dread settled in her chest—there were too many hours she couldn’t remember. She was scared to see the pictures, but it was more dangerous not to know.
She clicked on the first—it filled the phone’s small screen—and exhaled when she saw it was harmless, a crowd scene, Emma barely visible in a cluster of junior girls. Next there was a selfie with Abigail: they posed with eyes wide, cheeks sucked in to sharpen cheekbones, lips glossed pink and pursed.
The photos that followed told the story of the night: Emma posed on Elisabeth Avarine’s glass coffee table. Mid-swing, her hair strung over her face, and bra straps dangled down both arms; her tiered chiffon skirt swung up to flash a strip of muscled thigh. In another, she bent forward to reveal a dip of cleavage, a black push-up bra, a dark slice of nipple. In the third, she sprawled across a white couch, eyes closed, head cocked on her shoulder, legs dropped open to reveal a pink vee of underwear under her skirt. On Facebook more photos were posted—the same poses shot from different angles, by different kids—and beneath them were strings of comments from people she called friends, the same kids who had texted her afterward, professing love and promising to save her from her solitude. Then there was the blog post that popped up when she Googled her name, and Twitter posts from people she had never even met:
http://www.onemarinviewblog.com
Marin County Teenager Injured After Night of Hard Partying Recorded on Social Media
posted by admin
5/27/2013
A Marin County teen is in the hospital today after a drunken car crash near downtown Mill Valley early Sunday morning. The girl, 16-year-old Emma Fleed, will have to cope not only with the serious injuries she has suffered, but also with the nightmare that has been raging online ever since the news of the crash got out. Facebook and Instagram posts from the party that preceded the crash are all over the Internet, and they are disturbing. But they do give us a glimpse into the reality of teenage life in Marin today:
Nick Brickston: Everybody in mv get to elisabeth avarine’s shes throwing down
Ryan Harbinger: yee
Emma Fleed: yeah its bout to be fat
Damon Flintov: lez do it
As the night wore on, signs of trouble began to emerge. There is a photograph of the driver of the BMW, Damon Flintov, kneeling on a kitchen floor, a bottle of Smirnoff Ice cocked at his mouth:
Nick Brickston: Damon getting iced
Ryan Harbinger: chag ro
Ryan Harbinger: fuckin goon
Damon Flintov: Ha ha flints back bitches
Jonas Everett: ohhhh shit
In another photo, Nick Brickston, one of the passengers in the BMW, gives a sexually explicit hand sign kids refer to as “The Shocker”:
Ryan Harbinger: its the shocker!!
Emma Fleed: ohh yaaaa
Damon Flintov: yo nick brix got the hooks
The night progressed and Emma Fleed, the primary victim of the car accident at Throckmorton and Cascade Canyon, was video-recorded on a mobile phone as she danced on a glass coffee table, apparently unaware of her surroundings, likely intoxicated (or “turt”). The video was posted on Vine, a popular social networking site where short videos play on never-ending loops. Here, the kids’ comments take a darker turn:
Nick Brickston: majestic
Steph Malcolm-Swann: he he
Damon Flintov: woah woah woah. this chick is so ratchet
Lexie Carlton: luv u sexxxy
Ryan Harbinger: drunk off her ass ha ha
Annalynne Schmidt: wut the fuck is this girl doing??? lol
Nick Brickston: Emma Fleed is so wasted Lindsay Lohan just told her to get it together
Jake Rambelli: is this girl getting naked or what?
The kids continued to take advantage of Emma Fleed’s vulnerable state, posting additional photographs and videos of the young girl on the table, her skirt and top disheveled so as to reveal her thighs and underwear:
Jonas Everett: this girl is fcked UP
Jake Rambelli: thirsty trick
Steph Malcolm-Swann: this is so hilar
Dave Chu: what if that was your daughter
Ryan Harbinger: what if it was my fuckin little sister
Damon Flintov: it wouldn’t be tho. she wouldn’t do that.
Ryan Harbinger: real.
Jonas Everett: Emma Fleed is DTF whose ready??
CHRIS NGUYEN and 6 others
Finally, the victim is shown as she lay passed out on a soiled white couch, her hair disheveled, her skirt hiked up to reveal pink underwear. Though at least five other kids took and posted photographs in this moment, it does not appear, from the photos, that anyone stepped in to help the girl. To the kids it seemed to be a kind of terrible joke:
Damon Flintov: she is so fucked right now
Corie Narlow: who is this sloppy drunk bitch?