Heads of the Colored People(32)
She chastised herself for her stupidity and chuckled. She was not going to kill herself, certainly not today. Maybe she would try volunteering again, try reading to the elderly. She could wear a costume and visit sick children or attractive young men in the hospital; she could start brainstorming the outfits and completing the necessary applications as soon as she finished her dinner. The pictures she would post. Nothing was more fulfilling, it occurred to her, than giving back to others and letting people know about it.
She poured water from the filter pitcher into the bowl, over the dehydrated noodles and powder, and put the whole deal into the microwave and pressed start before she remembered her phone.
Later, those who mentioned her asked whether anyone had noticed anything different about her. Were there any warning signs? And why did she set the whole house and the poor ginger cat on fire? Why did she use the phone instead of a more traditional way? But in the moment, Jilly saw only the bright crimson of the explosion. It came in four red pops, like notifications, friend requests.
WHISPER TO A SCREAM
The comments poured in steadily, and though she never responded to them right away, sometimes taking up to a week so as not to look too eager, Raina always read them almost as quickly as her viewers posted. She ignored anyone who posted comments with the N-word, monkey references, and black-fetish cracks, their vitriol one of the main reasons for her mother’s opposition to Raina’s “hobby.” But the eighteenth comment, “Can u where ur Dorsey uniform in the next 1?” made her close her laptop for a moment before she could bring herself to reopen it. No avatar accompanied the screen name, Sir_Pix_Alot, but she knew it must be Kevin or one of the other guys in her class again. No matter how many times she blocked them, they always reappeared with new names and the same line of trolling. “We know it’s you, Raina.” “How come you never talk like that to us at school?”
She closed the laptop again and carried it from her bedroom into the bright kitchen, where her mother had left two notes on the oversize refrigerator: “At the salon. Heat the leftovers around 6:30,” and “Finish your algebra 2 before you get on Youtube.” Raina crumpled both notes into the trash can and reset the magnets—one advertising her father’s car dealerships and one for the family dentist—that had held the notes to the fridge. The scrunched paper made a satisfying sound that her viewers would enjoy. Her mother had hidden or thrown out the tasty bread again. “Fiber will help you with some of that belly,” Carmen had said the week before, on her way out to some event, focusing her eyes on Raina’s midsection for longer than necessary.
Over her snack of baked corn chips with hummus and dried cranberries, Raina replayed the video. “Hi, everyone,” her video self whispered from the kitchen table, as her manicured hands stroked alternately a feather and a children’s anthology. “Today, I thought I’d”—she ran her fingernails over the cover of the book—“start with some scratching sounds and then tell you a story.” She had carefully edited out the two-second frame in which she cleared her throat, fearing it too jarring a sound, despite the six or so requests she’d gotten for “more rasp.” She had briefly considered deleting the three-second accidental shot during which she adjusted her breasts into her top, but she kept it for her mother’s sake, and for Dom’s, deliberating only as long as it took to hit Finalize. She liked leaving Carmen little surprises here and there, sometimes to keep her on her toes, sometimes to force her hand. Last week it was a pendant necklace that grazed her cleavage. The week before, she decided on the hint of a lacy bra under a V-neck shirt.
She guesstimated that Carmen was responsible for seven of the three-hundred-plus views the video gained in its first hour after publication, because just as her mother could check Raina’s browser history—which Raina always cleared, along with her cache—Raina could check stats on her viewers, a detail that Carmen did not seem to understand. Her mother must have watched the video from the salon and was probably preparing her lecture. Dom hadn’t seen it yet or he would have called, though at four thirty it was still a little early.
A year ago, when Raina had started making ASMR videos, she assumed that keeping her head out the frame would preserve her anonymity at some level, prevent the sorts of dramas that had resulted from the makeup and hair videos she started in eighth grade. With only her voice and torso as markers, she believed her classmates would not be able to identify her, but someone always did. It wasn’t as though she could start over with a new online identity every time they caught up with her; her viewers wouldn’t know how to find her, and if she gave them clues, Kevin or the other guys would find them, too. Why should she lose her growing number of subscribers or the stats on her videos because of a few jerks with too much time on their hands?
“Because it isn’t right, the whole thing,” her mother had said barely a week earlier. “You don’t want people to see you as one of those nasty girls, do you.” Carmen had phrased it as more of a statement than a question.
“What’s nasty about helping people sleep or soothing them?” Raina had said, regretting it almost immediately. That was the point of trying to create an autonomous sensory meridian response, a tingling of the head and body in full relaxation that some people experienced from sounds and other stimuli. Raina was sure some viewers were using it for grosser purposes—some of the comments made that clear—but she saw her videos, and ASMR, as therapeutic. She imagined her voice like warm water pouring over the crown of her listener’s head. A girl with PTSD had written to her last week, saying, “Your stories, your voice, these are the only things that have helped me sleep.”