You Can't Catch Me(11)

I’ve made the space my own. The queen-size bed that touches both walls is the most comfortable bed you’ll ever sleep on. There’s no window in here, just the painting Kiki gave me. Underneath it is a desk with a large monitor that doubles as my television. I installed a hanging bar near the ceiling that raises and lowers on a pulley system to hang my clothes on, and I built a set of drawers that fits under my bed.

I grab my laptop and return to the common area.

“You want a beer?” I ask Liam. He’s standing in the middle of the living room, which is composed of two uncomfortable leather couches and a massive flat screen. Men and their priorities.

“Sure. Mind if I put the game on?”

“Go ahead.”

Liam’s a die-hard Mets fan and has season tickets at Citi Field that he inherited from his dad. Mostly, he gives them away or resells them, but he watches on TV when he can. He used to take me to games, telling me about this whole hot-dog-and-beer ritual he had with his dad and how they scored every game they attended together, keeping the results in a series of three-ring binders. It made me jealous of the normalcy of his upbringing, so I acted out by changing the score sheet when he wasn’t looking. He stopped taking me after that.

Liam turns on the TV and finds the right channel while I go into the galley kitchen and fetch two beers from the fridge. Its contents are labeled like they were in my freshman dorm: the yogurt is mine; the fancy craft beer is Josh’s. I take two of his beers, a tithe for the guacamole that was clearly labeled as mine that I caught him with a few weeks ago.

“I think we should start with Twitter,” I say, handing him his beer and taking a seat next to him. I open the laptop and log on.

“What does that mean?” Liam asks, pointing to the number 293 over the little bell symbol next to Notifications.

“Have you never been on Twitter?”

He grimaces as he tugs on his beer. “What’s it notifying you of?”

“All the people who’ve liked a tweet of mine or retweeted it or @-ed me.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Like direct tweeted at me. They sent a message to @reallyJessicaW specifically.”

“That’s your Twitter name?”

“Yep.”

Liam pulls on his beer and barely avoids rolling his eyes at me. “Do you need to answer all of those tweet thingies?”

“Nope.”

“Are you even going to check them?”

“It’s not anything I need to see.”

He reaches over and moves the mouse on the trackpad until the cursor’s over the symbol, then clicks. My notifications are full of what I’ve come to expect—horrible misogyny and hate.

“What the hell is this?” Liam asks.

“This is what happens when you’ve been publicly shamed.”

Liam’s eyes scroll down the page. He stops when he gets to the first guy threatening to rape me.

“What the fuck, Jess. You need to call the police.”

“It’s just Twitter. They won’t do anything. And they don’t mean it. Not most of them, anyway.”

Liam looks away and swallows half his beer rapidly. “What are we doing on here, then?”

“I wanted to see if I could find other women named Jessica Williams.”

I execute a quick search in the people tab. The first result is the former Daily Show correspondent, but it goes on for pages and pages. “I’m not going to get anywhere here.”

“Why does anyone use this?”

“It was kind of essential in my old job.”

“And now?”

“A bad habit, I guess.” I navigate away from it. “Anyway, it’s not the right place for this kind of search. Maybe Facebook.”

“Do you have Facebook?” Liam asks.

“Everyone over twenty-five has Facebook.”

He frowns at my jab. Liam does not have Facebook. He turns his eyes to the TV screen. The Mets are up by two against the Phillies in the second inning. I’m sure it won’t last.

I log into my Facebook account. I don’t go on Facebook much these days, though I used to spend a lot of time on there. There’s a survivors’ group—Not in Todd Anymore—where some of us saved by Liam and others who left on their own started gathering seven years ago, after Todd died, but there’s little activity there now.

“If I remember right,” I say, “you can’t search for age on here. Just names, and then you can see, sometimes, where they live and their age on their individual page if they want that information to be public.”

“I thought Facebook was shit about privacy?”

“They know everything, but that doesn’t mean it’s easily accessible to ordinary users.”

I type Jessica Williams into the search bar. A list of Jessicas appears, sorted by what algorithm, I don’t know. One of the first on the list has a common friend, someone I used to work with, but when I check this Jessica’s page, she’s ten years older than me. The next two both have their privacy settings on high, and no personal information but a photo.

I click on the expand tab—the list goes on and on and on.

“There has to be a better way,” Liam says.

“You’re the guy with the skills.”

“You want me to call in a favor?”