The Takedown(23)

My mom turned to me with a furrowed brow. Oops, had I forgotten to mention that part?

My lips pressed into a straight line. If Graff believed that the student who organized a self-esteem seminar for freshman girls would sleep with her twentysomething teacher, then there wasn’t much I could say to dissuade her.

“Maybe just answer the question, Kylie,” Mom said.

In monotone I said, “Of course the video is a fake.”

Dr. Graff was infamous for her unblinking stare, which she now leveled on me. Like eye contact would make me change my story, like I was lying.

“Of course it is,” she finally said.

In the tense silence that followed, my mom launched into her talking points about my college applications rapidly approaching their due dates (check that one off the list, Mama), my White House Internship Program application already being submitted, my wrecked G-File, and this video’s detrimental effects on all three. I peeked at my Doc. I had a txt from Sharma.

sharm After school—city. Know hacker at Eden. Agreed to meet you.

I forwarded the txt to the other girls, with the new intro:

moi Operation Video Takedown in effect?! Sí?

Apparently no.

fawnal Can’t today Picking up our CSA farm share.

audy Have plans.

sharm Capturing Silver Tower (zombie stuff).

Ouch, ladies. Not to play the diva, but this was my life. I couldn’t imagine telling one of them that I couldn’t be there because I had to pick up vegetables or had vague plans or had to kill M-F-ing zombies.

“We understand your worry,” Dr. Graff was saying when I looked up. “And while we take cyberbullying very seriously at Parkside Prep, I must be frank. We are a small staff, tasked with expanding students’ minds, not policing their Internet tendencies. If it were our responsibility to ferret out the source of every slanderous e-attack on a student, we would do little else.”

“Please tell me there’s something you can do about this, Dr. Graff,” Mom said in her calm-before-the-storm voice.

“Certainly there is, Mrs. Cheng. Just this morning at my DOE breakfast, I raised the topic of creating an exploratory panel focused on online defamation. And of course, we’ve already taken steps where our staffing is concerned.”

I was stunned.

“Does that mean you fired Mr. E.? Dr. Graff, he didn’t do anything wrong. He’s a victim too. Maybe Park Prep could issue a statement on his behalf and—”

Dr. Graff shook her head. “I don’t believe that’s wise at the moment, Kyle. Truthfully, it’s best to draw as little attention to this as possible. Mrs. Cheng, believe me when I say that no one cares about the reputation of Parkside Preparatory or its students more than I do. But sadly, as most schools are learning through one painful example after another, when it comes to online vileness like this, our hands are frustratingly tied.”





Final bell.

I’d made it. School was finito. Maybe the girls had been conspicuously absent from all our between-classes gossip spots. And maybe Mac hadn’t used the lav pass in AP Calc to come visit me in lunch. But now it was time for the good stuff, namely Park Prep’s Community Club’s pre–holiday party gift-wrapping session.

Say that one time fast.

Tomorrow afternoon, Christmas Eve, we were throwing a party for families from a women-and-children’s shelter in South Slope. Today was the gift-wrapping bonanza. We’d been fund-raising since September. The kids were going to leave with more presents than they could carry. The moms would go home with new clothes and coats and, most important—thank you, Swiped Tech on Fifth—a solar Doc-lite. Meaning their kids’ current situation wouldn’t force them to fall behind on the latest tech, and hopefully ensuring they’d still be in the running for a quality future.

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.”