The Takedown(49)

I couldn’t help it. I was all full up with anger. Twenty minutes earlier, right before Dad got home from work and my mom came back from a meeting in Tribeca, Mac backed out of coming to dinner.

mac Gonna stay home tonight, hermosa. Stuff feels kinda weird with us, and you don’t seem too keen on my company right now.

moi Is this because I was teasing you about Ailey? Are you mad at me?!

mac No, just maybe need to lick some wounds for a day and don’t want to ruin your time with your parents.

I didn’t write back.

So it was only the four Chengs who walked to our favorite ramen spot on Vanderbilt. There, at our usual window table, between big bowls of eggy noodles and plates of pork buns and dumplings, I actually managed to find my pre-video self. We laughed and teased each other and, for a little while, life was about family: Mom getting tipsy; Kyle, Dad, and me re-upping our noodles and slurping enormous mouthfuls without biting because in Chinese culture that’s considered bad luck. And I didn’t need more of that, thank you very much.

Later that night, after a pre-Christmas present—faux-leather gloves!—and cocoa by the hologram fire that Kyle downloaded and then projected into our fireplace, and Dad’s traditional readings of ’Twas the Night Before Christmas and The Polar Express, I txted good night to the girls and, after much consideration (too much), also Mac.

moi Merry almost Gift-Giving Day, Se?or Rodriguez.

mac And a Happy Standing In Return Lines to you, Ms. Cheng.

I miss you, I typed but quickly deleted, vaguely wondering if AnyLies was keyed into my Doc and if it made her hate me less to see how terrible I was at having a simple relationship with a boy. Then I hunkered into bed and pulled up the Bra&Panties site on my Doc. Audra knew my weaknesses. How could I make a good argument if I didn’t know what I was taking about?

On the left of the page was the countdown clock. Until Legalization and Exposure was written in a curling script above the clock. The end date was December 31. Beneath the decreasing numbers was a huge close-up shot of the B&P’s cleavage, pushed practically to her chin in a lacy nude bra. Beneath the pic it read: See me bare all (my face and other assets) on the thirty-first.

The clock had 242,000 likes.

My hand hovered over the teeny x that would close out the page. Instead, with a sigh I couldn’t suppress, I swiped over to the latest post and started reading. After placing Audra on the suspects list, I kind of owed it to her.

BRA&PANTIES

Hey, party people,

Let’s talk objectification. I get this question a lot: Is it objectification if it’s to my own benefit and I’m choosing to put myself out there? To which I ask: Do you like what you’re doing? Is it fun? Or is it beneficial to you—say, is it providing a much-needed income? If the answer is yes to any of these questions, then no, it’s NOT objectification.

Yeah, sure it’s not. I was about to skim ahead when something caught my eye—my name.

BRA&PANTIES

Take this Kyla Cheng chick for instance. How great would it be if she had the courage to stand up and say, “So what?” Why can’t this chick be Li’l Miss Straight-A, intelligent, a real go-getter, and still—gasp—have sex? Our sexual icons faded out nearly a century ago. Can we all agree that we are desperately in need of an update?

In theory, I agreed with what she said. But come on. It wasn’t like her followers—Mr. @BigJack2005 or @DirtyDaddy—were admiring her for her brains or lucid women’s-rights arguments. I mean, no one watched Unicorn Wars for the wars. They watched it for the unicorns. Maybe the post would have meant more to me if she didn’t end it by plugging her big nudie reveal. Or if it weren’t me she was calling out for not being feminist enough.

No better than the average teenage boy, I swiped ahead to the pictures.

It was a series of six photos. The sluts wore different lingerie in each pic (keeping the advertisers happy). There was a girl in bed, sheets tucked in just so around her naked body. Then a girl in a skimpy bra-and-panty set, stretching. Then that same girl straddling a pillow. Even alone in my room, I blushed.

I scrolled down to the comments. Some of them were go get ’em girl!–type posts, a few were near memoirs about the reader’s own struggle with objectification, and a few followers were having an intense exchange about feminism. The rest were completely asinine. Slut was written so many times, I stopped seeing it. And it wasn’t men writing these comments. All the men’s posts were like girl u hot. The nasty comments were all written by other girls.

Now I scrolled back up to the third photo. The girl was posed on her bed, face blurred, hair tousled like she just woke up (but who woke up on all fours?). It wasn’t the ridiculous pose that kept drawing my attention; it was her bra. I recognized it. It was the same one that Ailey was wearing the day the video came out of me and Mr. E. The one I’d thought seemed exceptionally fancy for no-glitter Ailey.

I swiped off my Doc. The whole point of B&P was to get people to buy things. The fact that Ailey had that bra didn’t make her one of the B&P’s sluts, it only made her impressionable, like the hundreds of other Brooklyn teens who lived and died by B&P. Besides, though she and the model did have similar skin tones, there was no way Ailey’s boobs were that big.

I sent one more message.

moi Hey Jessie, Kyle Cheng here. Can we talk?

I wasn’t expecting much. Maybe just a flat-out no. But my Doc sat unresponsive in my hand, like I hadn’t even txted a real address. The thing of it was, if Jessie was AnyLies, why wasn’t she using that moniker all the time? I mean, it equaled far creepier and untraceable. Why was she posting anything under her own name? Unless it was precisely to throw me off her trail. As I tried to fall asleep, I wished hard that it was Jessie who made the video. Because if it wasn’t her, then I had to admit I still had no idea who had.