The Takedown(96)

“Yup.” I felt her nod. “Almost twenty-four hours a day. And when it got really bad, you would come to me with your arms outstretched, smiling, and I knew no matter what happened with the stores, our finances, my marriage, I was blessed. Even during the roughest patches—”

“Like the day after Christmas?” I interjected.

“Exactly,” she laughed. “Even then, I loved you as fiercely as I did when you were that little girl who held her arms out to me when I felt like I was sinking.”

Now we each took a tissue and blotted at our eyes. Mom reached across to her room screen and untacked a tiny piece of paper. I unfolded it. It crackled with age. In my mom’s cool block printing, in faded red ink, it read:

WHAT WOULD KYLA DO?

“No matter what obstacles we face in the future, if we create them or if others do, you are my greatest strength and my greatest love. Don’t tell your brother I said that.” We laughed. She gave me one last squeeze. “And that is the story of us. To be continued.”





In January, a week after I took my video down—Wait, sorry, who took down her video? Oh, that’s right. This girl!—my parents and I went to the offices of Awareness for a Safe America, located in downtown Washington, DC. Our lawyer set up the meeting. Once we were inside, two forms of ID were needed to check in at reception. Everyone’s tech was remotely powered down by security. When we were deemed nonthreats, we met with the head of ASA’s public relations department, a Ms. Smythe—no joke, just like in a spy movie—who explained that, contrary to what our lawyer insinuated via e-mail, ASA wasn’t entrapping people.

“We’re a watchdog group,” she said. “A privately funded corporation that works in conjunction with Homeland Security. Since technology isn’t growing in a bubble, ASA’s job is to hold the criminals that grow with it accountable for the very traceable, very real, very evil—I don’t think I’m overselling it by using that word—footprints they leave on the stream.”

Cool. Ms. Smythe was one of those people who called the Internet the stream. I imagined her riding the building’s soundless elevator to a pod in the basement every night, attaching a giant hose to her back, and powering down.

“While we sincerely apologize for your inconvenience, I hope you will view it as forgivable. There’s no end to the benefits of monitoring men who frequent or set up child pornography sites. Or, when it’s true—we’re reevaluating our vetting process as we speak—of pulling teachers who slept with their students out of schools. As stellar as you are at debate, Kyla, even you can’t argue against the advantages of preventing grown men from befriending children on apps that were meant for ages two to six.”

Clearly, Ms. Smythe didn’t know who she was dealing with. Or maybe she did. As I explained how that was heroic and all, but that there were still five other girls suffering through the mess Jonah Logan had made of their lives, she replied that she’d already signed them up for a pilot software program that erased selected materials as soon as they reemerged online—i.e., the other girls’ un-DRMed sex videos.

When we left, Mom got all teary-eyed. “That was spooky and terrifying, but honey, I am in utter awe of how awesome you are.”

I wasn’t as impressed. When I’d asked about Mr. E., Ms. Smythe had said, “We’ll look into it. But in his case, I fear the damage has already been done.”

Awareness for a Safe America had done that damage. Them. But this was politics, wasn’t it? And if this was where I was headed, I needed to learn the game. Maybe today there was nothing to be done, but someone worked above Ms. Smythe. There was always another channel.

Speaking of politics, while, ahem, I did take down my video, I was not the recognized valedictorian of my high school graduating class. I should have been. I had the highest grade-point average. But a few days before the ceremony, Dr. Graff called me into her office for one last visit. With her unblinking eyes, she informed me that though I was technically valedictorian, due to the circumstances in December my giving the commencement speech would be too controversial. It would open the school, and myself, up to too much scrutiny and negative publicity. So it was that Jessie Rosenthal, with her lousy 3.89 GPA, her three senior-elective art periods, and her crap British accent, won the honor of being the class speaker at graduation.

And actually?

She crushed it.

“We’re all about to go off and see and do many miraculous things, but I’d like to spend a few minutes now reminding you about what we don’t see….”

While she spoke, she scrolled through photos from a series she called the Humanity Project. It was the man in the diner, and the woman feeding the birds, but also a woman putting on makeup on the train, a man walking his bicycle, a mother with her five children staring into space as they waited to cross the street, all these lonely souls, moving through the world, crying out for a little contact and a little something good to happen.

“…In conclusion, I’d just like to remind everyone to be kind, to be mindful of those who don’t have what we do, and for heaven’s sake, to look up.”

As an added bonus, I still got called up onstage for having perfect attendance.

In college app news, two days before the admissions deadlines, Mom and I contacted twelve different admissions offices and begged them to let me resubmit the essay portion of my application. It turned out to be no big deal. Apparently, Scholar screwed up constantly and students were always pleading to upload new documents.