The Takedown(97)

Still, I didn’t get into Harvard.

But I did get a partial ride to Yale.

I was also in that year’s class of summer White House interns. Funny, but as it turned out, I think my sex video nudged me into both places. In their acceptance e-mail, the head of the White House review committee told me she was “moved” and “overwhelmed” by the video addendum to my application, and that she was “excited” to have such a voracious crusader on board. In my reply, I thanked her for her kind words and said it was only too bad that my teacher, Mr. Ehrenreich, had been a casualty of the whole ordeal.

I’ll get Mr. E.’s record expunged yet. After all, I’m the girl who took down her video!

Okay. That will be the last one.

Although, actually? I didn’t take down the video.

Yes, I deleted it from Ailey’s Doc and YurTube faster than you could blink, but not before transferring it to my Doc. A few days later, I posted it to Whattodo.org along with my story—this story. Of course, the video had a DRM on it, and Mr. E. was no longer tagged to it, but if at some point in all our lives we’ll be attacked online, we need to muster every resource to fight it. And there’s nothing I love better than a good fight. (Or at least a good theoretical one.) Besides, a friend once told me I’d be an idiot not to use the incredible platform I’d been given.

Speaking of Audra, the photos for her big New Year’s Eve reveal were staged on her parents’ dining room table. I didn’t see them right at midnight on New Year’s. I was too busy toasting my mom and dad. But I did try to flip through around one a.m. Unfortunately, a billion other people must have too. All the traffic temporarily crashed her site. When I saw the pics the next morning, I had to admit that Audra looked beautiful. The photos were tasteful, fairly showy, and yet coy. I’m not sure any of that mattered to the Parents.

As I’d hoped, Sharma said that Audra showed the Parents the photos on the dining room wallpaper screen after yet another nonpescatarian dinner. Audra’s bags were already packed and waiting by the front door. Which, from Sharma’s telling, was a good thing as, shortly after the Parents viewed the pics, Audra was no longer welcome in the Rhodes brownstone. Apparently, she’s lived quite happily in her one-bedroom Williamsburg apartment ever since.

Dr. Graff was also not thrilled with Audra’s entrepreneurship and this latest Park Prep sex scandal. I’m guessing Audra opted for a suspended-until-graduation deal, as she never sat next to me in English again. By then I highly doubt she cared. Because it just meant, by early January, her life was exactly where she wanted it to be.

After her New Year’s pics posted, Vogue did indeed scoop her up, but she must have pissed off someone, because her column only ran for four months. Fawn said Audra was now working on a lifestyle brand and had a contract with a major national retailer—apparently she was thinking of naming it Slut Kitten. Leave it to Audra to take over the world, one repurposed word at a time.

There was a lot of leftover junk related to the video on my G-File, and right before the January 1 deadlines my parents paid a file-sweeping company to make it go away. Before they did, Audra thoughtfully untagged me from the B&P posts.





I immediately txted

moi you =

audy You know it, betch. Keep being good. And don’t forget to be bad, too.

I did not come to such charitable terms with my other ex–best friend. Ailey’s currently enrolled in Cornell’s new NYC Tech undergraduate program. Judging by her profiles—fine, I look—she seems happy. I need to know that, because almost daily I think about her sobbing in Audra’s dining room, and the same sickening shame I experienced that day washes over me. For someone who prided herself on never making a mistake, it doesn’t get much worse than how I dumped Ailey. And yet she nearly ruined my life, so I can’t quite forgive her, either.

I tell myself the best way to deal with the ick feeling of it all is to make sure I never treat anyone like that again. And that at least Ailey got what she wanted. I will never, ever forget her. Maybe one day I’ll even get to a place where I can wish her luck.

Currently, that day seems like a million clicks away.

As predicted, Fawn and Kyle lasted for about two months. On New Year’s Day, Fawn dropped by with flowers for me.

“I didn’t know how to tell you,” she squealed. “It just kinda happened. At first I didn’t think it was anything serious. And then I did. Does it help to say I think he’s loaded nachos with extra jalape?os?”

“Only if you don’t ever mention his jalape?o in front of me again.”

“Kylie, a penis joke? I’m so proud.”

Fawn dumped him right after Valentine’s Day. Kyle still insists it was the best two months of his life. And I suppose in an extremely creeped-out, please-let’s-move-on-to-other-subjects way, I’m happy she was his first. Everyone should be so lucky as to love the first person they sleep with. Still, things weren’t quite the same with me and Fawn after that. She’s currently enrolled in the French Culinary Institute and washing dishes at this hot young chef’s new restaurant in the LES. We mostly check in with each other when we need a little e-love pep talk.

Kyle continues to make overanimated facial expressions and remains one of my favorite people on earth, though it will be some time before I bring any of my single friends home.