The Take Down Read online

  “Oh, worried face.” Tears gushed down her cheeks as she gave me her Doc. “It’s getting worse. Thirty-five people shared this link.”

  I jabbed play. The screen whirled and connected to a YurTube video titled HOW DOES IT FEEL?

  “Oh, gross,” I said, because the video was of Mr. E. He was with a girl in his classroom and they were, well, doing it. I handed it back to Fawn. “Swipe it off, Fawnie.”

  “No, watch.”

  Since the girl’s face was completely obscured by her long black hair, I watched Mr. E.’s face, trying not to think how his whole career was over. Lots of us probably imagined doing stuff like this with him, but when we imagined it, it was in a foggy, fairy-tale way. Seeing it in real life was gruesome. I couldn’t look. Instead I watched the video’s time run down. Twenty more seconds.

  “How could he be so stupid as to make a sex vid of himself in school?”

  There was no doubt it was the real deal. It wasn’t grainy or blurred the way fake videos were. It looked like it had been recorded from the exact hub that always bombed out in class. And here I’d felt flattered by his extended looks this morning. When he came to class he must have already known about this. Everyone knew I was one of Mr. E.’s favorite students. Those looks he’d given me were looks of mortification. I shivered.

  “Almost there,” Fawn said, her eyes glued to the screen.

  Throughout the video the girl kept her head down. Now she lifted it up and shook her hair out of her face. It was like I could almost hear it. Like when you step on ice and it makes that satisfying crunch under your heel.

  Except now it was my life cracking and splintering.

  If you hadn’t already guessed, I was staring at myself.

  The next two minutes weren’t flattering. I’ll spare you the details. The sudden drenching underarm sweat. The insane-person pacing. My insisting it had to be some kind of joke.

  All you need to know is that it didn’t look like a joke. Or like a face-swapping filter. It looked like me in the video. And not just “like” me. It was me. For one click, I worried I’d experienced a massive brain reset and had actually slept with Mr. E. All my classmates knew I was completely obsessed with him thanks to the swooning Quips I posted daily. The last one from barely fifty minutes ago, sent while Audra was grilling me:

  Almost time for Huck Finn in English. Me. Raft. Mr. E. Now that’s a story I want to get lost in.

  Whose parents hadn’t warned them about the content they posted online? But I thought they meant, like, don’t post pics of your butt. Everyone superfanned over some guy, girl, or other. Right?

  Or this was what I told myself as I tried to remain calm and watched Fawn cry. Good lord. It was like someone had told her she’d never eat butter again. I pulled her in for a hug, then wiped giant tears from her cheeks.

  “Fawnie, you goof. Stop crying already, betch,” I said in my best Audra impersonation. “I’m sure this isn’t that big a deal. Ms. Sandoval in New World Borders just said that at one point or another every living person in modernized society will fall prey to some kind of online scam or identity takeover. So this is mine.”

  Fawn nodded, not meeting my eyes. There was an urgent knock on the door; then Audra and Sharma slipped into the bathroom. Considering Audra must have been getting pinged like crazy, why hadn’t she immediately shown me this after English? Her Doc must have been off.

  “Sharma got us off-grounds passes.” Audra handed me my coat.

  “Been saving for an emergency.” Sharma shrugged as Fawn’s jaw dropped.

  “Wait. We’re leaving?” And this was an emergency? My brain was having trouble keeping up. “You can’t tell me this is any worse than Boobgate. I mean, you guys, that’s not even me. You know that, right?”

  Three pretty heads looked from one to another, then too readily bobbled up and down.

  “Okay,” Audra said, albeit a little stiffly. Mentioning Boobgate still did that to her. “It’s not you.”

  “Wait,” Fawn sniffed. “Come here.”

  Only later, when I dissected every second of the previous and future twenty-four hours, would I appreciate what Fawn did next. She grabbed my bag, took out my compact, and dabbed at my face. Then she applied a light pink gloss to my lips. In the next eight minutes, 104 different pics would be snapped of me. Yev Baker would PhotoMix half of them into a video titled “Walk of Shame.” At least I didn’t look stunned and shiny in them.

  “There. Now you look lovely.”

  Audra linked her tiny arm protectively through mine. “Two hallways, two flights of stairs, and we’re there.”

  “What is this?” I laughed. “Witness protection?”

  “Yeah, kind of, Kylie,” Audra said, and tsked.

  The girls all took a deep breath. Then Fawn opened the bathroom door. It was still between periods, and the halls were packed. Fawn took my other hand. Sharma trailed behind, her fingers a blur above her Doc, hopefully unleashing a world of doom on whoever had made the video. It was like the morning Walk all over again, except faster with no banter, and now there was a whole different reason we weren’t meeting anyone’s eyes.

  Someone took my pic. Audra’s Doc dinged when I was tagged in it. Yulia Yap muttered something about “got him fired.” Her best friend, Heather Ru-Weinberg, shot me some serious eye daggers. I blew them both kisses.

  “I don’t think that’s helping,” Audra said.

  I needed to find Mac. He would make this better, either with a totally inappropriate comment or a really long hug.

  We went down two flights of stairs in utter silence. At the new attendance and security sensor, our clunky tablets beeped. The sensor lit up green as it registered our passes. Mr. Watkins, the jovial guard the sensor had replaced, never would have let us leave this easy. For once, I didn’t miss him.

  Outside, Park Slope had that hush that only a snowstorm could instill in the city. An interborough taxi navigated the unplowed street at half its normal speed. White Christmas lights twinkled mutely beneath the snow-encased potted pine trees that guarded the school. I took my first real breath since Fawn showed me the video. And then there he was, my Mac. I wondered if one of the girls had txted to tell him we were leaving. His tablet was flashing red. No off-grounds pass for this boy. Unless he went back inside quick, detention would ensue. For once, I couldn’t care less about Mac’s truancy record.

  “Macky.”

  He hadn’t heard me. Barely off school grounds, he’d already swapped out his EarRing for his headphones. They were supposed to keep sound in, yet I could hear his music twenty feet away. He was completely absorbed in his Doc, the way he only got when he was searching for exactly the right song. I broke into a trot. The girls called out, trying to stop me. Didn’t they know everything would be okay as soon as those arms were around me?

  When Mac finally noticed me, he quick swiped at his eyes, then nonchalantly turned away and continued to tap at his Doc. Now that I was closer, I saw that he wasn’t searching for a song; he was scrolling through pics of us, deleting them.

  I’d expected his hands cupping my face and a stream of affectionate Spanish. Not to be ignored and erased. I almost laughed from the shock and hurt. Like that time Mom yelled at me, “Stop it already, Kyle,” in the middle of GoodMart because I wouldn’t stop citing reasons why microalgae should immediately be incorporated into all our meals.

  “Rodriguez.”

  He looked awful. Like he’d come down with a sudden scorching fever. His face was flushed. His eyes were red and puffy. I could tell he debated ignoring me again, but seeing as I was only inches away, that wasn’t really feasible.

  I put a hand on his arm. He immediately shook it off.

  “Don’t touch me.” Maybe it was because his music was up so high, but he was kind of shouting. “I have nothing to say to you.”

  “Mac.” I was like some useless bot only programmed to say his name. “Hold on. Can you please lower that so we can talk about this?”

  He pulled a
headphone forward off one of his ears.

  “No, you don’t get to talk to me anymore. You don’t get to send me cute pics before you go to bed or make plans with me of what we’ll eat for after-school snack. You don’t get to call me crying every time you fight with your mom. You don’t get to be my ‘just friend’ anymore.”

  Behind us, the girls moved in, their shoes crunching on the snow. I couldn’t believe it. Mac thought the video was real. Me. The girl who covered her eyes during sex scenes in movies. The girl who refused every single one of his advances, even though it would have been much easier and more enjoyable not to. She had suddenly up and done this? With her teacher?

  There was little doubt it was me, except for the important fact that it wasn’t. I thought that’d be clear to anyone who knew me even a little. Panic and rage coursed through my body in equal measure.

  “Kylie, honey,” Fawn said. “Let’s go.”

  At their approach, Mac’s eyes took on that faraway, heavy-lidded it’s all the same to me gaze that his primos were so good at. It was the expression he wore on constant at Prep. The one that covered up how funny, sweet, and silly he was when he wasn’t surrounded by kids who had their own assistants and drove beamers.

  As calmly as possible I said, “Macky, you know that isn’t me in the video.”

  Still not meeting my eyes, he gave me a slow, lazy smile. I’d seen this before too. It was the same smile he gave Avery Gibson the time Mac pulled Avery’s soda can out of the trash—Mac hated when people didn’t recycle—and Avery saw and said, “Hey, Rodriguez, if you’re that desperate for the deposit money, I’ll just txt you some credits next time.”

  And Mac replied, “Hey, Avery, eat SHT,” and then whipped the can at his head.

  “No preocupes, princesa,” Mac now said, calmly, like he was over it. “I should have seen it coming, right? Only, you know the part that gets me? All these months, you’ve acted like I was the slut.”

  I felt the sting of his words as sharply as if he’d smacked me.

  “Hey,” Sharma said.

  “No,” Fawn snapped. “You don’t talk to her like that.”

  She began to push past me, but Audra grabbed her back. Mac held his hands out, like You want me? Come get me. Luckily, a cab pulled up. Mac’s cousin Rupey was hanging out the passenger-side window. Two of his other cousins were in the back. Rupey and Mac slapped hands.

  “Have a nice life, Kyla.”

  Mac was the only person who ever called me by my real name. His voice cracked a little when he said it. He hopped into the backseat of the cab, exchanged a series of handshakes with all the primos. Then, because whenever we were in the same space that’s what they tended to do, his eyes flicked to mine. How could you?

  Before the cab pulled away, Rupey spat on the sidewalk at our feet. Now the tears came. If Mac believed this, who wouldn’t?

  Fawn immediately absorbed me into a hug.

  “I’m fine,” I said, angrily wiping my eyes.

  Audra stared after the boys, then shook herself a little and said, “Let’s take you home.”

  Home. All I wanted was to put my head in my mom’s lap and have her stroke my hair, like she did when I was little and had woken up terrified from a bad dream. Sharma handed me a half-used tissue from her pocket. I gratefully blotted my eyes with it.

  “No, not yet,” I said. “We have to go to Sharma’s and figure out what the H-double-L just happened.”

  Since I’m sure everything will be different by the time you read this, allow me a mini ancient-history lesson for the young’uns in the audience. Once upon a time there was something called the Internet.

  I’m kidding! I won’t go that far back.

  As you do know, the first site to do Worldwide Facial Recognition was ConnectBook. Anytime someone took a picture, everyone in it—even twenty rows back—was tagged. So a day shopping in the city meant a hundred different tourists’ vacation photos now attached to your profile. You had to un-star them or, like, click diss-connect in order for them not to show up in your feed. I can’t remember. There was a lot of starring and clicking back then.

  Worldwide Facial Recognition (shortened to WWFR, pronounced “Woofer”) was controversial from the start. A cheating husband was the first to sue. He and his mistress were captured in the background when some kid took a pic with his first car. As soon as the kid posted the pic online, BAM! The wife saw the husband tagged—along with the wife’s best friend.

  Oops.

  Wife divorced husband. Got millions in settlement.

  Double oops.

  The cheater claimed Woofer ruined his life. The court of public opinion said he did it to himself by cheating in the first place. ConnectBook said he could have selected to opt out of Woofer under his account’s personal settings. The lawsuit worked its way up through the court of appeals to the door of the Supreme Court. In a five-to-four decision, the court ruled that Woofer didn’t infringe on an individual’s privacy rights. After all, anyone at any time could opt out.

  Nobody opted out.

  Instead the world got smaller, or so says my mom. She says Woofer changed everything. In a few months, those star-stalker e-mags became obsolete, because you could now go to your favorite star’s CB fan page and watch him move real-time through the world. It was lose-lose for undercover cops. And it became near impossible to lie to your parents about, say, “sleeping over at Sharma’s,” when you were out at a salsa club with Mac. (Lesson learned on that one.)

  ConnectBook patented their 3-D-based, surface-texture-analysis tech so when Goog started attaching Woofer photos to G-Files, ConnectBook sued and won. Now to access Woofer, and all the star and fellow-man stalkery it allowed, you had to be a CB member. ConnectBook’s user numbers exploded. It’s estimated that 94 percent of the people in the world have a CB account.

  Mom said it was the nail in the coffin. Thanks to Woofer and the new personal holographic devices, i.e., PHDs, i.e., Docs (get it? Because they’re PhDs?), no one would ever look up from their tech again. Randomly pull up any Woofer tag from the first year it came out, and nine out of ten times that person was staring at their device. After that, audio txt took off. I mean, who liked looking at pics of people looking down?

  Now, as we silently filed into Sharma’s brownstone and down into the garden apartment that was her lair, I figured someone must have pulled a Woofer video to make the one of me and Mr. E. And all I knew was that whoever did this had it backwards. I’d be over this video in a matter of minutes. They’d be the one who’d live to regret it.

  That is, assuming I could get any of my friends to actually believe that the video was fake. Because an hour later, despite their Park Prep nods of solidarity, it had become all too clear that the girls weren’t concerned with who had virtually violated their best friend, but why their best friend still wouldn’t admit that she’d slept with her teacher.

  “I guess what I’m getting at, Kylie,” Fawn was saying, “is I hope you know that it’s okay if Mr. E. was your first—hypothetically speaking, of course.”

  “‘Reading Prez Malin’s old debate transcripts,’” Sharma said out of nowhere. “Ha. Knew that excuse equaled suspicious.”

  “You guys—” I started to say, only to have Fawn talk over me.

  “I mean, mine was the counter kid from the bodega on Thirteenth Street. What a waste that was. Did we expect that Mac would win the goods? Of course. But aside from the age difference, which honestly, whatever, it’s like six to ten years tops, and Mr. E.’s chubby lips—is he a wet kisser? I always wondered….”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. This was getting more and more absurd.

  “I mean, aside from that stuff, sleeping with Mr. E., you know, theoretically, is nothing to be ashamed of. The part that would bother me, assuming it were true, was that we didn’t even celebrate. There should have been pink bubblies. You should have told us.”

  “Agreed,” Sharma said as Fawn wiped at her cheeks.

  This was the third
time she’d cried. As calmly as possible, for the hundredth time, I said, “First of all, I wasn’t keeping secrets. Second, Fawnie, there’s nothing to celebrate.”

  “Got that right.” Sharma nodded at her mammoth wall screen, where the video’s YurTube page idled.

  Since Sharma’s mom was a heart surgeon and her dad was an emergency room nurse, their differing schedules meant they were rarely home at the same time, or ever. This meant if Sharma was at her Fort Greene brownstone, she was usually alone. Also, that her parents’ guilt in turn bought her every high-end gadget on the market. Sitting in front of Sharma’s wall screen was equivalent to being first row at a movie theater. Needless to say, despite it equaling a marathon walk from Park Prep and all our houses, we were at Sharma’s a lot.

  “Three thousand three hundred and thirty-four views,” Fawn intoned. “That’s…Sharma, math.”

  “One eighteen.”

  “One hundred and eighteen new views in three minutes.”

  On the ride to Sharma’s—Audra pinged an Elite, What, like anyone wants to walk to Fort Greene right now?—Fawn flagged the video. I didn’t expect YurTube to remove it. If anything, they’d slap an NC-17 rating on it, which was almost worse. Now Sharma swiped the video from YurTube into PostProduction. On the wall screen my right eye was magnified by 300 percent.

  “Eye see you, too, Sharma,” Fawn giggled.

  Sharma leveled a look at her, then said, “No obvious mask or filters. No color discrepancy. No motion disjointedness.” Now the video went into an HTML program. It was like the JFK Terminal Five of HTML. Code flew in; code flew out. “No breaks in code.”

  “I’m telling you.” I crossed my arms. “It’s fake.”

  Sharma took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “Kylie, this isn’t like someone FaceSwitched you. Remember the HG trilogy from the two thousand teens? That actor died during production of the third film and they superimposed him into scenes and it was all-caps and italics OBV? Current vid-editing tech hasn’t progressed much beyond that.”