The regret is almost immediate.
“His username was middle-earthling83?” Teddy exclaims. “Even I’m not that nerdy.”
“Your app history begs to differ.”
“Click it,” says Teddy.
“I’m in pain,” I protest.
“Click iiiit.”
“I swear, you’re always warning me not to be a busybody, but you’re the nosy one here.”
That said, of course I click into the LiveJournal page, because the universe wouldn’t dangle something this absurd in front of me if it didn’t intend for me to do just that.
And there, lo and behold, is a profile page that is so unmistakably the twenty-year-old version of my math-loving, Lord of the Rings–guzzling, computer-hogging dad that it feels like the ghost of Cooper Price Past just walked into the room and caught us in the act. The whole theme is done up in images of the Shire, and the banner on the top reads ALL THESE WORDS MAKE NO SENSE, I FIND BLISS IN IGNORANCE.
“Uh, dark much?”
Teddy types the line into his phone. “It’s from a Linkin Park song.”
“Cooper was an emo mathlete!” I gasp.
“Cooper contained multitudes,” says Teddy, putting half of his tall self into my lap to continue to scroll down the page, like one of those Labrador retrievers that still thinks it’s a puppy and never reevaluated personal space after growing into a dog.
It gets worse. Edits from Lord of the Rings movies. Some sort of meme-ish-type thing with a cartoon bunny that says “not listening” on it. Sappy playlists titled things like “autumnal jams.” It’s like it was trying to be a Tumblr page before anyone respected the true meaning of the word aesthetic.
“Oh my god, he was super into this Beth lady,” says Teddy. “But also someone named Fedotowsky? Wait, are these actual journal entries?”
“Don’t click,” I squeal, slapping a hand down on his.
“Too late.”
I skim what appears to be a very long post waxing poetic about a friend of his, and then I genuinely do start to feel something adjacent to guilt. “Okay, okay,” I say, clicking back out to the main page.
“The 2003 is hurting my eyes,” Teddy moans.
I pause. “Wait, did you say 2003?”
“That’s what the time stamps say. Almost all of them are October.”
“Uh…”
I do some quick math, but Teddy does it quicker, his eyes widening.
“Could one of them be your mom?”
I yank the laptop away from him, scowling at the screen. I’m a July baby. As gross as it is to have to think about how I became a July baby, this is the closest thing I’ve had to insight in all sixteen years of my life.
“Holy shit.”
And that’s how the complete and utter evisceration of twenty-year-old Cooper Price’s privacy begins. I scroll down until we hit what appears to be the first entry from October, then click it open and start reading it out loud.
“‘I don’t know why I’m even writing this, nobody’s ever going to read it,’ yada yada yada,” I mutter to myself, skipping through a few paragraphs of existential ennui to get to the juicy bit. “‘I know it’s super cheesy, but I’m going to give her the mixtape and tell her how I feel about her. I just feel like it’s the right time. She’s one of my closest friends, but it feels like we’ve been something more than that for a while,’” I read.
“For the record, if you ever fall in love with me, please don’t express it with a mixtape,” says Teddy through a mouthful of popcorn. “I’ve had enough of your Broadway nonsense inflicted on me.”
“Noted,” I say, even though my heart’s beating so fast that it feels like it’s thumping through the couch and down to the floorboards. I click back out, and there’s a post a few days later of a “jams for beth” mixtape, with a link to some file-sharing website that is more than defunct by now. It’s riddled with love songs—“Yellow” from Coldplay, “I Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing” from Aerosmith (but specifically, from the Armageddon soundtrack), and, of course, “Many Meetings” from the score of The Lord of the Rings—and at the bottom is a note: “Sooo she liked it.”
My jaw drops. “Oh my god.” The somewhat life-scarring implication of that “Sooo” aside, I might be, for the first time in my entire life, reading words about the woman whose DNA is half of me. “Oh my god. This is my mom.”
“Not so fast,” says Teddy, clicking back out and scrolling up. “October twenty-fifth looks like a sad one.”
Sure enough, there’s just an empty post that says in tiny lettering under it, “current mood: melancholy.” Teddy keeps scrolling past a few mopey band lyrics to another post on October 28 that’s titled “!!”
We both speed-read through it, the two of us so in sync that we end up reacting to everything in the same beats:
Fedotowsky and I got so drunk last night. I don’t even know how it happened, but it happened. I was upset about Beth and she was upset about Roger and at some point we just … ugh. I mean, she doesn’t want to “make a thing” out of it. But it felt like a thing to me. At least enough of one that we should talk about it.
My eyes linger on the screen when I’m finished reading, until I feel Teddy’s square on me.
“‘Make a thing,’” I repeat. “So … I could have been the ‘thing.’”
“Yeah. I guess,” says Teddy.
He’s a little less gung ho now, a new somberness in the room. Like we found a shiny new race car and hit the accelerator before figuring out what road we were going down. I feel kind of queasy as I click out to the main page of the LiveJournal again. There’s only one more journal entry left in that time span, dated November 1, titled “what the hell is wrong with me.”
I’m in too deep now to not click. Still, I wait for an extra second, taking a breath before it loads onto the screen.
So hungover. So confused. Farrah came back from some audition and dragged us out to a Halloween party and I woke up next to her on the floor. Not the bed. The FLOOR. I need to get my shit together. At some point I’m going to run into Beth and her “ex” boyfriend, and I don’t want to look like a total idiot when I do. Logging off now. Going to study. No more distractions. No more feeling sorry for myself. And definitely no more Smirnoff Ice.
There are a few beats of silence after that, and then Teddy extricates himself from me, typing something into his phone. I stare at the screen like I’ve just fallen into it and I don’t know how to pull myself back out. I don’t even know if I wanted to know this. I certainly wasn’t supposed to know it. But it’s like the option of not knowing was gone before I even realized I had an option at all.
“Hey,” says Teddy. “For what it’s worth … I think I found them.”
I blink the screen out of my eyes, turning to him. “What?”
He’s got the Facebook app open on his phone. “They’re all still mutual friends with your dad. People with those names in his year at NYU, at least.”
The blood is roaring in my ears. “How did you…”