“Okay. I’ll keep it.”
“Great! There’s just one thing.”
There was always just one thing with her. “What?”
“I have a few minor suggestions for improvement.”
7
Whit’s “suggestions for improvement” weren’t exactly minor. They were huge changes to the basic functionality of JerkAlert.
Like adding a login system, to prevent people from spamming the site with fake profiles. And a search feature, so users could easily find the men they were looking to review.
Plus, I had to figure out a way to make sure the right guys were receiving the right reviews. For example, there was surely more than one Brandon from Brooklyn, but only one of them had stood me up. I couldn’t go slandering an entire borough’s worth of Brandons just because one of them happened to be a jerk.
At first, the thought of revamping JerkAlert was overwhelming. These changes would take hours. Days, even. Was it really going to be worth all the time and effort I’d have to put in to make it better?
Then I remembered: this was my opportunity. My opportunity to demonstrate my prowess. To take something kind of cool and make it even cooler. If I nailed this, the help desk might soon be a distant, unpleasant memory. So even though I couldn’t be sure all this work was going to pay off in the end, the only way to find out was to try.
That’s why, instead of watching Jane the Virgin for six hours that night, I coded. I coded until my eyes were bloodshot, until my knuckles cramped, until my thoughts became garbled and mushy. At three thirty in the morning, I didn’t so much fall asleep as lose consciousness.
The next two days went something like this: wake up in a panic, having slept through my alarm; get ready in under fifteen minutes before heading to work, groggy and disheveled; spend the next eight hours enduring an endless stream of so-called “techies” who can’t figure out how to fix their own computers; finally, race home to work on JerkAlert until I pass out.
It was an exhausting routine, but the satisfaction I felt from those late-night code-athons made the struggle worth it. I’d never worked on a project like this before, something original and challenging, something that had sprung from my own imagination and that people responded to. Creating JerkAlert made me feel inspired for the first time in... Well, it was the first time I could remember feeling inspired.
Though I did have an additional source of inspiration: while all this web development was going down, things with Alex were heating up. Every so often, he’d drop by my cubicle, just to say hi. We synchronized our runs to the coffee machine, and then lingered a little too long stirring milk and sweetener into our mugs. We shared secret smiles as we passed in the hallway. Working the help desk was somewhat tolerable now, knowing he was simply a DM away.
To think I’d almost written him off because of a simple misunderstanding. I made sure to delete that JerkAlert entry I’d entered on Sunday night, where I accused him of flirting with me behind his nonexistent girlfriend’s back. All record of my idiocy had been scrubbed from the internet forever.
On Wednesday evening, shortly before midnight, I typed out my final closing curly brace and deployed the whole updated JerkAlert site to my server. It looked fantastic. By cross-referencing the JerkAlert database with profiles I pulled from the Fluttr app, I could display photos, improve searches, and reduce the chance of mistaken identities.
God, I was a genius.
I spent a few minutes poking around the site, clicking links and searching for random phrases, just to make sure everything was working as expected. Then I texted Whit and told her to give it a whirl.
Her response: Will get to it 2morrow. Out in the Village rite now and SUPER LIT. Wanna join?
No thanks, I wrote back, have fun, then continued surfing JerkAlert, taking obscene pride in the fruits of my labor. The speed with which the pages loaded, the slickness of the UI. It looked totally professional. Not at all like it’d been hastily coded in a few harried, Dorito-fueled nights.
The database had tripled in size since Monday night. There were now over three hundred unique men who’d been logged to the site, some of whom had more than one review. Like Nate, 35, from Tribeca, who sent four women the same dick pic. And Hakim, 23, from Sunnyside, who started at least a dozen different text conversations with the charming opening line, RU horny?
When I came upon Eddie, 38, from Staten Island, I stopped clicking. His review read:
Total effing scumbag. Dated him for six weeks last summer before his wife called me on the phone telling me to stay away from her husband. Swipe left on this one, ladies. HE’S MARRIED.
This couldn’t have been the same married guy that Whitney had been talking about, could it? She’d told me a whole different story involving a wedding ring popping out of his pants pocket. Out of curiosity, I typed the word married in the search box at the top of the screen.
Twelve records came up, each one representing a different married guy who’d been trawling Fluttr for a side piece. From their pictures, they looked like decent guys. Guys I might’ve even swiped right on if I’d seen them in the app. You’d never suspect them of being shameless cheats.
Then again, my dad looked like a decent guy, too.
I didn’t know every detail of how my parents’ marriage came undone. I’m not sure how long Dad had been unfaithful or exactly when Mom found out about it. All I remember is the defiant glimmer in her eyes when she told me the news.
“Dad’s moving out tomorrow.” Her voice was flat, matter-of-fact.
“What?” I looked up from my SAT vocabulary list to see her looming in the kitchen doorway. I’ll never forget the word I was trying to memorize at that moment: aberration. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m sorry to spring this on you, sweetie.” She approached the table and sat down next to me. “But there’s no way to sugarcoat it. Your dad’s been cheating on me and I told him to leave.”
“What?”
Her words weren’t making sense. My dad was an accountant. He wore sweater-vests and collected vintage Star Wars figurines. He drove five miles under the speed limit at all times. Surely, I thought, a man this seemingly wholesome and cautious would never cheat on his wife.
But I was wrong. He left the next day, just like Mom had said he would. As he rolled the last of his suitcases out the front door, he shot me this woebegone look and said, “I’m sorry, pumpkin.” As if saying he was sorry made up for the nightmare my fifteen-year-old life had suddenly become.
After dinner, Mom drained a bottle of white zin and I retreated to my room with my SAT study guide tucked under my arm. Not like I could concentrate. I stared at the pages, unseeing, the sentences blurring together through my tears. A few hours later, Mom stumbled in without knocking.