“How are you doing?” she asked.
There were so many ways to answer that question. Terrified, confused, furious, sad. But I settled on, “Fine.”
Her eyes slid to the floor. She knew I wasn’t fine. “I’m sorry for this, sweetie.”
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “I just can’t believe it. I mean, it’s Dad.”
She let out a shaky breath. “I didn’t wanna believe it, either. But looking back on it, all the signs were there. As soon as he started working those late nights at the office, I should’ve known something was up.”
I’d noticed he’d been working late a lot, but I didn’t think anything of it. I just figured he had a lot of tax returns to file. Now I realized I was a fool for assuming my dad was an honest guy.
Mom looked so sad sitting at the edge of my bed, half-drunk, her liquid liner smudged beneath her watery eyes. I knew I never wanted to end up like that, but it seemed impossible to prevent. Sometimes the greatest man in the world could turn out to be a dirty, dirty cheat.
In a way, maybe the seed for JerkAlert had been planted that night. Maybe, subconsciously, this site was a premeditated scheme to humiliate men who behaved shamefully. But that’s not what I was thinking as I scrolled through the profiles of those twelve philandering assholes. What I was thinking was how happy I was Alex wasn’t one of them.
I knew this gushy, smitten feeling wouldn’t last forever. I knew he’d eventually disappoint me, in some way or another. But right now, he made me feel fantastic. And I wanted to ride that wave for as long as it would hold me up.
My gaze dropped to the clock in the corner of my computer screen. 1:04 a.m. An early night for me! I shut down my laptop and headed to the bathroom to brush my teeth. When I returned, the blue light on my phone was flashing. Alex had texted.
I don’t know if you’re up, but I just finished working, and in case you are, I wanted to say good night.
Fireworks went off in my chest. Not those simple one-burst wonders, either. These were flaring fountains, the kind that whistle and pop as they spurt every color of the rainbow in a constant stream of exploding light and energy.
Maybe, I thought, hopefully, naively. Maybe I’ve found myself one of the good ones.
I returned his kissy-face with some heart-eyes and crawled beneath the covers, cheeks straining from my hundred-watt smile. When the phone buzzed again, I grabbed it with glee, hoping Alex had returned my heart-eyes with an actual heart. But it was from Whit. She’d sent a link to a YouTube video with the message:
This is you, rite? I can barely make out the picture, it’s so fucking dark, but I would recognize your voice anywhere.
She must’ve been wasted, because this text was totally nonsensical. Confused, I tapped the play button. Shadows moved around the screen, silhouettes of people in a dimly lit crowd. There were no distinguishable faces, just hints of movement. The light from someone’s phone screen, the flash of an earring as a head shook.
Wait, that earring looked familiar.
A tinny voice rang through my speaker, garbled at first, then clear as day: “The man behind me is rubbing his dick against my backside.”
Oh, shit.
With shaky thumbs, I texted back: Where did you find this?
Twitter, she replied. You’ve gone viral!
Against my better judgment, I opened the Twitter app. Right there, under “Trends for You,” was the hashtag #DickInTheDark.
I was internet famous, all because of an unwanted willy.
8
I’d never been so grateful for a lack of proper lighting.
I mean, I wasn’t feeling particularly grateful at the time, when we were trapped in a tunnel with no fresh air and no personal space. And frankly, the power outage was to blame for the very existence of the video; if we hadn’t been stuck there in the dark for so long, that perv wouldn’t have had the opportunity to grind against me, and I wouldn’t have screamed the word dick in the middle of a crowded subway car.
But at least the darkness concealed my face. So even though my voice may have been internet famous, my identity was still largely a mystery. Only people who knew me really well could listen to a five-second snippet of shouting on a low-res cell phone video and know it came from me. To everyone else, that person with the flashy earring and loud mouth was merely an angry, anonymous shadow.
An angry, anonymous shadow that had been turned into a meme.
It seemed bored basement boys everywhere were having a blast creating their own versions of #DickInTheDark. Taking stills from the video, they Photoshopped cartoon penises, cylindrical vegetables, and a whole host of other phallic objects into the space behind my silhouette. One budding videographer had added a soundtrack to the original clip, auto-tuning my voice and dubbing it the “#DickInTheDark Remix.” It had been posted to YouTube less than twelve hours ago, and had over fifty thousand views.
Needless to say, I was humiliated. On the plus side, it was a relatively private humiliation. My name wasn’t popping up in any online comments, I didn’t get any double takes on the street, and, as far as I could tell, nobody besides Whit, Lia, and Dani knew it was me.
At first, I was afraid the Hatchlings might know, too. When I arrived to work on Thursday morning, I half expected to find my cubicle wallpapered with meme printouts, or the “#DickInTheDark Remix” blaring over the loudspeaker.
Obviously, though, that was a ridiculous notion. My colleagues never listened to a word I said, so of course they didn’t recognize my voice in the video. When I skittered into the office that morning, no one looked up from his computer screen. I was my usual invisible self.
At eleven o’clock, everyone gathered in the large conference room for our monthly all-hands meeting, where the management team spent an hour boring us to tears. We heard from Charles in Accounting, who assured us we were solvent. Then our chief innovation officer, Arnaud, blathered on about “radical breakthroughs in bleeding-edge technology” for thirty minutes. Finally, our HR manager, Benny, took the mic to remind us of all the things we had to do to remain in compliance with New York’s labor laws.
“Just a reminder, people—you need to have your annual workplace harassment training modules completed by the end of the month.”
Sighs of annoyance filled the room.
“Yeah, I know, I know.” Benny put his hands up. “Don’t shoot the messenger. Our attorneys make us do it to mitigate potential liability. It takes ten minutes. Just get it done so I don’t have to come after you.”
“Wouldn’t that be considered harassment?” one of the Hatchlings yelled out, setting off a ripple of laughter through the audience.
Benny chuckled. “You’ll have to take the training to find out. Okay, that’s all from my end. I’m gonna hand it off to Vijay to close out the meeting.”