Chapter Seventeen
Adam takes one look at me when I walk into work that evening and sends me home again.
I’m miserable. I’ve never given up on anything before.
Mainly because I haven’t tried anything before.
And that realization just sends me spiraling even more.
I go straight to bed with a bottle of wine and one of Granny’s books and fall into an exhausted sleep somewhere between glass three and chapter nine.
The next thing I know, the sun is shining, and my phone is vibrating somewhere nearby.
I’m a little hungover, and it takes me a few seconds to figure out where it is, slapping blindly around the blankets before I find it.
“Hello?” My voice is groggy, and I check the time to see it’s a little after eight.
“I had nothing to do with it.”
“Gemma?” It is Gemma. But this Gemma doesn’t sound like Gemma. She sounds nervous and hesitant and thoroughly not Gemma. “Nothing to do with what?”
“The video.”
“What video?”
There’s silence on the end of the line and, as the last vestiges of sleep finally leave my brain, I sit up, propping myself against the headboard. “What video?” I repeat.
“You haven’t seen it?”
“Seen what? What are you talking about?”
Our doorbell chimes through the house before she can reply. That’s a first. We’re knocking people around here. Peer-through-the-window-and-wave people. I didn’t even know the bell still worked.
“Someone’s at the door,” I say, kicking the covers off my legs.
“Katie, wait—”
“I’ll call you back. They’re going to wake Granny.”
I hang up, yawning widely as I shove my feet into my slippers and head down the stairs. The bell goes again just as I reach the hallway and I don’t bother to hide my frown as I nudge an equally confused Plankton out of the way and answer it.
A young woman stands on the other side, smiling radiantly. She’s wearing a blue trench coat and her dreadlocks are dyed silver and piled high on her head. Her lipstick is bright pink and so perfectly applied that I can only stare at it in envy.
“Katie Collins?”
“Yeah?”
“My name is Michelle Kayode from The Irish Weekly News . I was hoping I could—”
“As in the paper?” I interrupt, and her smile widens.
“That’s right. I was wondering if you’d be available for a quick chat?”
“Katie?” I glance over my shoulder as Granny yells from her bedroom. “Who’s that?”
“I’d really love to talk to you about the video,” Michelle says. “If you’ve got time?”
The…
Okay. Hold on.
“Can you give me one second?” I ask.
“Of course.”
“I just have to check something.”
“I’ll wait right out here,” she says. “There’s no rush.”
“Cool…I— okay. One second. Don’t leave. Stay right there.” I close the door to keep Plankton in, and retreat to the kitchen to call Gemma back. She answers on the first ring.
“What video?”
The words come out in a rush. “Noah filmed you and Callum arguing yesterday. And then he put it online.”
“He did what ?” I hiss, as Granny shuffles into the room, a cigarette half-hidden in her hand.
“Who was at the door?”
“Nobody. Go back to bed.”
She gives me a look that lets me know I’m going to be paying for that comment for the rest of my life and disappears down the hallway.
“What do you mean, online?” I ask, as I hurry after her, making sure she does indeed go to her bedroom before taking the stairs two at a time to mine. “How online?”
“He put it up on one of his social media accounts yesterday. It was picked up by someone else overnight and it ballooned from there.”
“But how big is the balloon?”
“I’m sending you the link,” Gemma says. “I can’t apologize enough, Katie. And Noah feels awful too. I don’t think he realized what he was doing, but he definitely will when I ground him until he’s eighteen. He wants to say sorry if you can stand to face him.”
“Okay,” I say, distracted as I peek out the window. The reporter is still there, standing by a small red car. “Just let me deal with this first. You’ve sent the link to me?”
She confirms she has, and I hang up, opening my phone to see a whole host of notifications that I missed when she first rang. At the top of them is a text with a link to a video app.
The clip takes a few seconds to load, the spinning circle taunting and teasing, and then suddenly I appear, soaked to the skin and gesturing wildly at someone I know to be Callum even though he remains just out of shot.
I climb back into the bed, horrified and yet unable to drag my eyes away.
I look like…I don’t even know what I look like, but it’s not good. It is very not good.
It’s a gross invasion of privacy that someone would not only film this but put it online.
And the fact that it was Noah…I suddenly understand Gemma’s terse tone on the phone, and though I’m obviously furious with him, I know she’ll take it seriously and I don’t envy whatever punishment that kid is about to receive.
The video stops halfway through my feverish plea and loops back, starting over, and I know I should just put the phone down. I know I shouldn’t do what I’m about to do next. It’s the number one rule of the internet and yet I can’t help myself. I can’t stop.
I read the comments.
There are hundreds of them, maybe even thousands.
Crude jokes about my body, laughing emojis, get a room s.
My heart beats rapidly until I feel like I’m going to throw up, but my thumb keeps scrolling, my eyes keep reading, and, after a while, the laughing emojis start to blur into one and I read the actual words between all the spam.
The ones that…aren’t so bad.
this sounds cute I wanna go
Glenmill destroyed our neighborhood. I, for one, applaud this young woman for standing up to them.
And on and on and on. People tagging their friends and their friends responding. People sharing the link to our website.
I dare you to come with me @LisaHigg92!!! We were just talking about something like this!!
I drop the phone onto the bed and reach for my laptop.
It takes a minute to turn on and another minute to connect to the Wi-Fi, but when it does, I log on to my email and see…
well, emails. My festival inbox doesn’t really get emails.
But now I have three pages of them. All of them booking requests.
Requests because the booking system on our website has crashed.
I jump as my phone rings again, the Laketon Hotel’s number flashing up, but I ignore it as a car door slams outside.
The reporter.
I scramble off the bed, throwing on the first clothes I find before running back down the stairs, where Michelle is waiting as promised. I careen to a halt at the front door and give her my most professional smile.
“Would you like to come in?”
* * *
An hour later, after I’ve told our story, the reporter goes off in her car, and I cycle into the village. I had to turn my phone off since I was getting so many calls and when I arrive at Gemma’s house, it’s to find her standing in the doorway, waiting for me.
“I’m so sorry,” she says. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so mad at him in my life, but I take full responsibility for—”
“It’s okay,” I interrupt, propping my bike against the wall. “Really.”
“It’s not okay. I can’t even begin to imagine what—”
I slip past her into the house, pulling off my jacket as I glance around. “Noah?”
“Noah!” Gemma’s shout is a lot more forceful than mine was and, a second later, I hear the floorboard creak above me.
“I’ve already told him he’ll be running errands for you and Maeve every weekend for the rest of his life,” Gemma tells me, as he appears on the upstairs landing.
Noah creeps down the stairs, stopping halfway as if I’m going to attack him. “I’m sorry, Katie.”
And he sounds it. It might be because of the raft of punishments he’s about to receive, but by the miserable tone of his voice, I can tell he knows he did the wrong thing.
“I’ll never do it again,” he continues.
“Because you’re never allowed on the internet again,” Gemma mutters.
“Apology accepted,” I tell him. “But what you did was bad, Noah. You shouldn’t film people without their permission, even if you think they won’t mind. Things like that can’t be undone.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“I forgive you. But please think about it before you do something like that again, okay?”
He nods, looking serious, and Gemma steps in to free him, jerking her head in the direction of the stairs. “Homework only,” she reminds him, as he disappears up them again.
“I took away his PlayStation,” she says to me. “At least until his birthday. And we’ve had a stern talk about consent and social media.” She sighs, her frown lines so deep they look permanently etched into her forehead. “I can’t believe he did that.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“I’m his mother, which means it is. He’s never done anything like that before. At least not that I know of anyway.”
“It was a shitty thing to do, Gem, but he’ll learn from it. I know he will. And this might be just what we need. Have you checked our emails this morning?”
“I’ve been a little busy yelling at my child.”
I pull my laptop out of the bag as we enter the kitchen. “Our ticket sales shot up overnight. We have a waiting list .”
“What do you mean?” She’s distracted, busy putting the kettle on and checking the time on the washing machine and putting the milk back into the fridge. I wait until she’s dropped the teabags in the mugs before trying to explain.
“I think, as wrong as what he did was, Noah might have just inadvertently given us the best promotion we could have hoped for. We’re sold out.”
Still, she looks confused, as though the obvious is inconceivable to her. “Of what?”
I spin my laptop around as she sits at the table. Our inbox fills the screen, crammed with another hundred messages in the twenty minutes since I last looked at it. Gemma frowns in concentration, her eyes growing wider and wider as she realizes what she’s looking at.
“What the hell?”
“We’re sold out ,” I say. “Every ticket. These are all people asking if there’s any space left.
Two hotels called me this morning. All the rooms they set aside are full and I’ve got businesses contacting me from every nearby town asking if we need sponsors.
People are coming. We just have to run the freaking thing now. ”
“Oh my God.”
“I know.”
“Oh my God .” She stares at it. “We should put the prices up,” she says suddenly. “And we’re going to need more food. And more buses.”
“We’re not putting the prices up.”
“But—”
“It’s the publicity we need,” I remind her as my phone rings. “Not their money.” I glance at the screen, expecting to see another unknown number, but it’s Nush.
“Where are you?” she asks, three words that put me immediately on edge.
“Gemma’s house. Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, it’s just… I think you should come down to the barn.”
“The barn?” I ask, and Gemma looks up. “Why?”
“I don’t know really know,” she says, and sounds confused enough that I believe her. In the pause I hear raised voices in the background, and the familiar sound of construction vehicles working away. “Just come down here,” she says.
I don’t need any more convincing.