Chapter 7
IT WAS THE night of the dreaded dance, which Anna had mostly forgotten about.
Mostly. Louisa had been keeping tabs, because seven-year-olds forget nothing, locking away every imperceptible slight and wrongdoing in some lockbox of the brain for later use.
Honestly, Anna couldn’t fault her daughter.
She had been exactly the same, had built the same arsenal up against her own mother, using decades-old pain whenever she needed something to be angry about.
Today Louisa was sulking around the house in an old pair of torn jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt from summer camp that said Camp Chris across the front, swearing she would never again find happiness.
“Everyone,” she said to Anna. “Everyone at school. Everyone! Everyone is going to the dance!”
“Kiddo, I wish I had better news to report, but there just were not enough tickets to go around this year,” Anna said.
She had watched her bird-boned daughter arc through all of the human emotions of defeat: anger, resistance, denial, an attempt at manipulation.
Perhaps they could just show up anyway, she had suggested.
No, no, Anna said. That certainly was not a good idea.
“But why aren’t there enough for all the kids?
” Louisa sobbed. “It isn’t fair!” Stomp, stomp, stomp.
She had made a bit of a game out of this, up the stairs, down, a circle around the kitchen island, the same refrain about the unfairness of it (Anna didn’t disagree, but she had to lie about it in order to dodge a larger argument).
More stomping. A few tears. A little bit of flailing on the floor of the kitchen, which, Anna noticed, was dirtier than she had thought, as evidenced by her daughter’s now gray-looking T-shirt.
It was a bitterly cold February night. Anna could think of nothing cozier, anyway, than staying in by the fire, like when her children were tiny and only wanted to be close to her, but they seemed to reject her at every turn now, and this was just another rejection.
“There will be other dances,” Anna said, a consolation prize at best. “I’ll tell you what. You go get changed and we can all figure out something to do tonight that will be even better than having mediocre spaghetti with a bunch of kids from your school.”
Louisa’s eyes turned big and wet at the mention of the word spaghetti.
“But, Mom!” she wailed. “This isn’t just pasta! It’s a whole . . . thing!”
Anna knew she had misstepped, and it made her feel terrible to see Louisa like this, broken.
Her daughter was dramatic, that was true, but it felt devastating to a seven-year-old to be the odd one out, the excluded party.
Louisa had crumpled onto the floor again, a little pile of person, shattered by this stupid, silly little dance, and although Anna had always repeated the same refrain to her kids about life not being fair—about fairness being no measure of anything—she had to concede the point, just this once.
It really did suck, all of this, pitting kids against each other for no reason at all.
And there would be other excluded kids in other houses, too, ones with less privilege than her little Louisa, and Anna could feel the real injustice of that, a quiet ember burning inside of her, a hot fire, inextinguishable.
Earlier in the day, Anna had picked the kids up from school and she had run into Mimi.
It should have been ordinary: two mothers collecting their children after a day of school.
But the air between them was frigid. Anna watched the girls exit the doors of the school in unison, Harper her usual, bouncy self and Louisa slightly dejected, and she thought she saw—now, maybe she was imagining it—something coursing between them.
Harper’s face held, Anna was sure, a slight sneer, and when Anna looked over to Mimi to see if it had registered, she caught a smile on the mother’s face.
Sanctioned. Approved. A rumble of war had ignited, Anna was certain about that.
Later, at Riverview, in Ipswich, they ordered the kind of bar pizzas that come one pie to a person and leaned back in the red vinyl booths and tried to make small talk to pretend that the night hadn’t been a bust. Ben with his pepperoni, and Denny, always with his sausage and black olive and a glass of Miller Light, and Louisa, so particular, cheese pizza, extra-crispy, and Anna, always changing her mind about what kind of pie she wanted, but this night, only mushroom, please.
It took her a minute to notice that her phone was doing something unusual.
Buzzing, sure, but then buzzing a lot. An orb of light illuminating the whole table, like a weird oracle.
“You wanna get that?” Denny asked, and so she looked down and realized that in the time it had taken to order a few pies and a round of drinks she had gotten, what, sixty-seven notifications?
That didn’t seem right. She checked again.
The phone was still going, though. Sixty-seven.
They weren’t all from one place, either.
Email inbox: forty-two. Facebook Messenger: seventeen, none of them familiar.
Instagram notifications: eight. She took a quick glance.
Strangers, all of them. Scanned the titles.
Swear words. Slurs. Her first name in subject lines.
Her last name. Words she shouldn’t be seeing.
Cocksucker. Slut. Dumb cunt. Anna Plummer.
A dizzying compilation of words that all came together at the same time from different places.
“Sorry, I’m not sure why I’m getting so many emails. It must be something work-related,” she said, but her face must have given her away. She could feel a creep of red-hot fire fall across her cheeks.
“It’s still vibrating,” Denny said. “Anna. Your phone?” For a second—and only a second—he looked concerned, but he abandoned it and went back to looking into the distance, thinking about something else, someone else. Anna never knew where he lived when he wasn’t living here with them.
Anna’s phone was shaking the whole table, actually.
“I think I’m being pranked,” she said, feebly.
“What?” Denny said.
“It’s just . . . I’m getting some weird Facebook comments and things.”
Denny opened his phone and scrolled to her page. Not all of the messages were visible, but he was able to see some of the comments posted to her page. “What on earth?” he said.
“I don’t know. Maybe I got hacked?” she said.
“Looks like local kids,” he said. “They’re Internet-savvy. They do all kinds of insane things these days.”
“I, um, I think I’m just going to shut it off.
” Her right hand was shaking, and she took a deep breath and went to steady it.
She stopped and looked directly in front of her, at the red vinyl of their booth, at the faces of her two children, who were paying attention to their drinks, to the little squares of wax paper that Riverview had given them in lieu of plates, to the loud noises in the restaurant, but not, certainly, to their mother’s phone, or to her shaky hand.
Denny had stopped paying attention, too, and Anna was relieved by that.
She pressed the button on the side and the phone went dark and she sank into a Diet Coke and smiled and looked around the restaurant, scanning it for people she knew.
At the bar, behind their booth, she spotted Rachel Kincaid, who was not necessarily a friend, but not an enemy, either.
They had gone to high school together, and Rachel lived in Hamilton now, too, her kids older, out of elementary; they rarely saw one another these days.
She was waiting by the takeout window, wearing a crossbody Tory Burch bag and holding a glass of white wine, talking to someone in a cheap leather jacket.
Anna waved hello, and Rachel waved back: two girls from the same town, just getting pizza.
Maybe she was having an affair. Maybe she was just killing time until her dinner was ready.
Anyone, Anna realized, could be a different person here, in Riverview Pizza in Ipswich.
Who knew which version of the story ended up becoming the final draft?
Back home, once the kids were cleaned up and in bed and once Denny had settled onto the couch with a martini, Anna begged off on her own.
“I’m going to take a bath,” she said, kissing her husband lightly on the lips.
He didn’t look up from the show he was watching about whether or not the Loch Ness Monster was real (spoiler: in fifty-five minutes they gave no answers at all).
“Did all that stuff stop?” he asked.
“To be honest, I haven’t really looked,” she lied.
For whatever reason, he believed her. Denny rarely checked his social media on weekends, and by the time he looked again, her accounts would be gone.
Hackers, she’d say. Case closed. Honestly, he was probably right.
It was probably just a bunch of kids messing around.
But better to run it by Di first anyway.
Upstairs, Anna went into her ugly bathroom, with its tiny and dark bathtub, and drew a bath for herself, the water so hot she could barely stick a toe into it.
Sitting stark naked on the edge of the porcelain, she paused and then pressed the button on her phone.
The Apple icon appeared. Boot up. Then the phone sprang to life, the green icon denoting texts, and suddenly a windfall of new messages.
Two. Six. Sixteen. Fifty. Over a hundred and thirty-five.
They spiraled in. Emails. Facebook messages.
Instagram notifications. Her phone was suffering a full-scale assault.