The Deepfakes from Hell
MARY KATE
Istep out of Grounds & Glory and the first thing that hits me isn’t the cold but the silence.
The sidewalk seems frozen as I make my way back onto campus.
I zip my vest up to my neck and jam my hands in the pockets, like that’s going to save me, and start walking fast down the main drag.
My boots clack on the frozen cement, and I focus on the rhythm—left, right, left, don’t think about the world burning down in your phone, just move.
But the world won’t let me off the hook that easy.
Before I’ve made it three steps, I clock the way some girls by the library stoop fall quiet as I approach, a little ripple of stillness that travels through the puffer jackets and ponytails and doesn’t even bother to pretend it’s about something else.
I keep my eyes ahead, try to look casual, but my mouth tastes like battery acid and the skin on my neck tingles, like it knows it’s being watched.
At the bike racks, there are two guys in sweats.
I recognize one from a club meeting long ago, but he looks straight through me like I’m glass.
The other one, a jock with a jaw so square it probably gets stuck in doorways, glances up and grins, then leans in to his friend and whispers something.
They both laugh, low and brutal. I tell myself it’s not about me, but I know it is.
My phone buzzes again in my pocket. I don’t look at it.
I keep walking, fast, wishing I’d remembered my gloves.
The cold is so sharp it’s almost soothing.
I breathe in through my nose, count to four, out through my mouth, count to eight.
My therapist called it box breathing, but the only box I can think about right now is the one they’re trying to shove me into.
Halfway to the parking lot, I have to pass the central quad.
The fountain there is dry for winter, but they’ll fill it with water soon.
In warmer months, it’s where everyone sits and eats lunch or sunbathes or sneaks a smoke between classes.
Now, it’s mostly empty—just a few kids hunched against the cold, or playing chicken with the campus security who cruise by every half hour.
I’m almost past it when it happens.
A guy in a battered North Face and a faded baseball cap leans against the wall, lighting a cigarette with a hand that shakes a little.
He looks up as I pass, then tips his chin and says, “Hey, slut.” Not loud, but just enough that I know I’m meant to hear it.
I freeze, just for a second. My face goes hot. I feel the burn all the way to my ears.
He grins, all teeth. “You hear me, right? Thought you liked it rough. Let me know if you have some free time because I’d like a taste of those big tits and wet pussy too.”
My body moves before my brain does—I keep walking, head down, fists jammed deeper in my pockets. I’m breathing hard, and I don’t notice the tears in my eyes until one slides down my cheek, blurring my vision.
Behind me, another voice: “Whore.” It’s a girl this time, but the hatred in it is just as thick. I don’t turn around. I just keep moving, fast as I can without actually running.
My boots slip on some grass at the edge of the walkway, and I nearly wipe out. I catch myself on a lamp post and look up, and that’s when I see her.
Stella Moreland.
In high school, Stella was the queen bee—captain of the volleyball team, queen of the Halloween dance, the kind of blonde you see in TV shows about mean girls but who, in real life, was always weirdly nice.
When I moved into my dorm freshman year, she lived on my floor, and we’d stay up late watching trash TV and eating boxed mac and cheese and pretending our lives were going to turn out the way we’d planned.
She’s jogging up to me now, her boots leaving neat little divots in the crusted snow, and for a second I’m so relieved to see a friendly face that my knees go weak.
But Stella doesn’t look like herself. She looks panicked, and this girl never looks panicked.
She’s usually put together to the nines, but today, her hair’s in a messy bun, with no makeup.
She’s wearing a giant puffer and a scarf wrapped three times around her neck, and her hands are stuffed so deep in her pockets you can’t see her fingers.
“MK!” she calls. Her voice wavers a little, and I know something’s wrong.
I shake my head, already starting to edge away. “I can’t,” I say. “Not now.”
She catches up to me anyway, matching my stride, and puts a hand on my shoulder. I try to shrug her off, but she’s stronger than she looks.
“Mary Kate, give me a sec,” she says. She breaks off, glancing around, then lowers her voice. “I know you’re hurting. Just listen to me.”
I can’t answer. My lower lip is shaking, and if I try to speak I’ll lose it.
Stella steers me off the walkway, behind the quad fountain, to a little alcove between the stone wall and a row of evergreen shrubs.
It’s the kind of spot where you’d go to sneak a cigarette or make out with your boyfriend after hours—private, but not hidden enough to be sketchy. She drops her voice again.
“Look, I don’t know how to say this. But you know about the videos right?”
I stare at the ground, the salt-crusted concrete, the little slush islands where the plows haven’t caught up yet. I wish I could fall into one and disappear.
“Do you have them?” I ask, so quiet it’s barely a sound.
Stella hesitates, then nods. “Yeah. Boys I know sent them to me this morning. Some even posted them to their stories before getting shut down. I’m so sorry, MK. I am so, so fucking sorry.”
She pulls out her phone. I don’t want to see it, but I can’t not see it.
She opens the first video. The screen is grainy, like it was filmed on a potato, but the face is unmistakable.
It’s me—my hair, my eyes, the little scar on my eyebrow from when I fell off the monkey bars in fourth grade.
I’m on my hands and knees, cowboy hat on my head along with a pair of sparkly cowboy boots, and nothing else.
My tits are out, my puss’s bare, and I’m sucking a dick while another guy rams into me from behind.
My mouth is open in a perfect “O,” eyes rolled back like a porn star’s, and I look so into it that for a second I almost believe it’s real.
But it’s not. I never did that. I never wore a fucking cowboy hat. I’ve never even owned boots like that, with spangles up and down the sides. Most importantly, I’ve never been double-teamed by two men, moaning up a storm as I’m spit-roasted by two cocks!
“Oh my god,” I say in a faint voice. “Holy shit.”
“I know,” says Stella in a grim voice. “But there’s more.”
The second clip is worse. I’m in a man’s lap, facing the camera, and the look on my face is pure bliss—cheeks flushed, lips parted, hair sticking to my sweaty skin.
Once again, I’m buck-naked, with my giant tits and pussy on display, my ivory curves gleaming in the low lights.
The man holds my hips while I lower my asshole onto his cock, whispering praise in my ear as my anus is stretched wide, my moans low and throaty.
I can almost hear it, the fake me begging for it, saying, “Mmm, Daddy, yes! My butt, my butt!”
What the fuck?!?! I’ve had anal sex with Kent, but I’d never say “my butt, my butt” like that. But the video loops, and every time, the look on my face seems to get more and more ecstatic, like my only purpose in life is to be used as a man’s sex doll.
Stella doesn’t say a word. She just watches me, her lips pressed together so hard they go white.
I can’t breathe. My hands are shaking so bad I can’t even reach for the phone. I swallow, then look up at her.
“That’s not me,” I say. “You know that, right?”
She nods, quick and desperate. “Of course. Anyone who actually knows you knows it’s fake. But—” She looks down, ashamed. “But a lot of people don’t care. They see the video, they believe it. Or they want to.”
A wind cuts through the alcove, sharp and bitter. It stings my eyes, but I’m not crying. Not yet.
“Who did this?” I whisper.
Stella shrugs. “No one knows for sure, but you know how people are. There are about a dozen guys claiming that it was them in the videos because the men’s faces are blurred, and you know guys don’t give a shit about their reputations.
All they care about is being known as the dude with the big cock, and the dudes in those videos are sporting monsters. ”
I close my eyes. I think hard. My mind is a mess as I try to fight down the panic in my chest, but I have to do better.
I try to piece things together in order to figure out what’s going on.
Suddenly, I know. It’s the spangly boots that clue me in because I saw them at the Sigma Epsilon Chi party long ago.
The one where the boys hired two working girls, and were having group sex in the attic while filming the whole thing.
Sure, the girls got paid. Sure, the girls didn’t care that they were being recorded.
But why the fuck did someone put my face onto the women’s bodies?
Then, I see Clay Newell’s face, the way he looked at me at the party, the way he tried to force me into his bedroom, the way he acted like the world belonged to him and everyone else was just a prop.
I see Kent’s face, too—the flash of anger, the fist, the way he dragged me out of the party like I was breakable, precious, his, while Clay whined and cried like a baby calling for his mom.
It has to be Clay Newell who created the deepfakes.
He must be jealous and hurt and enraged by what happened at the party, and he’s doing this as some sick act of revenge.
I open my eyes. I look at Stella, really look at her, and see the fear and the pity in her eyes. I hate it. I want to scream at her, or maybe hug her until my ribs crack, or maybe both.
“Can you send me the videos?” I ask, my voice steady now. “I need to… I don’t know. I just need them.”
Stella nods, and does it. My phone buzzes in my hand a few seconds later, and the files show up in my texts. I open one, just to be sure, and watch my lips part as I’m fucked from two angles at once, my mouth stretched wide, my curves moving with impossible hunger.
I feel nothing. Not anger, not sadness, not even embarrassment. Just a cold clarity, like the moment before you pass out or throw up.
“I’ll be okay,” I say, and I almost believe it.
Stella hugs me then, so tight I can’t move, and for a second I let her. I let myself be held, let myself be small. But then I pull away.
“I have to go,” I say.
She doesn’t argue. She just stands there, arms wrapped around herself, watching as I walk away.
I stalk back toward the parking lot, past the boys at the bike rack, past the silent girls at the library, past the quad where the wind rattles the bare branches and the sun is already half gone. My phone is heavy in my pocket, and every step echoes with the words I heard and the ones I didn’t.
Slut.
Whore.
Fake.
I keep walking, boots scraping on the ice, and promise myself that next time, I won’t be the one on my knees.
Not ever again.