Drunk Physics #3
“I don’t actually care. Just make it stop.
It’s upsetting—” I glance at Trinity, who’s listening in.
“Upsetting us. Now, what I originally messaged about is something else that’s upsetting us.
Those comments. I’m presuming the fact that they don’t actually say ‘murder’ gets them past comment moderation.
Your moderator needs to be more careful. ”
“That’s why I was calling, Hannah. To discuss the comments. They’re bypassing moderation.”
“Exactly. Whoever is moderating is letting them—”
“No, I mean they’re bypassing moderation. And the only account that can do that is the one you two share.”
“Sure, our account isn’t moderated but… Wait. Are you suggesting—?”
Trinity hits the Speaker button. “Oscar? Trinity here. Are you saying someone posted those comments from our computer?”
“Yes,” he says.
“The call is coming from inside the house,” I intone.
She glares at me.
“That means someone’s hacked our account,” I say.
Oscar doesn’t reply.
“Track the IP address,” I say. “Find out where exactly those comments came from.”
More silence.
“You already have, haven’t you?” I say carefully.
“Yes.”
And I don’t need to ask what he found.
The call really did come from inside the house.
After I end the call with Oscar, I text Rory. Thirty minutes later, he’s at our place, dissecting the videos and the comments for signs of tampering. Rory might be a physics postgrad, but his area of expertise is quantum computing…and he did his share of hacking in his misspent youth.
If Trinity doesn’t match anyone’s idea of a physics doctoral student, Rory is a walking stereotype, effortlessly managing to convey both computer geek and science nerd wound in a double helix.
He’s not much taller than me, slight and reedy.
His saving grace is his hair, which is an adorable boy-band mop of dark curls.
Today he’s wearing a “Super Jew” T-shirt and blue jeans that I’m pretty sure he irons—he might even starch them.
That sounds less than complimentary, but to me, guys like Rory really are superheroes in disguise—sweet, funny, smart as hell, packaged in a way that lets them pass under the radar of girls like Trinity.
I do not fail to notice how fast Rory replied to my SOS, even on a Sunday morning, and I won’t pretend I’m not pleased by that.
After an hour of work, Rory leans back in the swivel chair and adjusts his glasses. “I don’t know what to tell you, Hannah.”
“The truth?”
“That I can’t find any sign of outside tampering.
I don’t know how those orbs are getting on the video, but it seems to be the same one you’ve uploaded.
No one is taking it down, tweaking it and putting it up again.
As for the comments, everything indicates that they really did come from this computer. ”
I swear under my breath. Then I say, “It’s not me.”
“You’d hardly call me in to investigate if it was. The real culprit must be…” His eyes cut toward the back of the house.
“I don’t think it’s Trin, either. She’s really freaked out by all this.”
“Hmm.” He eyes the closed door again and lowers his voice.
“Trin likes attention, and since you guys switched to Webizode, you’re the one getting it.
You’re the cool, quirky science geek. Trin is the window dressing.
The straight man to your comedian.” He lowers his voice even more.
“Does she know you’ve been fielding offers for solo projects? ”
“I delete those as soon as they come in. Trin and I were having trouble even before this. She thinks I’m mocking her with my geek-culture references and…” I sigh. “Managing her moods is harder than I expected.”
“Mm-hmm.”
I turn back to the computer. “She’s going to think I’m doing this. How do I convince her I’m not?”
“By ending the show.”
When I stiffen, he says, “It started as a lark. But between Trinity’s bullshit and the weekly hangovers, you’re not having fun anymore. You already have job offers—real job offers in your field just waiting for you to graduate. You don’t need this show, Hannah.”
“Trinity does. It means a lot to her. Both the exposure and the money.”
“Which is not a good reason for you to continue, when she’s the reason you’re miserable.”
“We’re fine,” I say, taking the keyboard and busying myself checking comments.
“You said Trinity is really freaked out by those comments,” he says. “Does that seem like an overreaction?” He leans in, his dark eyes twinkling with amusement. “Maybe our Trin is a secret killer, tormented by her guilty conscience.”
I groan.
“You did say she believes in ghosts,” he says. “Maybe she’s convinced her past has literally come back to haunt her.”
He starts making ghost noises, and I laugh, telling him to cut it out. That’s when Trinity walks in. She looks from me to Rory.
“Did I just hear you two talking about ghosts?” she says.
“Uh, no, we—” I begin.
“You were making fun of me, weren’t you, Hannah.”
Rory rolls his chair between us. “No, I was joking about ghosts, and Hannah was telling me to stop.” He gets to his feet. “I have a lab this morning, and I need to run. First, though…” He reaches into his backpack and hands me a wrapped mug. “Almost forgot this.”
I unroll the paper to find a Doctor Who mug with the “timey-wimey stuff” quote I’d paraphrased on the show. As I laugh, I catch Trinity’s expression.
I quickly rewrap the mug. “I’ll put this in my room.”
She snatches the mug and sticks it on the desk, facing the camera, with, “There,” and a defiant look my way. Rory counters with a narrowed-eyes glare, but Trinity doesn’t notice, just plunks herself into the chair with, “So, did you find any evidence of tampering?”
So these comments came from our account. From our computer. And they’re being posted after Trinity goes upstairs to bed and I am alone, sleeping it off on the couch.
I’m the logical culprit. Trinity isn’t buying my protests and excuses. She’s convinced I’m responsible, and I need to fix that.
I keep thinking of what Rory said about Trinity seeming suspiciously freaked out. His comment about her having murdered someone was a joke. And yet…
The more paranoid Trinity becomes, the more I wonder whether there is something in her past to warrant it.
Not that she’s actually killed anyone. But whenever I slip and say we’re being accused of murder, she’s always quick to clarify that the comments never say that.
Only that one of us is responsible for a death.
I’d joked about I Know What You Did Last Summer, in which a group of teens accidentally hit and kill a pedestrian. What if there’s something like that in Trinity’s past?
It doesn’t even need to be that dramatic. I’d been at summer camp with a girl who drowned, and I still feel guilty for not noticing her go under the water…even if a dozen other kids and three counselors didn’t notice, either. Survivor guilt, my mom calls it.
Someone could know that Trinity feels guilty over an accidental death and be trolling her. Tormenting her. If there’s something in Trinity’s past—connected to those comments or not—it’d help me understand her paranoia.
I conduct my search in the library. If the public computers weren’t crammed with undergrads, I’d have used those to better hide my search history.
Is that paranoid? Maybe, but I need only to imagine Trinity discovering what I’ve searched, and my back tenses, triggering an ache that suggests I’ve been more stressed lately than I like to admit.
I think of what Rory said, about quitting the show.
I’d be fine with that. I might even be relieved.
My parents are both corporate researchers, and while we’re hardly rich, I don’t need the show income—I’ve been stashing it in a savings account.
Also, I’m really tired of the drinking. The occasional pub night with friends used to be fun.
Now I nurse a Coke…or blow off the invitations altogether.
The problem is Trinity. I can’t be the bitch who takes away a critical source of income. And maybe I won’t need to be, because I find the answer to my question a lot faster than I imagined.
In high school, Trinity was blamed for the suicide of a bullied classmate.
My gut clenches reading that. I won’t pretend that I don’t know what it’s like to be bullied.
I mostly flew too far under the radar to attract attention, but there was one girl in high school who decided I was a vastly under-appreciated and overlooked target.
Even today, I’ll tense seeing her first name online.
Trinity isn’t named in the actual articles about her classmate’s suicide.
They only refer to bullying by “an unnamed sixteen-year-old classmate who has not been charged at this time.” It’s social media that fingers Trinity as the perpetrator, and even there, while no one disputes she’s the one accused, they hotly debate her guilt.
The short version is this: when Trinity was sixteen, a classmate—Vanessa Lyons—committed suicide.
In her note, she alleged ongoing and systematic harassment by Trinity, who had been her best friend in middle school.
Vanessa claimed Trinity had dumped her as a friend after becoming a cheerleader and joining the popular clique.
When Vanessa tried to maintain a civil relationship, Trinity turned on her, bullying and berating her until depression claimed Vanessa’s life.
It’s a common story that carries the mournful ring of truth.
Girls are BFFs, but then one grows into a gorgeous cheerleader and the other…
does not. Popular girl ditches uncool friend, who flounders, trying to make sense of it, and when she reaches out, popular girl drives her away with insults that lacerate the friend’s already paper-thin self-confidence, driving her to a place where suicide seems the only option.
In death, she can finally accuse her true killer.