Second Sister

by Chan Ho-Kei

  “Her motivation could be the same as ours: revenge.”

  Nga-Yee followed N’s gaze to the laptop beside her. Something like an electric shock surged through her brain. She knew what N was saying, but she couldn’t accept it.

  “You mean the person who posted on the chatboard two years ago, calling Violet a snitch—that was Siu-Man?”

  N didn’t reply right away, just moved the mouse to highlight the name of the poster. “This was written by ‘2B_Aide.’ Which means the student aide at the time, Violet To. Obviously she wasn’t denouncing herself, so someone must have broken into her account. Enoch students have to log in to their accounts all the time—to use the printer, for instance—so it wouldn’t be too hard to see someone’s password.”

  Nga-Yee recalled the poster in the school library telling students to be careful with their passwords.

  “Remember I said the person in charge of the system was an idiot? He knew how to delete the post, but not how to get into the back end of the chatboard to find the real poster from their IP address.”

  “And the IP address was—”

  “Pisces Café.”

  “But it wasn’t just Siu-Man who used the Wi-Fi there, all the kids do.”

  “The IP address is not the only piece of data, remember? There’s the user agent too.”

  N pressed another key to produce a string of letters:

  Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.0.4; zh-tw; SonyST2li Build/ 11.0.A.0.16) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/ 4.0 Mobile Safari/534.30

  “I showed you this before: a Sony Android ST2li.” As before, N pulled Siu-Man’s red smartphone from his pocket and waved it at Nga-Yee.

  “But … but maybe one of her classmates has the same phone?”

  “The user agent doesn’t just make a note of the model, it records the serial numbers of the updates and the browser version too. Even an identical phone would have some differences here, and I haven’t seen any of your sister’s classmates matching these numbers.” N leaned against the desk, turning a little toward Nga-Yee. “This was posted on September 13, 2013, a little before five in the afternoon. That was a Friday, the day your sister usually hung out at Pisces. Wouldn’t it be too much of a coincidence that someone else was there with the exact same phone, browser, and so on, and happened to be posting about Violet just at that moment?”

  “But Violet wouldn’t have known—” Nga-Yee stopped, because she’d abruptly realized that Violet may not have had the tech knowledge to seek out things like user agents and IP addresses, but she was close to someone who was familiar with lots of hacking techniques.

  “Looking at this objectively, kidkit727 does seem like someone who posted that Popcorn attack on your sister out of revenge, down to the word choices. Violet got called a ‘bitch’ on the school chatboard, so she said something similar about your sister in her smear. Because of their history, Violet was certain that your sister was distorting the truth once again and that Shiu Tak-Ping must be innocent. That’s why she had no compunction asking her brother to help her stir up some trouble. I have no proof that the Rat hacked into the school system, so whether he discovered that your sister was the one who denounced Violet, I can only guess.” N shrugged. “There’s quite a bit of circumstantial evidence, but I can’t say for certain that Violet did this to take revenge.”

  “I don’t believe you! Siu-Man would never write a post like that.”

  “I didn’t say she wrote it.”

  “What? You just said—”

  “I said it was posted from her phone. Have you forgotten who was in the coffee shop with her?”

  Nga-Yee thought back to the day they met Kwok-Tai at Pisces. He said that in year two, Lily’s extracurriculars kept her away from their gatherings, so he and Siu-Man went to the coffee shop alone—and he hadn’t liked Violet either. Nga-Yee saw where this was going.

  “So it was Kwok-Tai.”

  “Yes. The text has the characteristics of Kwok-Tai’s writing.”

  “What characteristics? Words like ‘bigot’?” Nga-Yee remembered him calling Violet that.

  “That too, but I was talking about his handwriting.”

  “What handwriting? This was all online.”

  “Do you think language loses its individual character online, Miss Au? Let me give you some examples: Violet is the bookish sort, so even the threatening emails she sent your sister were properly signed and addressed. Even her Line messages are in full sentences and properly punctuated. When she uses ellipses, it’s always exactly the right number of dots, no more and no less. Her Chinese teacher must appreciate that. Her brother’s the opposite—efficiency is everything. He often doesn’t bother with periods, though he does put in commas—which many people don’t. Some people leave a line after paragraphs, some indent. We can even work out what sort of keyboard someone uses by analyzing their typos. But people assume there’s no such thing as digital handwriting, so they don’t bother to disguise these elements, and that’s how they give themselves away.”

  N brought up the post attacking Violet. “Look, every paragraph here starts with exactly three blank spaces. That’s different from what your sister does in her messages, but it matches Kwok-Tai’s Facebook statuses. Your sister tends to use short sentences and paragraphs. If she’d written this, it would have been split into ten more paragraphs.”

  “So Kwok-Tai wanted to harm Siu-Man by using her phone—”

  “Don’t be silly. Even if your sister didn’t write this post, she must have known what was going on. She probably did it to help a friend—he probably made it sound like a funny joke to have her help him accuse Violet,” said N, his deadpan voice mocking Nga-Yee for still finding excuses for her sister. “If Violet did this for revenge, she didn’t have the wrong target—she just mistook the accomplice for the mastermind.”

  Nga-Yee’s mind went blank. Should she keep trying to poke holes in N’s hypothesis, or was it better to forget he’d said anything? Ever since Siu-Man’s death, her hatred of kidkit727 had been the only thing propping her up. Finding the person responsible for her grief became her overriding mission. Every night, she tossed and turned, and by day she could barely force food down, all because Violet had taken away her only family member. Knowing who was responsible only intensified her fury into a desire for revenge.

  And now a voice at the bottom of her heart was telling her she had no reason to hate this girl.

  Everything Violet and her brother did, Siu-Man and Kwok-Tai had done before them. You could even say Violet’s actions were the natural consequence of Siu-Man’s. If Nga-Yee thought what she was doing to Violet was justified, how could she condemn Violet’s treatment of Siu-Man? Nga-Yee felt caught in a horrific cycle that would pass this hatred on and on.

  Yet she couldn’t bear to give up.

  She glanced at the screen. Violet was still sitting like a puppet in front of her computer, her face blank. Nga-Yee might have lost her grounds for hating Violet, but she still couldn’t forgive her.

  “How long have you known this?” she asked N, struggling out of her daze.

  “I was already pretty sure when we started our revenge plot.”

  N’s answer flooded her heart with bitterness, telling her once again that the man standing before her wasn’t quite human.

  “If you knew Violet had her reasons for what she did, why did you want to help me get revenge? Was it for the money? I thought the people who killed Siu-Man must be pure evil, but now I’ve become the thing I hated. How am I any different from them?”

  “The difference is that Violet To was rescued last year, and your sister died.”

  The frostiness of this answer snapped the final string in Nga-Yee’s heart.

  N placed his hands on his knees and leaned forward. “You’re confused now. But if I’d told you all this last week and you’d given up your plans for revenge, you’d have started to regret it when you realized you were all alone in the world while Violet and her brother were still alive and
well. You’d have complained that fate wasn’t fair to you, and started to feel how stupid you’d been for abandoning your plan. You might even have taken out your anger on me.”

  “I would never!”

  “You would. But it’s not just you—anyone in the world would feel the same way.” N was looking directly at her, more serious than she’d ever seen him. “Human beings are never willing to admit that we’re selfish creatures. We talk nonstop about morals and righteousness, but as soon as we’re in danger of losing what we have, we’re back to survival of the fittest. That’s human nature. Even worse, we love to find excuses—we aren’t even brave enough to own our selfish actions. Hypocrisy, in a word. Let me ask you this: Why did you want revenge?”

  “To get justice for Siu-Man, of course.”

  “What do you mean, for Siu-Man? The revenge was yours. You were sad at having your family taken away from you, so you went searching for someone to take your anger out on. That way, you might find release. What does Siu-Man care about justice now? It’s a cunning strategy, putting words into the mouth of someone who can no longer speak for herself.”

  “Stop talking like you know Siu-Man!” yelled Nga-Yee in a fury. “I’m her sister. I know how much she suffered—and how reluctantly she’d have given up her own life! What right do you have to say any of this? You never even met Siu-Man!”

  “True, I never met your sister—but that doesn’t mean I don’t understand her.” N picked up Siu-Man’s phone, pressed a few keys, and handed it to Nga-Yee.

  “Don’t try to tell me you can know a person from their phone, that’s—”

  Her words faltered as she saw what was on the screen.

  Dear Stranger, By the time you see these lines, I might no longer be here.

  “You … you put the fake suicide note on her phone?”

  “The note you saw was a forgery, but I didn’t say its contents were fake,” said N slowly. “I had to reshape it a little to achieve the effect I wanted, but everything you read came from your sister.”

  N took the phone back from Nga-Yee’s shaking hand, scrolled down, and gave it back.

  “Start reading here.”

  June 14, 2014 23:11

  Mom’s been gone a whole month.

  Every time I think of her, I feel a hole in my heart.

  A hole that can never be filled.

  When I come home from school, the house feels so cold.

  I know this cold comes from the hole in my heart.

  This was a recent Facebook post by “Yee Man.” The profile picture was a white lily.

  “This is … Siu-Man’s … Facebook?” Nga-Yee stammered. “But the name—”

  “Obviously that’s not her real name. Keep reading and you’ll see.”

  Nga-Yee frantically scrolled on.

  June 19, 2014 23:44

  I’m not as strong as my sister.

  She’s such a good person. I don’t think anything could leave a hole in her heart.

  Mom always told me I should be more like my sister.

  But I’m not her. I’m just pretending to be as strong as her.

  I’ll never be as good as her, not in my whole life.

  This post was five days after the previous one. On this blue-and-white page, Nga-Yee read her sister’s thoughts—thoughts she’d never known about. She was startled that Siu-Man would call her strong. In those days after her mother’s death, all she’d done was copy how her mother had behaved in that early time of widowhood, when she’d had to force herself to carry on to keep the family going. She wished she could tell Siu-Man that their mother’s death had bored a hole in her heart too, but she’d had to pretend it wasn’t there.

  July 2, 2014 23:51

  The first thing I do when I get home every day is turn on the TV.

  I don’t care what’s on, I just want to pretend there are other people at home.

  I hate being home alone. That’s why I stay back in the school library.

  I don’t even like reading.

  Sometimes my sister works late and doesn’t get home till after nine, but my school library closes at five.

  Waiting for her to come home, I always think about the past.

  When my mom was at work, my sister stayed home. When she started work, Mom stayed home.

  Now no one’s home.

  No one talks, no one answers.

  I have to turn on the TV to hear human voices.

  Nga-Yee hadn’t known any of this. She only remembered that one day she’d come home to find Siu-Man in her room with the TV on in the main room. Not knowing the reason, she’d scolded Siu-Man for wasting electricity. Was that why she stopped doing it—because of that tiny amount of electricity? Had Nga-Yee unwittingly destroyed her small escape from loneliness?

  The next few posts didn’t say very much, so she skipped ahead to find why Siu-Man was on Facebook in the first place.

  October 3, 2014 22:51

  Sometimes I think I’m stupid to be writing like this.

  I haven’t added any friends, so I’m the only one reading these posts.

  If no one sees this, then I’m basically talking to myself.

  Only, that’s not completely true.

  I’ve heard that social media sites have mods who see everything.

  If I wrote in my diary, no one would see it. Here, the mods might.

  They don’t know who I am, and I don’t know who they are.

  We’re strangers to each other.

  If you’re reading this, even though you can’t respond, it still makes me happy.

  Because then I’m a bit stronger than someone just talking to herself.

  “This account—She didn’t tell anyone about it?” Nga-Yee murmured.

  “It seems not. The fake name was probably to keep anyone from finding it,” said N. “It must have been like shouting into a hole in a tree, somewhere to release her feelings.”

  “Was she right? Would the mods read her posts?”

  “The mods on any social media site can read whatever they want—they’re responsible for keeping the site running, after all. If a user has a technical issue, they need to be able to get in there. Different sites have different policies, though, about what employees can do regarding user privacy. But Facebook has billions of users worldwide, four million in Hong Kong alone. That’s hundreds of millions of posts every day. The chances of your sister’s words being seen by some busybody mod are probably less than you getting hit by a meteor.”

  N paused for a moment, then went on. “Not that it mattered to your sister whether this stranger actually existed. She wasn’t looking for a response, only someone to talk to. Sometimes people are able to say more to a stranger than to their own families.”

  Nga-Yee could never have imagined that Siu-Man would seek an outsider rather than talk to her own sister. She kept scrolling through these words that no one but N had ever read. When she got to a short entry from November, her heart sank.

  November 13, 2014 01:12

  I feel so dirty.

  That was the first thing Siu-Man wrote after being molested on the train. Nga-Yee had never heard her say this. She’d tried so hard to comfort her sister. She’d told Siu-Man to lean on her, she’d cursed the pervert and said he should be thrown in jail, but she never once asked Siu-Man how she was feeling.

  Nga-Yee had never tried listening to her sister.

  December 5, 2014 23:33

  My teacher asked me about that incident again today.

  I didn’t want to talk about it, but she forced me.

  I don’t dare have lunch in the cafeteria. Kids I don’t know point and stare at me.

  I’ve had enough.

  I miss you, Mom.

  A lump was growing in Nga-Yee’s throat. She knew how Siu-Man must have felt as she was writing this. She hadn’t wanted to talk to her teacher out of shame at having to rehash the whole thing. The last line made her wince. Siu-Man could only have spilled her heart to their mother.

  Why hadn’t
Siu-Man felt able to turn to her own sister for help? When had this gulf appeared between them?

  February 16, 2015 23:55

  Dear stranger,

  I realized I have no one to talk to any more.

  Today my sister told me I have to give evidence in court.

  I know the man’s lawyer is going to question and humiliate me.

  I want to throw up.

  My sister says she’ll support me.

  She was smiling when she said this, but I know she was pretending.

  I’m so useless.

  All my life, I’ve held my family back. My sister, my mom.

  I know my mom died because of me.

  We had no money, so she held down two jobs to raise us.

  She worked too hard and ruined her body. That’s why she died.

  If I’d never been born, my mom would still be alive.

  It’s all my fault.

  “That’s not right—not right at all! How could she think that?” Nga-Yee cried. She’d never imagined that her cheerful sister could have such dark thoughts, blaming herself for their mother’s death.

  “You watched your sister grow up, so you’ve always thought of her as an innocent child,” said N. “But children eventually learn to think for themselves. Sometimes the answers they come up with are a bit extreme, but looking at this objectively, she does have a point.”

  “But—But Mom and I never thought that! We never complained—”

  “Let’s put it this way: if your sister had never been born, how much less would your household expenses have been? Would you have had more time for your studies? Could you have actually enjoyed your youth? Maybe your mom could have had one less job? And you might have finished school, maybe even gone to university?”

  Nga-Yee had nothing to say to that. When had N done all this research into her background?

  “Just keep reading.”

  February 26, 2015 17:13

  Finally, it’s over.

  This short post from late February marked a brief period of calm. That was Shiu Tak-Ping’s second day in court, when he’d changed his plea to guilty, so Siu-Man didn’t need to give evidence.

  But another storm was about to begin.

  April 11, 2015 23:53

  Why? Why? Why?