by Chad Kultgen
Dawn said, “Thanks. That pretty much answered what I think I was asking.”
Patricia said, “And as long as we’re on the subject of Internet predators, and what is safe and unsafe for our children to be doing online, I think I would also add that, statistically speaking, the reason I even started this group in the first place, really—the number-one threat our children face when they’re online—is adults posing as children their age. I know it’s a terrible thing to think about, but we should all be extremely aware that there are adults out there in chat rooms, on AOL Instant Messenger—playing World of Warcraft, Kent—who are acting like children in order to gain the trust of our kids. It’s very disturbing and it’s what we all have to fight against. Our kids have grown up using the Internet and cell phones; they’re not stupid. They know that, if an adult is interacting with them through this technology, that adult is probably not to be trusted. But if they think they’re interacting with one of their peers, they’re statistically far more likely to divulge personal information because they see no harm in it. Again, and I can’t stress it enough, the number-one threat to a child’s online safety is an adult posing as one of their peers. This can come in the form of a fake Facebook account, an online avatar in a video game, or even an adult hacking into a child’s social-networking site and then using that child’s online identity to interact with that child’s peers. It’s a difficult thing to monitor, but you should have a conversation with your kids and tell them that, if any of their friends start behaving abnormally online, there might be cause for concern that their account has been hacked. And they should immediately call that friend to see if they’re online and actually the person on the other side of the computer.”
The other members of the PATI meeting asked questions, ranging from what action should be taken if a parent accidentally discovers their child masturbating while viewing pornography on the Internet to how many hours a day a child should be allowed to use the Internet. Neither Kent nor Dawn found any of Patricia’s answers regarding anything that was brought up to be that informative or enlightening.
After the initial round of questions came to a close, Patricia spent twenty to thirty minutes reviewing various cell phones that had either just been released or were about to be released in time for Christmas. She went over details such as price, functionality, preloaded applications and software, and which phones she felt were the safest for their children to use based on ease of monitoring and controlling use.
At the meeting’s conclusion, Patricia handed out a four-page document, which she’d created the night before, containing much of the information about new phones that she’d just covered. The document also included various websites where parents could download software for their children’s computers and cell phones that would grant the parents remote access to the children’s devices, as well as the ability to log keystrokes in order to obtain passwords and transcripts of chat conversations that might have been deleted by their children. This part interested Kent more than anything else in the meeting.
Kent was still thinking about what he might find out about Tim’s lack of interest in football using such software as he walked out of Patricia’s house just behind Dawn. Patricia said, “Kent, Dawn, it was a pleasure to have you guys out tonight. I hope you got some good info and it helped a little. And, of course, I hope to see you back next week.”
Kent and Dawn both engaged in the expected pleasantries and noncommittal banter, which Patricia knew meant she would not be seeing them again. She wondered what she could do to make the meetings seem more important. As she closed the door behind them, Patricia thought about renting out a meeting room at the Ramada Inn in order to give the meetings a more formal feeling.
Dawn and Kent, both wanting a chance to talk without the other PATI attendees around, made small talk until they were the only two left meandering around in front of Patricia’s house.
Kent said, “Which way are you parked?”
Dawn said, “Over here,” and pointed down the street.
Kent said, “Oh, I’m the other way, but I’ll walk you to your car if you want.”
Dawn said, “Sure.” She hadn’t been walked to her car since she was in high school. She found a certain charm in the offer. She assumed that Kent had been so out of practice with dating that he held on to things like walking a woman to her car or maybe opening the door for her.
Once at her car she said, “This is me.”
Kent said, “Nice car.”
Dawn said, “It’s old.”
Kent said, “So, uh . . .” He laughed, “I really haven’t done this in a while, so I guess I’ll just do it—would you want to get dinner or something, or drinks or coffee or . . .”
Dawn said, “Or what?”
Kent said, “Or . . . I don’t know, I guess I covered everything we could do on a first date, didn’t I? I just wasn’t really sure how to end that sentence, I guess.”
Dawn said, “Oh, first date? Well . . .”
Kent said, “I’m sorry, was that too forward? I don’t really . . .”
Dawn said, “I’m just joking with you. Yes, I would love to get dinner with you. How’s this weekend?”
Kent said, “Oh! Fine with me. Saturday night?”
Dawn said, “Saturday night it is. Here, what’s your number?” She pulled out her cell phone. Kent gave her his number and she added him to her contacts, sending him a text message that read, “Looking forward to Saturday night.” He added her to his contacts as Dawn and then said, “What’s your last name again?”
Dawn said, “Clint,” which he added to her contact page, and then said, “Mine’s Mooney,” which she added to her contact page.
As he drove home, Kent felt strange about having set up a date. He knew logically that it was all part of moving on, and he was somewhat surprised at how little difficulty he encountered in his first endeavor to reenter the dating pool. It gave him hope, and he found his thoughts drifting to what Dawn’s breasts looked like naked. Kent began to experience the excitement that comes with the promise of a new sexual partner—something he hadn’t felt in a very long time.
Kent’s son, Tim, had just finished a twenty-five-man Trial of Champions raid in which no gear dropped that was useful to the character he had run the instance with. He told his guildmates good night, waited for each of them to tell him how much they wanted to “fuck his mother in every hole,” “hang him from a tree like a filthy nigger,” or “fuck him in the ass and then wipe their dicks across his lips to give him a cum-flavored shit mustache,” and then signed up for the following night’s raid in the guild calendar and logged out of World of Warcraft.
He logged on to his Myspace account and searched through his friends to find Freyja. Tim took the next fifteen minutes to compose a three-paragraph-long e-mail in which he detailed his romantic interest in Brandy Beltmeyer and his curiosity about her alter ego and all of the activities she had described being a party to in her blog entries, specifically the anal sex, threesomes, and bisexual encounters. He admitted that he’d never had any kind of sexual interaction, beyond a few awkward attempts at masturbation that had yet to yield an orgasm. He then highlighted the entire e-mail, pressed the backspace key, and wrote, I had a good time at lunch today. He knew she hadn’t responded to the first e-mail he’d sent to Freyja, but he felt now that some ice had been broken, that their individual outcast statuses at Goodrich Junior High had somehow merged into something mutual, something that would compel her to respond this time. He clicked the send button. She wasn’t online, but he assumed that she got text message updates on her phone alerting her to any incoming messages or friend requests associated with her various Myspace and Facebook accounts. He left himself logged into his account in the hopes that she might respond more quickly if she saw he was online, perhaps even beginning an instant-message conversation.
While he waited, Tim minimized his Myspace page, opened a new window, and logged into his Facebook account. He had several new wall posts, most of which w
ere his classmates deriding him for not playing football. Tanner Hodge was the most prolific of the posters in this vein. Tim thought about changing his account’s privacy settings to disallow the public posting of comments on his wall, but he had come to enjoy some element of it. A part of him found pleasure in knowing he was responsible for any anguish felt by his peers. Their posts on his wall confirmed their continued unease due to a decision he made.
He then noticed a new post by his mother. Tim had shown her how to make a Facebook account a few months before she and his father had separated. Both he and his mother had tried to convince his father to make a page as well, but he refused. Tim hadn’t heard from his mother in almost two weeks. He had e-mailed her in response to the last one she sent him, but she had not yet responded.
He clicked on her post, which was titled Napa. He saw a series of forty-three photos chronicling a weekend trip his mother and Greg Cherry had taken to various Napa Valley wineries. The last time Tim’s mother had posted photos was the week after she left for California, when she posted a series of shots chronicling her breast augmentation surgery. The photos, featuring images of his mother out with her girlfriends drinking a few nights before the surgery, images of her on the way to the surgery, and finally images of her new breasts in a bikini, were difficult for Tim to view, but somehow the absence of Greg Cherry in all but one of the seventeen made them easier to witness than the Napa series.
Greg Cherry was in all forty-six of the Napa photos. Seeing his mother with a man who wasn’t his father disturbed him and made her absence in his own life that much more concrete. Her new breasts, almost twice their original size, along with a new, much shorter haircut and a tan that was much too orange, made her seem like a different person to Tim. He wondered if this was the person she’d always wanted to be but was held back, held to some identity she had come to despise, because of himself and his father. There were photos of his mother drinking wine, laughing, dancing, kissing Greg Cherry, living a life that involved neither Tim nor his father—and it was a good life, a life she enjoyed.
Tim’s stomach churned a little bit and his neck warmed. He could feel his forehead beginning to sweat. As he clicked through each photo, forcing himself to look, he told himself that this was the way things were. His mother would never again be a significant part of his life. His thoughts drifted to Carl Sagan and “The Pale Blue Dot,” a video he had found on YouTube. This doesn’t matter, he told himself. He could be looking at photos of his mother having sex with the entire Cornhusker football team—it didn’t matter. Eventually, she would die, his father would die, Greg Cherry would die, even he would die, and beyond all of their deaths, beyond anything they had ever done in their lives—the football games played or not played, the saline breasts implanted or not implanted, the conversations spoken or not spoken—all of those things done or not done by everyone he knew, or would ever know, would be forgotten in time if they were even remembered to begin with. And, far beyond that collective discarding of anything they had managed to leave behind, humanity itself would burn out, leaving no impression on a universe that would itself be torn apart under its own forces, leaving no trace of anything. This undeniable truth of reality propelled him through the series of Napa photos, through the images of Greg Cherry with arms around his mother, through the images of his mother lowering her shirt’s neckline to feature her manufactured cleavage while drunk, through the images of his mother captured candidly through a camera held by Greg Cherry, who was only feet away from her, through all the rest of the images of Tim’s mother, to the final three photos—which somehow trumped all of the rational philosophies he had mustered and made him so nauseated that he nearly vomited.
The first of these three photos depicted Greg Cherry and Tim’s mother, Lydia, kissing in a gazebo as the sun was setting. It reminded Tim of a postcard, the image seeming too perfect to be real. Up until this photo, the captions accompanying all of the others had been innocuous, relaying the time or date of the trip and the location, occasionally including an attempt at humor. The caption attached to this first photo of the final three, however, read, “He chose a perfect moment for it.” Tim wondered what this “it” was, but he had a feeling he already knew. He clicked the next button to get his answer.
The next photo was an image of Greg Cherry on one knee in the same gazebo, with the same sunset as a backdrop, as he extended an open ring box to Tim’s mother. The caption read “The ring was beautiful, especially as the sun was setting. What do you think I said?” Tim wondered what his mother must have said, even though he again had the feeling he already knew. He clicked the next button to get his answer.
The final photo was an image of his mother, with the ring on her finger extended toward the camera, as Greg Cherry kissed her on the cheek. The caption read, “YES!!!” Tim stared at the screen for several minutes. His mother was marrying another man. He didn’t understand where the emotions he was feeling stemmed from. He knew logically that this was to be the eventual outcome of his parents’ separation, certainly of his mother’s move to California to live with Greg Cherry. Despite his rational understanding of the events as they were unfolding, he found he didn’t want them to be real. But they were.
He noted that the pictures had been posted just fifteen minutes before he had logged on. That meant that he was among the first to see these images, to witness this moment of his mother’s happiness. He stared at Greg Cherry’s eyes in the final image. He seemed equally happy. Tim didn’t hate Greg Cherry the way he thought he should. He didn’t even know him. He represented a happiness that Tim and his father were unable to supply Lydia with, and that made Tim feel resentment toward the man, but not hatred.
Unable to look for more than a moment at the photographic evidence of his mother’s wholesale rejection of him and his father, Tim checked his Myspace account and found no response from Brandy Beltmeyer. He logged out and started up World of Warcraft, hoping to spend an hour or so running daily quests in an attempt to take his mind off his mother and Greg Cherry. When he logged on with his main character, Firehands, he saw that the cooldown on his alchemy transmute had reset, so he went to the Ironforge auction house in order to buy the necessary materials to perform the transmutation. As he clicked on the buyout price of eighty-four gold for a stack of Frost Lotus, he saw a message in guild chat from Selkis that read, “Why you logging back on nigger? Forget to jerk off to your toon?” Tim thought about not responding, just finishing his transmute and then logging off, but he felt an overwhelming need to let someone else know about his mother. He typed a message in guild chat that read, “I just found out via Facebook that my mom is getting remarried.”
Instantaneously, multiple members of Tim’s guild sent their reactions to the news. The messages read, “Is she marrying a nigger?” “Does she fuck niggers?” “Is your dad a nigger?” “Can I fuck her be4 she gets hitched?” “I thought ur mom died after I raped her last night, but I still raped her again.” “Where’s the bachelorette party?” “You’re gonna have a mulatto half-bro.”
This continued for several minutes. Tim offered no response. He just read the scrolling green text. Tim understood that the responses were absurd, too detached from the actual event to have any real perspective, but they put him at ease nonetheless. They made him realize that none of the people in his guild, none of the people he talked to on a daily basis and considered friends, had any stake in anything that happened in his real life. And this led him to realize that he had no stake in theirs. They could be going through similar turmoil, or going through situations that were even worse, and he would never know—or, if he knew, if one of his guildmates should divulge any personal information as he just had, he knew he wouldn’t care either, and that he might very well be the one responding in guild chat with equally insensitive comments. It reminded him that nothing mattered.
After running his final daily quest at the Tournament of Champions, Tim quit the World of Warcraft program, revealing the Facebook window he left op
en. He knew that looking at his mother’s pictures again was a mistake, but he couldn’t help himself. He needed to see them. He wanted to force himself to look at them, to scour them for every detail that might relay how happy his mother was without him and his father in her life. He wanted to be done with missing her. He wanted to recognize her as a person he no longer knew. He wanted to hate her.
As he clicked the general link to the Napa photo album, he was met with a message from Facebook that read, “This user has made his or her photos private.” Tim understood that she had posted the photos without realizing that all of her Facebook friends would be able to view them. He assumed that, in the few hours he spent on various websites and playing World of Warcraft, she made the Napa album private specifically to block him from seeing the photos it contained. This, he reasoned, meant that she was thinking about him and, he believed, trying to spare him whatever emotional pain the knowledge of her engagement to Greg Cherry might have caused. He thought briefly about sending his mother a Facebook message congratulating her on her engagement, but thought better of it, not wanting to seem petty. Instead, he logged out and decided not to tell his father. He would pretend he never knew, that he’d never logged on and saw his mother’s Napa photos before she made the album private.
chapter
eleven
Allison Doss had become something of a celebrity on the message board at Ana’s Underground Grotto after posting her account of her first sexual experience with Brandon Lender. She had almost one hundred replies to her initial post, and a dozen or so personal e-mails, all commending her on sticking to her diet and seeing the tangible results. She also had far more traffic to her profile on another pro-anorexia website, which resulted in a glut of comments on her photos, all praising her beauty. She was checking this profile on her cell phone at lunch to see if any new comments had been added when Danny Vance and Brooke Benton sat down next to her.
