by Suzanne Park
His breath was warm behind my ear, near the nape of my neck. My skin prickled as he gently stroked both of my arms, shoulders down to fingertips. His body pushed against mine, his heart beat in quick tempo, same as mine.
I lifted my chin up, tilting my head enough so I could look into Nolan’s eyes. With a wry smile, he steadily returned my gaze. My entire body felt airy and weightless, just by being so close to him. Losing my inhibition, I licked my lips, ready to make a move.
A blaring honk jolted me with adrenaline as a black Nissan Sentra with a Liftr sticker pulled up right in front of us. “Melody?” the driver asked through the rolled-down window. My phone buzzed soon after. My call with China was starting in fifteen minutes. Asher texted at the same time: Don’t be late.
I shoved my phone into my coat pocket and stepped out from under the awning. I turned to face Nolan, and with his gaze fixed on mine, he asked, “Hug?,” then opened his arms. Hesitantly, I stepped into him, feeling his lean, muscular chest press against me once again, this time from the front. Head to toe, my body flooded with little tingles. But of course, this blissful moment couldn’t go on forever. A brief wave of panic hit hard when I thought to myself, What if someone from work saw us together? What would they think? We were just two friends having a casual dinner at P.F. Chang’s, where we mostly talked about work. If anyone asked, the heat flushing to my face was from all the drinking. It was no big deal.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I murmured as I pulled away from him and got into my car.
He waved as my Nissan Sentra drove off.
AT HOME, I set up my laptop in bed and began adding my work orders into the project queue for the remote developers. It wasn’t an easy task for someone who had three glasses of wine. I checked to see if the China and Poland teams were online and the chat status showed Asher was still active. Damn. He worked through my entire dinner.
My phone buzzed with a message from Nolan. Got home safe. You?
Me too ☺
Tonight was fun.
I didn’t know how to reply to that. He could have asked to do it again sometime, but he didn’t. So I ignored it for the moment and logged in to my work email to see if any of our overseas tasks had been completed on time.
Forty-four new messages. All of them had the same subject line.
Email number one was short.
Subject: Re: “Hey feminazis! Get off my lawn!”
To: Melody Joo
From: Hungggger
Hey China Doll
The remaining forty-three emails were just as short, equally disturbing, and one was riddled with spelling typos:
Subject: Re: “Hey feminazis! Get off my lawn!”
To: Melody Joo
From: Christof Nugent
Go fetch me some coffee, you supid bitch. You feminists have lied so much and none can believe any words you say these days. The campus rape epidemic, the gender wage gap, all lies. Lies lies lies. Fuck you.
What the fuck was happening? I searched online for “Hey feminazis! Get off my lawn!” and found an article that had been posted at 8 P.M. EST by BetaGank, an online gaming magazine and message board for “serious gamers to come together to bash weak scrubs and noobs.” That was actually their tag line, not me making a harsh generalization. It was essentially Gossip Girl for hard-core gamer dudes. The article named me as a producer at Seventeen Studios and leaked some basic information about me. My greasy appetizers and wine made their way backward through my digestive tract as I read the article.
HEY FEMINAZIS! GET OFF MY LAWN!
By Anonymous
Our inside source at Seventeen Studios has confirmed that a new title, currently named Ultimate Apocalypse, will be released in six months, just in time for the holidays. Seasons Greedys!
It is unclear if this is a console game or a mobile one, but given the launch date we are betting it’s mobile. Our source “UltimateDDay” has also confirmed that the game will target FEMALE gamers who want to play shooter games. Apparently feministas now need to have their own special snowflake games catering to their feminine whims. Maybe they’ll have in-game clothes to buy and mascara in hidden treasure boxes. Head of production and game creator Melody Joo (pictured here) is a total newcomer to gaming, so we’ll see if this game actually launches on time, and if it will suck. We’re betting no, and yes. Click here to contact Melody.
I skimmed all my new emails. Thanks to an anonymous informant at Seventeen Studios, freaks and creeps flooded my inbox with lewd comments (including not-suitable-for-work images) and sexist diatribes. Who were they? Where was all this anger coming from? And why go after ME?
I texted Asher to let him know I couldn’t make the call.
Not knowing what to do next, I texted the one person who had to be awake.
How would you reply to people if they sent you, hypothetically speaking, dick pictures?
Nolan called me immediately. “Wait, what? Someone is sending you dick pics? Why?”
“Don’t worry. Never mind. I figured it out.” He stayed on the line with me while I downloaded an app that added googly eyes to any picture. With a few clicks and swipes, Hungggger’s dick photo had metamorphosed into a googly-eyed penis masterpiece. I emailed it back to Hungggger with the comment, “China Doll has a sexxxy pic for you.” I attached a return receipt and went to the next email to respond.
Proud of myself for coming up with a creative solution while drunk, I told Nolan exactly what I did. “Mel, what the hell are you doing? You shouldn’t respond to any kind of harassment. I’m serious! Ignore it all for now, and if it gets bad, we should talk to the police, depending on how fucked up this situation is.”
My inbox jumped to fifty emails. After picking a handful of more dick pic ones, I googly-eyeified them and sent them back. Dozens more emails appeared with each inbox refresh, and I couldn’t keep up with the volume. Hungggger had responded to my googly-eyed masterwork, venting his discontent with my mockery of his heroic cock. If every time I responded to any of the harassing emails it would turn into a heated escalation, this would quickly become an uncontrollable situation. Plus, HR wouldn’t like me sending googly-eyed dick pics from our company email server. I rubbed my temples, trying to think of what to do.
“Mel, I know this will be hard for you, but I think you should get off email and go to sleep. You can deal with this stuff in the morning. The last thing you should do is drunk-email people. You are smart enough not to do that.”
He was right. Emailing while drunk was a terrible idea, and my one inebriated decision to googly-eyeify penis pics already turned into an escalation. I could (and should) deal with my work backlog and email harassment in the morning, with a clearer head.
The wine, compounded with weeks of sleep deprivation, helped me fall asleep fast, but I didn’t have a restful slumber: I dreamt that all my post office mail had been compromised and flooded with dick pic first class and bulk mail. Restoration Hardware catalogs, Valpak coupon mailers, and voter registration notices, all plastered with penii. Waking up to pee in the middle of the night helped put a stop to my stupid dick pic nightmare. But as the night wore on and I sobered up, it hit me that nothing prevented these terrorizers from just showing up on my doorstep. How bad had this situation become?
Chapter Eleven
A night of off-and-on dozing and a newly formed hangover didn’t put me in the best state of mind to think through what I needed to do next. Who had been leaking proprietary information from inside the company? Who were these assholes who immediately jumped on the hate bandwagon without giving me the benefit of the doubt? And who would go as far as emailing me grotesque porn images, coupled with ignorant commentary disparaging women?
I glanced at the clock on my nightstand. Crap! I needed to be in a status meeting in thirty minutes.
As I untangled myself from my bedsheets, my mom texted
. MELODY CALL BACK VERY IMPORTANT1!!!
Three missed calls from her, and two from my dad. My hands shook as I returned their call. “What’s going on? Are you guys all right?” Please, god, let my mom and dad be okay.
My mom shouted, “What is happen with you? Someone call our house in the middle of night and asking for you. He say he is secret admirer or something blah blah and want to talk to you. I told him he has wrong house because no way my Melody have any secret admiring boys. He get very angry and curse at me and then hang up.”
Those trolling assholes had moved on to harassing my parents. “Mom, are you and Dad okay? If you get any more calls like that, please call the police.”
“We be okay. No one usually bother us, so we call you right away. We hope you not ever dating him. That’s why we want you to marry nice Korean boy.”
Deep breath in, and exhale. “Could you guys just turn your ringer down and let the calls go to voice mail? It’s a long story, but a bad person posted some information about me online, and now it’s really blowing up.” I put the call on speakerphone and logged in to my work email.
My dad jumped on the other line. “Melody? Are you famous now?”
I skimmed my emails quickly on my laptop. Three hundred forty-two messages. “Am I famous? Not really. But I am getting a lot of hate mail and fan mail, so I guess I’m more famous than I was just twenty-four hours ago.”
“Okay, call our cellular phone later. We going to IHOP now. They have senior citizen early lunch special. Goodbye!”
I jumped into the shower, lathered and rinsed my hair, loofahed my entire body in ten seconds, and hopped back out, all in under a minute. After patting on powdered foundation and twisting my drippy hair into a clipped bun, I threw on a random assortment of clothing and ran out the door with my laptop bag.
My fifteen-minute meeting alert popped onto my phone screen as I called my Liftr car. I barely had time to think about work with all the shit going on thanks to the BetaGank article.
I got to the office and had only two minutes to spare. Except, there was no meeting, because it had been canceled. Ian, the head of Human Resources, and the publicity director all stood in my office, along with a stuffy corporate guy carrying a briefcase. That’s when I knew this had all officially turned into a nuclear shitstorm.
IAN CLOSED MY door and motioned for me to sit down, even though everyone else remained standing. I put my bag down on my chair and continued to stand along with the others. This wasn’t going to turn into some weird power play where Ian and his cronies would look down at me, literally. No thanks.
Sue, the head of HR, got straight to it. “We have a huge heaping pile of shit on our hands. The PR team got hundreds of negative social media alerts about the Ultimate Apocalypse game this morning. What the fuck happened?”
When a bunch of sexist, racist trolls flame your company on a grandiose scale, the head of HR has permission to stop the PC talk behind closed doors.
Joe, former college varsity baseball captain and now publicity director, looked at us pleadingly. “I’ve never dealt with anything like this before. I used to do social media communications here before I got this job. This is way beyond posting cute memes and aspirational quotes from famous dead people online. It’s a real shit-ton of crazy fucking shit and, honestly, I’m way out of my league here.”
Everyone looked at Ian, the only executive left to speak. “Well, don’t look at me. Yeah, people hate me, sure, but I’m a white dude with serious gaming street cred. They’re trying to bring her down, not me.” He pointed straight at my face, making it clear he was referring to me.
The briefcase guy said, “Ian, these trolls are trying to bring this whole place down, not just Melody. And you are the leader of this company. As your outside counsel, from my perspective you have two options.” He pulled down the knot on his tie to loosen the choke hold. “You can replace Melody with a new producer, but if you picked someone from within this company, the person would likely be male, and you’d see major backlash for that. Or you can keep Melody on the project and stay the course.”
What? That was like saying, You have two choices. You can do the wrong thing, or the logical, right thing. What the fuck kind of options were these?
“Both options have their risks.” He smiled at me reassuringly. “Honestly, I’ve heard from a few people that she’s doing a good job, so pulling her now could be detrimental to the business.”
Sue asked, “Do we know who leaked the game info?”
Ian barked, “Sue, it’s much more important to deal with this online backlash first. We’re in triage mode here.”
We heard a knock at the door, and another stodgy corporate guy carrying an old-school briefcase waltzed in. Great, now we had two briefcase guys. “I’m Brian Wallace, a crisis PR consultant. I’ve been called in by the board to assist with your communications.” He shook hands with all the executives.
Crisis-prevention Brian said to me, “Melody, I recommend that you refrain from engaging with any of the comments, accusations, and threats against your company, and at you. To minimize personal harm and unnecessary stress, please also deactivate your personal social media accounts. One wrong move or one misconstrued social post and this could lead to a bigger PR nightmare. Or they might try to hack you. As they say in this business, don’t feed the trolls.” He repeated, “This bears repeating. Do NOT feed the trolls, no matter what. I’ll work with Ian and Joe on issuing a formal company statement that the game will not be canceled. But you all need to decide soon whether we remove Melody or not.”
Ian didn’t even hesitate. “Let’s replace her with someone like Asher. That wouldn’t be a problem.”
My heart pounded so hard it hurt to breathe. Replace me with Asher, just like that? Was HE the mole? He knew everything about the game launch. He also had motive. That cocky, backstabbing motherfucker.
And where was Asher? I looked over at his desk and saw a half-eaten muffin. He was probably holed up in a conference room, leaking more game info.
Sue chimed in. “Actually, if you remove Melody it would look really, really bad for our company. No woman would dare apply here and we’d be seen as sexist. The long-term repercussions of this within the industry would be unsurmountable. For months now we’ve strived to add diversity to our studio community. This would set us back tremendously.”
Joe grimaced and paced the room. “PR-wise, I agree, it would be a bad move. Social media is sixty percent women, and women form virtual communities. As soon as word got out about this, you’d be looking at an angry mob of estrogen maniacs who rally for nationwide boycotts of our games and organize large-scale protests outside of our office. It would be a huge nightmare.” He threw his hands open wide. “And this might turn superpolitical real fast, with equal opportunity, fair wages, and all that other women stuff.”
His dismissive comments couldn’t go unchallenged. I couldn’t help myself. Executive Joe needed to be called out. “Estrogen maniacs? Women stuff? A mature use of words, Joe.”
I scanned Ian’s and Joe’s faces, trying to detect any humanity. “I’d like to stay on the project and see it to completion. I’ve met every internal milestone deadline and earned the trust of the team. I respectfully ask that you keep me on as production lead. Also, if you don’t, I agree with Joe that this could turn into a media nightmare, making you look like an antifemale company.” I didn’t say, Oh, and by the way I would totally sue your asses, which was what I was thinking.
“Fine.” Ian glanced down at his watch. “Joe, we need to send a press statement out ASAP. I’m having a conference call with the board of directors to let them know we’re working on defusing this situation. Oh, and Melody? I asked the IT guys to help you sort your inbox so you don’t see all the garbage and hate mail. We don’t want you to get distracted by all that during crunch time. It’ll get forwarded straight to legal for them to deal with legally and criminally.”
He looked at his watch again. “Since we’re on a tight schedu
le, we want you to be productive and not spend a single minute sorting through pictures of torsos and hairy balls. Plus, as you said, it would look bad if we replaced you. The risk of crazy female activists beating down our door is a more real threat than some loser teenage asshole trolling you and blowing off steam on some message boards.” Damon, the IT guy, appeared at my office doorway and set up email folders on my computer while the discussions continued. Thank goodness the legal team was handling all these emails.
AN HOUR LATER, the PR team released the Official Statement of Seventeen Studios on our website and emailed it to our entire company:
To our friends in the gaming community:
Unfortunately, a small group of people have been saying awful things online about our company and our games, games we will continue to release because we won’t be bullied into canceling them. They have been harassing one of our female employees, and they have been tarnishing our reputation as gamers with their unacceptable behavior.
Gaming should be a fun experience, both positive and uplifting for everyone, whether you’re a gaming newbie or a veteran. We aren’t trying to quash freedom of speech. We just ask that everyone try to be respectful.
Remember, there is another person on the receiving end of your communications. They’re part of your community.
(And next is where Ian must’ve veered off-script . . .)
You don’t shit where you eat.
Seventeen Studios stands against hate and harassment.
Thank you,
Ian MacKenzie and Melanie Joo
Damn it. He didn’t even get my name right.
Within minutes of sending out the press release, email responses poured in from female employees at our company, nearly twenty total, letting me know they stood by me in solidarity. Knowing I had allies at work supporting me lifted my spirits and helped keep me focused on my work. I wasn’t in this alone.
