My Life as a Hashtag

by Gabrielle Williams

  #

  Catching the tram in to school, me on my own without Liv, a shiver radiated all the way from my bones outwards to my skin. Maybe it was just the wintery Melbourne weather outside making me freezing – or maybe it was pure fear. It was hard to tell. All I knew was that my body was unable to stop shaking, and that the sense of frostiness was building as I got closer to school, a feeling of cold blueness pooling at my lips.

  I had to keep reminding myself that there were literally millions and millions of bits of data on the internet. A little ‘17 Celebs’ piece could easily be missed. There’d been nothing about it in any of my friends’ feeds last night – just that one friend of Harley’s yesterday afternoon. And I didn’t even know him.

  There was every chance they were going to miss it.

  I got off the tram and buttoned up my school blazer, pulled my collar up, tried to ignore the seven-degree tentacles of cold as they did their best to crawl in under my clothes anyway. I walked in through the school gates.

  Our school uniform is blue, with white pinstripes running through the fabric. If you tie your hair back in a ponytail or pigtails and you don’t have an exact-same-shade-of-blue ribbon to tie it up with, you’ll get a detention.

  I looked down at my bare hands. My fingers were blue.

  Walking down the corridor to my locker, I was hit in the eye with more blue, everywhere I looked – uniforms, ribbons, blue blue blue. It was blue overload.

  Liv and Yumi and Anouk and Hattie and a few of the other girls were in the fully-blued-out corridor, staring into someone’s phone, being knocked against as other girls walked past them.

  Liv dragged me into the blue-on-blue group. ‘You won’t believe this,’ she said, stepping back so I could get a good look at the screen. ‘This is unbelievable.’

  I took a deep breath.

  I would believe it – because I knew exactly what I was about to see.

  And, yep, there they were alright: seventeen celebrities, all hating on Anouk.

  I felt my vision tunnel towards the phone, everything peripheral going hazy. The corridor felt crowded. Someone bumped past me and I felt a tectonic plate shift underneath me, leaving me and my friends on opposite sides of a gaping tear in the ground.

  I fully expected them to turn towards me, a swooping of heads in my direction, as they said, Did you do this? Was this you?

  I expected them to know, to guess, that it was because of me. Because of my Tumblr account.

  My heart was banging – I could hardly get breath into my lungs. My teeth risked smashing because I was clenching my jaw so hard. My blue hands were gripping each other to stop the shaking.

  I had to act surprised. Act like I’d never seen it before.

  ‘Oh, wow, right,’ I said, sliding a guilty look up at Anouk to see how she was reacting. But her eyes were completely absorbed by Taylor Swift and Kylie Jenner and Josh Hutcherson all saying, ‘Fook you, Anouk, have a fooking sook.’

  ‘What did you do to make them all so angry at you?’ Liv said, her mouth splitting wide in a grin as she put her arm around Anouk. ‘All these celebs. Whoa, I’m kind of impressed. It takes real star power to piss off that many people.’

  ‘It’s obviously not her,’ I blurted, shaking my head at Liv.

  ‘Well, duh,’ Liv said. ‘Thanks for that, Captain Obvious.’

  ‘I thought you were special,’ Yumi said to Anouk. ‘That we were the only ones who said “fook Anouk”. But now it turns out everyone says it. It’s hilarious.’

  ‘Well, it’s a pretty obvious rhyme,’ I said, talking loudly so they’d hear me over the noise of the corridor, jamming my frozen hands into my blazer pockets. ‘I mean, as if we’d be the only ones to think of it.’

  ‘But who’s Anouk?’ Hattie said, shaking her head. ‘I’ve never heard of her. Is she, like, a singer, or an actor, or what?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said, feeling furious that they were spending so much time talking about it. ‘She’s obviously just some stupid Hollywood person we haven’t heard about. Who cares.’

  Hattie looked up, surprise glancing a blow across her face as she registered the edge in my voice.

  ‘I mean, it’s funny,’ I added. Normal. Remember normal. ‘But … I think Emma Watson’s doing a movie in Norway. I think I read that somewhere. I think that’s where this has come from.’

  ‘It’s so strange,’ Anouk said, shaking her head. ‘So completely and utterly weird.’

  I shrugged. ‘I guess,’ I said. And walked away from her, from all of them, towards class, gripping my folders so hard I could feel the indent the corners were making against my chest. It was the only way I could stop my hands from shaking.

  I could hardly sit still in class. I had a distinct sense of ants crawling under my skin, nibbling bits off my spine to carry back to their nest. There was every chance my entire body was going to collapse from the press of my skin against the chewed-on bones.

  Everyone spent morning break on their phones, scouring the internet for more Anouk stuff.

  A couple of the celebrities in question had issued statements. Saying they hadn’t been behind the videos; that they didn’t even know an Anouk.

  ‘Nothing from the Queen yet, though, I see,’ said Liv drolly.

  ‘She probably started it,’ Yumi said. ‘You know what she’s like.’

  ‘Come on, this is boring,’ I said, wanting to take all their phones and smash them against the walls. ‘Let’s go do something.’

  The problem was, we weren’t the types of girls to go and play tennis or have a game of netball during lunch or recess. We were the hang-around-sitting-cross-legged-on-the-oval types. Sitting on our phones was exactly what we usually did.

  #FookAnouk was trending all over the internet.

  There were hundreds of fake celebrity rants. Taylor Lautner was pissed off that he’d been grounded by his parents for staying at a party past his curfew on the weekend. Demi Lovato was having a go at the person who’d stolen her carpark in the supermarket earlier that afternoon, and was all like, ‘Seriously, that was so not okay. It was the complete opposite of okay. Whatever the opposite of okay is, that’s what you did this afternoon, arsehole.’ John Lennon was saying in a dodgy English accent that peace had no chance, what with the way things were going in the world at the moment. Ryan Gosling was hey girl-ing about the environment.

  All of them hashtagged FookAnouk.

  There were rhyming hashtags, too, which I might have found funny if it weren’t for the teeth of the ants setting me on edge.

  ‘My sister Britt likes to explain, in detail, every night over dinner, why @TheBachelor is superior television #ShitBritt #FookAnouk’

  ‘My flatmate Andy has put up a shelf in our lounge room. It’s crooked and things keep sliding off it, but still #HandyAndy #FookAnouk’

  ‘My boyfriend Tucker just dumped me. While we were on holidays. In Paris #YouFuckerTucker #FookAnouk’

  There was even a beer company that had posted a series of ads: different people happily holding their glasses aloft with the headline #FookAnouk and the tagline #CheersBeers.

  To say that I didn’t feel comfortable with any of it would be the understatement of the century.

  #

  The last class of the day was the longest of my life – fifty minutes of Mr Yumi going blah blah blah about Jasper Jones. I didn’t care. Didn’t care about Jasper Jones. Didn’t care about the girl. Didn’t care about any of it. I needed to get home so I could check that I was safe from the internet; that there was nothing anyone would find, no matter how many pages they trawled through. I needed to dig as deep online as I could.

  When the bell rang, I didn’t wait for Liv. I grabbed my bag from my locker and got to the tram stop in record time.

  Even though I’d deleted everything on Tumblr, now this thing had got so big, I wondered fearfully what muddy digital footprints I might have left behind without meaning to.

  When the tram arrived, I leapt aboard and took a s
eat near the front. I looked at the man sitting opposite me. He had the sort of eyebrows you wanted to take to with a pair of scissors, or a lawnmower.

  I wanted to lean over and say to him, Everyone gets annoyed with their friends, don’t you reckon? It’s totally normal to vent. Especially if you don’t think they’ll ever see it. I mean, imagine what my friends have written about me in their diaries over the years. It’s just that my videos are doing the rounds of the internet, and their diaries aren’t.

  I wanted to grab him by the shoulders, force him to look into my face. Do I look like a bad person? I wanted to say to him.

  When I got home I went straight up to my room, flipped open my computer and keyed ‘Fook Anouk’ into Google.

  There were 1,748,100 results.

  There were links to the Buzzfeed story. Links to Reddit, YouTube. To 9GAG, Imgur, Facebook pages, an Irish radio station, Mediamass. IMDb. Some of them brought up the whole story reposted, with all seventeen celebrities ranting. Others had just cherry-picked individual rants and added their comments or content. Tonnes brought up brand-new material – hundreds of thousands of posts by hundreds of thousands of people I didn’t know, with their own celebrities spouting their own messages to the world, all linking back to the original Buzzfeed story, to #FookAnouk – to my idea.

  But when I keyed in specific details like ‘Anouk,’ ‘MC’ or ‘agirlwalksintoaschool’ nothing came up.

  There was nothing that would lead to me. And nothing, therefore, that would lead to my Anouk.

  Still, my body felt brittle with adrenaline and anxiety.

  And I worried that it was all going to get so much worse.

  #

  I feigned another migraine the next day, didn’t go to school. This time I actually did have a headache, though; I slept almost the whole day away.

  That afternoon, Liv texted me to come over to her house. ‘I know you’re sick but Anouk’s here,’ she wrote. ‘You gotta see this.’

  ‘Anouk’ and ‘you gotta see this’ weren’t two statements I wanted to see together in the one sentence.

  I couldn’t not go, though. It would seem strange. Out of character. So I went over to Liv’s and walked up to her bedroom. Anouk, Hattie, Liv and Yumi were all there – Anouk and Hattie on the bed, backs to the door, huddled over Anouk’s phone; Yumi sitting atop Liv’s desk, with Liv on her desk chair, both checking out Liv’s laptop in her lap.

  The four of them turned to look at me when I walked in, grins opening each of their faces. And then Anouk stood up and faced me, to show me the ‘you gotta see this’ factor I’d come over to see.

  She was wearing a red-and-white striped T-shirt, the kind of thing Where’s Wally would have worn, with big, bold, blocky type across the front saying: ‘WHO THE FOOK IS ANOUK?’ There was a Gig FM radio station logo underneath.

  I felt my mouth falling open.

  Someone was making T-shirts?

  ‘What did you … where … I don’t get it, did you find that online or something?’ I said, trying to laugh, but finding myself unable to raise anything but a strangled choke.

  ‘Gig is holding a competition,’ Anouk said, holding out her phone so I could have a look at the website. ‘They announced it this morning. You can win five thousand dollars if you find out who the real Anouk is.’

  I couldn’t find any words. It wasn’t enough for everyone in the world to see my videos; to post their own videos, their own jokes? Everyone in the world wanted to know who the real Anouk was now, too?

  I wanted to not be here. I wanted to be anywhere but here, in Liv’s room, with poor Anouk wearing a ‘Who the Fook is Anouk?’ T-shirt and a five-thousand-dollar bounty on her unknowing head.

  ‘I rang up just before,’ Anouk went on, ‘and told them I was an Anouk, so they said I could have a T-shirt for free, because I was the first Anouk who’d called in.’

  My face felt radiator-hot. My stomach fell to my feet. My legs felt shaky. I said I needed to go to the toilet, then walked carefully, like I was drunk but trying to pretend I was sober, out of Liv’s bedroom, straight past the bathroom, and home again without another word.

  #

  When I got home from Liv’s I discovered that Gig FM weren’t the only ones trying to find Anouk. There were radio stations from all over the world with a similar idea (but no T-shirt).

  There was a morning show on American TV where the hosts had made it their own personal challenge to find out who Anouk was, and what she’d done to make the ‘17 celebrities’ (all said with a wink at the camera) so angry at her.

  Amsterdam seemed to have a glut of Anouks, all wearing a T-shirt that said ‘Ik Ben Anouk’.

  And the fake celebrities appearing all over the internet weren’t ranting anymore – instead, they were yelling out, ‘Annooouuukkk,’ over and over, as if they were searching for her and hoping she’d answer.

  Mum came to my doorway. ‘MC,’ she said. ‘I’ve been calling you for ages. Dinner’s ready.’

  ‘I’ve got all this homework to do,’ I said, feeling like millions more people were being packed into this snowball I’d created with every hit of the refresh button.

  ‘Homework can wait,’ Mum said, coming over and pushing my computer lid shut. ‘You have to eat.’

  ‘I’ll eat in my room,’ I said, opening my computer back up.

  ‘No. If you’re home, you eat with me.’ Computer closed.

  ‘Harley doesn’t.’ Computer open.

  ‘Harley’s not home.’

  ‘Harley’s never home, because why would he be?’

  Mum sighed – heavily. I knew I was being bitchy, but I needed to stay with my computer; needed to watch things unfold. I needed to keep an eye on it, so I’d know when to take cover.

  I could feel the breath of the internet – of the world – down the back of my neck.

  Mum went downstairs, and I stayed on my computer. Pressed refresh. And there it was – on the first page.

  A screen grab of agirlwalksintoaschool.

  I reeled. There was no way it was still out there. I’d deleted it. But there it was – all the celeb vids, the accompanying hashtags I’d used – #PartyBitch, #MadAsHell, #TaylorSwift, #JustinBieber.

  My video of the Gun was there too – #GirlsAreBitches.

  All my stuff from Year 9 – my rants about Anouk (well, Annick back then) and Liv and Yumi and Hattie and all my other friends? Yep, that was there too. My entire blog screenshotted, page by page, in all its hateful glory.

  The first thing that had come up when I googled ‘Fook Anouk’.

  Chapter 20

  I ran over to Liv’s to try to sort things out – to explain that the videos had been a rant that I’d expected to go nowhere; that the rest of the blog, everything I’d written way back in Year 9, was all just stuff I’d written for no good reason other than that I’d been struggling with getting used to a new school.

  ‘She’s not home,’ Prue said, frowning, then she put her hand on my arm. ‘Are you okay, MC? You’re shaking.’

  ‘It’s all fine,’ I said, running backwards away from the door as I spoke, feeling an imperative to keep moving, to not be pinned down, to not have Prue’s hand on my arm. ‘Get Liv to call me as soon as she gets home,’ I yelled.

  Back at home, I banged the front door behind me like someone was chasing me. I rang Yumi, but her phone went straight to voicemail. Called Hattie.

  Didn’t have the guts to ring Anouk.

  I kept picking my phone up, checking it, then putting it back down, then picking it back up again, to see if there were any texts, any alerts, what was happening on Snapchat and Insta and Facebook, if anyone had posted anything.

  I checked each of my profiles to see if everyone was still my friend.

  I went from my bedroom to the bathroom to my bedroom to the bathroom, in rotation. I wanted to get away from myself, but everywhere I looked, there I was.

  A bit less than an hour later – who knew how many rotations I’d done between bedroom and
bathroom by that stage, how many times I’d picked up my phone – Liv and Yumi and Hattie still hadn’t called me, so I went back over to Liv’s house. I couldn’t stand being at home with myself. I needed to talk to her.

  The light was on in her bedroom.

  So I rang the doorbell.

  Prue answered the door. Again.

  ‘It’s late,’ she said to me, and I felt like there was an unfriendliness to her that I’d never seen before. Or a sadness maybe. ‘Liv’s gone to bed.’

  ‘But it’s only early. I need to speak to her.’

  ‘It’ll have to wait until tomorrow, I’m afraid. I don’t know what’s happened, but it’s always better to talk things through when you’re bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. You don’t look bright-eyed at the moment. And Liv definitely doesn’t look bushy-tailed.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘It has to wait, MC,’ she repeated. ‘Sort it out tomorrow at school.’

  ‘Okay, well, tell Liv I’ll come over tomorrow morning before school so we can catch the tram together.’

  Prue looked away from the door, up the stairs towards Liv’s room, then back at me. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll let her know.’ And then, as she was about to close the door, she said to me, ‘It’ll be fine, MC. Don’t worry. I know it seems bad at the moment, but you girls will work it out.’

  #

  When I went round to Liv’s that next morning, she wasn’t there. Prue’s car was gone. Liv had been driven to school again.

  Anything to avoid me.

  As I sat on the tram, I watched the unfollows and unfriends, the deletes and blocks, start to cascade down my list of friends.

  Instagram darkened with screenshots of agirlwalksintoaschool, shared again and again, by my friends, by strangers, the attached comments mounting: ‘Your chance to win $5000’ and ‘I think I know these girls’ and ‘Five grand? Booyah!’

  I worried that the tram might be involved in an horrific accident – that we’d all die, all the passengers, and I’d never get to school; would never get to fix any of this.

  The world felt flimsy, like it was all balsa-wood facades and nothing behind. There was a staged quality to it.