by Sean Boling
Chapter Twenty Two: Candice
A few people had told her they read her article, and a few others had left some comments in the thread beneath it on the website. The comments were innocuous, along the lines of “Nice work”, “Wow. Din’t now this wz happening”, with just one troll, who called it “winey bullshit”, and a comment promising that if you clicked on the link provided, you could make five thousand dollars per month working from home just like his cousin.
The scant recognition had initially been a disappointment, which she was able to brush off thanks to the action her words inspired. Eventually, though, she grew nostalgic for that lack of acknowledgement after the board came to their decision, and a rash of newfound attention formed around her. The number of people who approached her didn’t rise much, but the number who appeared to recognize her did. It didn’t occur to her that the increased awareness was leaking into the comment thread under her article in the Valley Outlook, since weeks had passed since its publication, until one day her co-worker, the one so fond of enormous cups of soda, mentioned between sucks from a straw how long the list of tirades was becoming as they ate lunch in the office.
He assumed she had already seen the recent additions, and panicked upon realizing that he was bearing the news.
“Forget I said anything,” he squeezed in before a suppressed belch got away from him.
“Are they that bad?”
He took a moment to arrive at something to say.
“Don’t look,” he said, “If you can find a way to resist. Please. Not that we’re great friends. But nobody should talk to anyone like that.”
The thought of his reaction helped her stay away for most of the day.
After the girls went to bed, though, she found herself visiting the website and searching to see if anyone had written a letter to the editor in response to her piece, now that the charter had announced its plans to downsize.
Her article was the first hit on the list of search results, of course, which spiked her adrenalin flow.
She scanned the results and saw no other articles or letters related to her name, so her pulse softened.
But this also meant that everyone so inclined to respond was piling on in the comment thread, where names weren’t required, which caused her nerves to throb all over again as she hovered over the hit with her name on it.
She took a deep breath and tapped it.
The words she was so familiar with appeared. She had pored over them so many times on her own, then with the editor, and then out of pride after they were published.
She scrolled down and stopped just before the end, where the accomplished words crossed over into the chaotic ones. The expression on her office colleague’s face came to mind and held her up. His rotund face had suddenly looked gaunt at the thought of what lay below. But she wanted to see how tough she was. She wanted to challenge herself.
“I’m not scared,” she said out loud, and pushed the ‘page down’ button one more time.
The move made her dizzy. She needed to catch her breath and focus to see what was on the screen:
“Comments for this article have been closed.”
Her relief was again short-lived.
Having worked herself up to see them, she felt cheated, and laughed at herself over such an odd reaction.
But the sensation didn’t go away. She was aware of the interpretation which said that someone was trying to tell her not to look. But she had made her pact. She had put herself out there, and she wanted to see the results.
It was too late to call the editor, she realized, so she called him the next morning from the middle school parking lot after dropping off Mia.
She was told that once the comments are closed, they disappear from their network, and he didn’t know how to get them back.
He also told her that before they shut down the thread, he sent a copy to the sheriff’s department.
Candice assumed she said “What?” very loudly, but apparently that had only happened in her mind, for after a while, the editor asked if she was still there.
Since she hadn’t really said anything, she started fresh with a more pertinent question.
“Why?”
“Well,” he stammered. “Because I thought maybe you hung up. Or dropped the phone.”
“No,” she shivered back into the conversation. “I mean, why did you send them to the sheriff’s office?”
“They were, you know…”
“I don’t know. Tell me.”
“They were…bad.”
“Oh my god,” she clutched her forehead. “There’s that word again. Bad, bad, bad. Everything is either good or bad.”
“Fine,” the editor growled. “They were alarming. They were disgusting. They weren’t fit for human consumption. Shall I go on?”
“No,” Candice apologized. “I appreciate that you care. Thank you.”
He may have said “you’re welcome”, but she hung up before she could find out. She was in the process of feeling guilty about cutting him off as she looked up the number for the Sheriff’s Department. Her guilt vanished, however, the moment she tapped it and heard the phone ring on the other end.
The person who answered passed her to the chief on duty, who then passed her to someone they claimed was the deputy in charge of her case.
A deep female voice greeted her and told her that the comments were evidence.
“But nothing has happened,” Candice said.
“In case something does,” the voice was as steady as it was low.
“So I can’t have them?”
“We would prefer not give them out.”
“But it’s for me. Potential victim over here.”
“It’s not really a legal matter. We just think you’d be better off not seeing them.”
“Who are ‘we’?”
“Me,” the woman said. “I think you’d be better off not seeing them.”
“If I had checked the site yesterday, I would have seen them anyway.”
“The editor pulled them two days ago.”
Candice sighed.
“If I had visited the site two days ago, I would have seen them anyway.”
The voice paused, which Candice imagined didn’t happen very often.
“Okay, ma’am,” she finally said. “If you come to the office, I’ll make sure you receive a copy.”
“The main office in the county seat?”
“Yes.”
“You’re going to make me drive forty-five minutes each way during business hours to get them?”
“I’d prefer you picked them up in person.”
“Why would anyone want them besides me?”
The deputy paused again, but this time merely to exhale before giving in.
“What’s your email address, ma’am?”
“Candice Ingle, all one word, at Cada Casa Management dot com.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“Why?”
“Confirms your identity.”
“I could just be sending them to this Candice person as a prank,” she jabbed.
The deputy ignored her quip and wished her a nice day.
Candice drove to the office to check her email.
Nobody was there, as she suspected. Her colleague was most likely making some rounds amongst the rentals, and the manager, if she came in at all, wouldn’t appear until the afternoon.
She accessed her account as quickly as possible, trying to bypass the heightened heart rate and shortness of breath that had consumed her during the previous night of toying with the idea of looking. But the dread kept pace. Her fingers shook as she fumbled passwords and quivered into a few wrong turns thanks to some unsteady clicking.
The first item listed in her inbox was indeed from the Sheriff’s Department, with the subject heading “Copy of Threats”.
She hesitated. It occurred to her that this is how the world would end someday, not with a bang, but with a click. She let go of a nervous, one-syll
able laugh, then clicked.
The comments splattered onto the screen, and her nerves were severed.
Her brain perceived the words, but it could only send a message about them to her stomach. She was a torso full of nausea, her limbs untethered.
The first couple of entries were the only ones she read in full. She could only bring herself to scan the rest. Key words and phrases rose from the thread and filled her with more bile. Nothing surprised her about the language itself. Typical brain-dead slurs against women were thrown about. She just wasn’t used to being the object of them.
A contributor who dubbed himself “Constant Common Sense” was the first to turn the aggression sexual, which the others used as permission to do the same. It became an escalating frenzy of degradation and rape. She eyed the scroll bar to see how much farther down she had to go, determined to get to the bottom. They put every part of her body in play. She had a vision of herself in chart form, like a poster behind a butcher’s counter that illustrates what part of an animal the cuts of meat are taken from. And unlike the standard quality of the initial smears, their enthusiasm for violence inspired shocking levels of creativity. The depictions remained sexual only in the most technical sense.
An admonishing written voice would occasionally pop in with appeals to decency, but it was of little use, like saying “bad dog” to pack of wolves. Those from the scrum who bothered to acknowledge the interloper would merely train their howls on them, at which point Candice imagined herself screaming, “Forget about me! Run! Save yourself!” And by coincidence the dissenting voice would give up and disappear.
When she reached the last violent screed, she read every word of it, then leaned back in her chair and tried not to throw up.
It was like everything associated with the past year, and admittedly some of the years before, in that something was going to end badly, but she morbidly pursued it anyway.
She wondered how many of the authors she had met before, how many she really knew, and how many had nothing to do with the school, or her, and were just seizing an opportunity to anonymously rage against a woman they didn’t know while imagining one they did. Their voracity and speed convinced her that those who were strangers had programed alerts to let them know when their favorite deviant word combinations were being used somewhere on the web, so when they got an email notification directing them to a link where “choke, piss, face, smear” was billowing, they could pick up the scent and join the hunt.
The rest of the day proceeded in a way she hoped wasn’t a prologue for how the rest of her life was going to feel. She was scared. Men with whom she had always been perfectly comfortable made her uneasy. Even those she couldn’t imagine would ever do her harm made her wonder if they could have written any of the comments, or if they harbored the same thoughts but were blessed with restraint. She even refused to have a cup of coffee with the sweet old man at The Oasis who looked after his grandkids in his apartment, once he mentioned that the kids were with their mother, who took the morning off to register the oldest for Kindergarten.
As the day extended into several more, she made some progress in her efforts to stop reading every male mind she encountered, but not as much as she would have hoped. The stream of words she had absorbed gathered in her head like a cold she couldn’t get over. Thoughts of a world without civility or law pressed on her throat and the roof of her mouth. She was irritable, but unwilling to share what clung to her. She imagined how histrionic it would sound, how easy to disregard. Dismissive waves of the hand came to mind when she found herself on the brink of saying something, thousands of condescending hands flopping in her face.
Afraid of the effect her twitchiness may have on her daughters, she negotiated extra time with their father as school ended and plans for the summer took shape. Her ex was reluctant at first to take on any additional days, until she confessed that it had to do with her mental state, which seemed to offer him a sort of victory. He tried to sound consoling, but there was a smug undertone that undermined whatever genuine concern he had, and made it all the more difficult to see them off into his arms when the days came, as much as she knew it was for the best.
He agreed not to say anything about her condition to Yael. He vowed not to tell the girls, either, though Candice suspected they already knew she had seen better days.
The time alone served her well. She took care of work and of herself, and in the routine found security.
Eventually she found serenity.
And she found it in the words of her tormentors.
The “Copy of Threats” remained in her inbox. She held onto it with the idea that when she could read the words without despair, or at least far less of it, their loss of power would signal a cure. The copy had worked its way down the inbox list as other emails arrived that Candice needed to keep, until the copy wasn’t visible any longer.
But it was still there.
She tried to read them once a day, and by late summer the results started to show in how often she forgot to do so. There wasn’t so much a decrease in fear and sadness, but a rise in satisfaction.
She felt as though she was offered a glimpse into the depths of what people are capable of. The murky water had been cleared for her so that she could see the bottom without having to jump in. It started to feel like a blessing in deep cover, a twisted privilege. She used its shocking ability to enlighten as a way back to a place before the charter, and beyond that to a place before so many of the other events that wadded up her nerve endings. She was alive in a heartless universe, and in the face of its indifference, she gave it a shrug.
She saw Alma Copeland at the grocery store and didn’t feel the least bit uncomfortable. Unlike Alma, who tried to avoid her.
Candice respected her wishes for a few laps through the aisles, but by the fourth time they crossed paths, the ruse had become too absurd to carry on.
“Hello, Alma.”
“Oh, hi Candice!” she overreacted.
“How are you and Dale holding up?”
Alma looked as though she had taken a punch from the casual manner that Candice had thrown at her.
“Well…” she wobbled. “All right.”
“Glad to hear it.”
Alma paused and regained her footing.
“Is this some sort of victory dance?”
“I’m just wondering how you’re holding up.”
“In spite of all you’ve done?”
“Yes,” Candice easily maintained her sweet surrender. “In spite of it all.”
“It’s been tough,” Alma started to get emotional.
“I understand.”
“Do you?” she snapped. “Dale gets angry letters and emails.”
“People still write letters?”
Alma was once again caught off guard.
“The older ones,” she relented with a slim chuckle.
“Any death threats?” Candice asked, as though it was an item on her shopping list.
“No…”
“Rape? And lots of it?”
“Why would anyone threaten to rape Dale?”
“I just thought since he and I are both being attacked over the same issue, that maybe the threats would be the same.”
“We haven’t been threatened.”
“We?” noted Candice. “They mention you in some of the letters?”
“No, not really.”
“I didn’t think so. Because if they did, then maybe you’d know what I’m talking about.”
Candice almost offered her a glimpse of the glimpse she had been granted. She nearly paraphrased some of the most harrowing acts, positions, and implements that had been brandished at her. But her newfound place in the cosmos prevailed. She instead wished Alma a good day, and to say “hi” to Dale for her.
It felt like gloating, Candice thought as she walked away, though she hadn’t said anything that would lead Alma to believe that’s what she was doing. Even if Candice was proud, it had nothing to do with any changes
she instigated in the schools.
For when the new academic year started, and the charter was down three grades while the district was up five dozen students, it didn’t trigger any feelings of accomplishment, other than satisfaction at having made it through another year, with a new one on the way.
She was working, raising children, breathing, moving, and when she held still, it was to delight in some passing moment that nobody else would remember.
