She laid belly-down on her double bed, kicking alternating calves against the bedspread while she read her next biochemistry assignment and listened to Death Cab for Cutie on her iPod. With a neon pink highlighting marker, she traced a sentence in her textbook about the biosynthesis of membrane liquids. She had an exam in a week and was going to have to set the curve to have any shot at an A after missing lab yesterday.
She had e-mailed her lab TA with a polite explanation for the absence, but had not received a reply—at least not when she’d last checked her e-mail twenty minutes ago. She thought about logging in again but didn’t want to go online. She didn’t want the temptation of reading those horrible messages about herself again. She didn’t want to think about the possibility that there could be newer postings.
As impossible as it seemed, she was trying to follow Courtney’s advice to ignore the Web site altogether. She and Courtney had practically grown up together in New Jersey. When they had both accepted college admissions in the city—Courtney at Columbia, Megan at NYU—they had celebrated the fact that going off to school was not going to separate them. But now they were sophomores, and the reality was that the six miles between Courtney’s Morningside Heights apartment and Megan’s Greenwich Village place may as well have been a train ride between Chicago and Philly. Between classes, homework, and making new friends at their respective schools, they were lucky to see each other once a month.
But Courtney had dropped everything when Megan had called her yesterday. And Courtney had proved more helpful than either Megan’s parents or the police. Courtney was a volunteer at a domestic violence hotline and had some experience dealing with stalking—or at least its victims.
According to Courtney, Megan would be best off ignoring what had been written about her on the Web site. They were merely words in cyberspace. The first post she’d found went back three weeks, and until she came across her name two days ago, the words had sat online—stagnant, black and white, incapable of harming her. She simply needed to erase the problem from her mind—forget she’d ever seen the posts, and force herself to go back to normal.
Easier said than done.
She kept replaying Sergeant Martinez’s words in her mind. Messing with someone’s head isn’t a crime…. There’s a whole bunch on there that’s way worse…. You can’t let this get to you.
She reminded herself that there were thousands of posts on that Web site, millions if one were to count all of the many anonymous chatboards and blog comments that were on the Internet overall. She couldn’t let a couple of sentences—among all of that garbage—get to her.
Still, instead of learning more about how the molecules of life were synthesized, she found herself running through a host of possible suspects. Her father had immediately brushed off the sergeant’s suggestion that Megan might know the author of the notes. That’s the kind of father he was, the kind of father who instinctively leaped to his daughter’s defense. Of course he had sought to protect Megan against the notion that she might have made herself an enemy. Of course he hadn’t stopped to wonder.
But he had reacted so quickly that Megan hadn’t stopped to wonder, either. Even standing for half an hour in the precinct, she had never paused to really think through the question of who might be in a position—or have a motive—to “mess with her head,” as Sergeant Martinez had said. Or, as Courtney had put it more bluntly, “pull a mind-fuck on her.”
There was that guy outside their apartment last month. He was at the bus stop when she ducked inside Jamba Juice. She initially noticed him because he was cute, but by the time she had her Mango Mantra, the 3 bus had come and gone without him. Instead, he stood at the entrance of her building, and as she approached, she could have sworn that he’d been reading the list of names posted at the entrance, his finger resting close to her buzzer. She’d blown it off once the lobby door shut securely behind her, but now she wondered if there was some possibility she’d seen him before on campus.
As hard as she tried to remember that man’s face, her mind kept pulling up another image. Keith.
They were still together when she picked her fall classes, so Keith knew her schedule. Keith would know how much something like this would distract her from school. Keith was addicted to the Internet. He would know about a site like Campus Juice, and he would know that the site provided anonymity. And Keith could be vindictive when he set his mind to it.
But they had broken up back in June, and the online posts didn’t start until the beginning of September. Would he really stew for almost three months before carrying out a full-on assault of terror against her that continued to this day? It was hard to imagine.
But as she wrapped her necklace—the thin silver chain dangling the heart pendant that Keith had given her—around the tip of her right index finger, she couldn’t help but wonder.
Over the quiet distraction of the background music flowing through her headphones, she heard the clang of a pan against the electric stovetop in the kitchen. Heather had emerged from her cave for a feeding.
Megan had hoped that the one upside to getting a roommate would be a new friendship, a girlfriend to talk to late at night. And when Heather first moved in, she wasn’t particularly cold. In those initial weeks, she joined Megan in the living room for a couple of episodes of Project Runway, one of the only shows Megan ever made time for. They also formed a habit of piggybacking their takeout orders so they could share dinner at the table.
Then one night in June, after Heather caught Megan crying in her room after officially calling it quits with Keith, Heather had actually opened up to her. She said she’d gone through some rough times—a boyfriend, someone older, someone who really fucked with her head. She said she was pretty screwed up until she went through counseling for it, and now she was getting a fresh start. But then Megan had made the mistake of asking her what had happened between her and the guy to make it so bad, and all of a sudden, Heather was gone. She had a paper to write or something, excused herself from Megan’s room, and never mentioned the conversation—or any other one, for that matter—again. She was just a tenant renting a room.
Then, yesterday, when she got home from the police station, for just a second, Megan had felt something like a bond again when Heather noticed how upset she was and asked what was wrong. But when Megan told her about the Web site, all Heather had said was, “Wow, I’m sorry to hear that. That must be really stressful.”
Megan supposed it was a polite enough response. But it wasn’t the kind of thing a real friend would say. Courtney had spent nearly an hour with her on the phone yesterday, helping her pull herself together and put the entire situation into context. “The big picture,” Courtney kept saying.
Then later, when Megan was hanging her coat in the closet outside Heather’s room, she heard Heather on the phone saying something about “threats” on a Web site. She hadn’t asked Heather to keep it a secret. And she probably should have expected Heather to gossip to whomever it was she spent most of her time with when she wasn’t home. But she didn’t want anyone else talking about it. About her.
And she didn’t need to hear that word. Threats.
Megan looked at her watch. Eight forty. She should be at her morning spin class, pushing through a sprint to spike her heart rate. But Courtney had advised her to deviate from her usual schedule, just in case.
She turned her attention back to a paragraph about steroid biosynthesis in rat cells, and realized she was actually starting to feel better. She had gone a full hour without crying. Maybe in the afternoon, after classes, she’d go to the gym and use the elliptical trainer for a little while.