Sleep.
Uninterrupted sleep.
Not a bad way to pass the time waiting for Chrissie to come home.
A bang startles me from deep sleep. Oh fuck, how long have I been sleeping? And what the hell? Linda is rushing toward me, frantic and keyed up about something.
“What the fuck is the matter with you people?” she exclaims in a voice that could puncture the sound barrier. She’s breathless, alarmed and discomposed in a way I’ve never seen her before. “Don’t you ever answer your phones? I’ve been trying to call you and Chrissie for hours. Why don’t you ever pick up the fucking phone?”
She drops on the chaise beside me.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I ask.
“Len, get the fuck out here!” she screams. Her eyes shift back to me. “Where’s Chrissie?”
I frown. “She’s out for the day.”
She exhales again. “Oh God. Wait. That’s probably better.”
Better?
Every muscle in my body jerks and then tenses. Nothing rocks Linda. Linda is nonreactive, but she’s near hysterical and she’s happy Chrissie’s not here.
I am fully alarmed now even though I don’t know why.
Len drops down on a chair in front of a patio table. He flips open his laptop and starts to rapidly hit away at keys. His eyes are fixed on the screen. He doesn’t even look at me. I spring from the lounger and go to the table, staring over his shoulder, trying figure out what has him in full panic, too.
“What is this?” He’s clicking through pages too fast for me to figure out any of them.
“It’s your worst nightmare,” he warns. “Imagine The Osbornes, the Kardashians, Jersey Shore and Intervention all rolled into a multi-episode documentary. That wouldn’t be as bad as this. I don’t know how the fuck we’ll make it go away. It’s on the Internet. It wasn’t bad when Kaley just had the demented burned Barbies on strings dancing around narrating and pretending to be different characters in different scenes. Anything real world Kaley shot at an angle with effects so you couldn’t see the images clearly. It was really clever and artsy, that. But she’s gone live, face-to-face and there’s no hiding what the hell we’ve got here.”
“Len, what the fuck are you talking about? Would one of you just explain in plain English, please?” I shout, frustrated since neither of them seems able to tell me in a direct way what the fuck is going on here.
“Kaley’s World on the Internet,” Len counters in an annoyingly overexcited way. “It’s your Kaley. Christ, look!”
Kaley’s World—Oh God, a website. The reason the administrators called Chrissie in for a meeting today—this is not going to be nothing, not with the way the Rowans look.
I wait, dread turning my digestive tract to ice.
“Manny, the girl’s gone viral,” Linda says pointedly. “She’s on fire. Eleven million hits on today’s episode and it’s only been up a few hours. It’s on the network news. She’s crashed the servers at UCLA and a dozen other campuses with kids logging on to watch her live feed today. She’s been an Internet star for nearly a month. How could you and Chrissie not know? Every episode, more than a million hits. This has been going on for weeks.”
I stare at the screen anxiously waiting for the video to load. What the fuck is taking so long? It’s the Internet. Then Kaley is on the screen. Shit, it’s fucking Barbies turned into puppets. Alarm shoots through me. That is the interior of Chrissie’s house. The sounds. What the hell is that I’m hearing? Is that Chrissie and me fucking? The background sound effects are us fucking while Kaley tapes a mock shock talk show with burned Barbies as the hosts. Oh no…what the hell is she doing?
The camera pulls wide. Kaley stands up. “This is the last episode of Kaley’s World. I’m pretty sure I’m going to be silenced after this. Shut down after today’s live feed. But I’d like to send one last message to my dad, Alan Manzone. I’d like to call the remainder of this feed ‘Denial is a Terminal Addiction.’ So here is our live family therapy.”
A link appears at the end of the video. Linda clicks on it and the computer is redirected to a streaming video.
“This has been streaming for over an hour,” Linda informs me anxiously.
The video loads.
Kaley is shaking a can of spray paint. The wall. That’s my Malibu house. In big, bold red letters she’s already tagged: Fuck off Daddy. Entire walls tagged with brief offensive comments. She is filming live from inside my house.
I can’t collect my thoughts enough to wonder how she got in, what my next move should be, how the fuck to shut this down…or even that other part…Fuck off Daddy. She is crying and destroying my bedroom with a bat and cans of spray paint for any idiot on the Internet to see.
What do I do?
What do I do?
I need to stop the live feed.
Shut down the website.
Oh fuck, everything on the Internet lives forever…no, don’t think about that. And don’t think about what’s going to happen when Chrissie sees this.
Why would Kaley do this?
“Are the tweets still posting?” Linda asks anxiously.
Len scrolls through his phone. “Yep. Girl is trending at number one. New tweet every twenty seconds. Oh God, you don’t think our Bobby is there with her helping her do this? She can’t tweet, film and swing a bat all at once.”
They lock eyes.
“Kaley has help,” Linda announces. “It’s probably that airhead Zoe Kennedy. That girl does anything Kaley asks.”
“So does our boy,” Len reminds heavily.
Linda runs her fingers through her hair. “Oh fuck.”
My temper explodes. “Who the fuck cares if Bobby is the one helping her? I have problems here. We need to stop this. Now.”
They both look at me.
Oh fuck, they don’t know what to do either.
Not encouraging.
“Linda, stay here,” I order. “Keep Chrissie here until I get back. If she hasn’t seen it yet, don’t show it to her. Len, get in the fucking car. We need to get to Malibu.”
We climb into my Porsche and shoot out of the driveway, cutting at high speeds through Pacific Palisades only to be brought to a near stop on Highway 1. Fucking LA traffic. Shit, twenty miles to my house. How fucking long is it going to take? Len is still on his phone watching everything.
I hit the voice button on my car. “Call Goldman, Loeb, and Fisher.”
Len stares at me.
The receptionist answers.
“This is Alan Manzone. Put me through to Goldman. Now!”
“I’m sorry, sir. He’s in a meeting. Would you like—”
“Put me the fuck through now. I don’t care what he’s doing, who he is talking to—”
Click. Did she put me on hold? Then hideous Muzak.
“Sorry about the misunderstanding, Manny. What do you need?”
Ah, Goldman.
Sounding anxious.
Greedy cunt. You better sound anxious.
“I have a problem. I need to get a streaming video pulled from the Internet, a website taken down, a Twitter account frozen…” I look at Len. “What else?”
“Wait, wait, wait. Slow down. What are we talking about here?” Goldman says.
Len leans forward. “Go to www-dot—all one word—Kaley’s-World-dot-com. Click on the tab, ‘Denial is a Terminal Addiction.’”
Lots of noise in Goldman’s office pours through the car speakers. Sounds of action. Good.
“OK,” he says in an abrupt, focused way. “I’ve got Loeb with me, and our best technology and intellectual property rights litigator. Hold on.”
Silence. They’ve muted the call. Oh fuck. Not good.
“Who is the girl?” Goldman shoots through the speakers, lawyerly suspicious and insulting. The way he says that is repulsive and leaves little doubt what he’s thinking.
“Kaley Stanton. My stepdaughter, you asshole.”