I drank my double espresso and felt increasingly irritated. I guess caffeine doesn’t really help you stay cool, calm, and collected in situations like that, but Alan’s makes the best espresso in the world. And since I hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before, I needed it.
11:59. God, this was taking forever. I drummed my fingers on the communal tabletop, earning myself a sneer from the girl sitting across from me. I shot her a tight, insincere smile, which is how Midwesterners say “I hate you” to strangers.
And then finally—finally—finally it was noon, and I could see the results of my handiwork.
I hit refresh again, and this time the front page of TheWanted.com updated with a post labeled “THE TRUTH.” In the post, I’d embedded the video Jacinta had made—only this time it was public and accessible to everyone, just as she’d wanted. And that meant it was also automatically on The Wanted’s Twitter page (200,000 followers) and Facebook page (250,000 fans).
I hit refresh again and looked at the Twitter and Facebook widgets on the post. At first it had been tweeted and liked zero times. Within five minutes, the tweet count went up to 10, 20, 35, 50. The Facebook likes climbed similarly from nothing to dozens. As the minutes passed, both counts got higher and higher, reaching the triple digits within the hour. And the comments rolled in, one after another, also numbering in the hundreds within sixty minutes. I sat in that coffee shop all day, hitting refresh, reading the comments, the tweets, the Face-book posts. Other blogs picked it up, big ones—major gossip blogs, even a few big news sites. There was no question about it: Jacinta Trimalchio’s final act had gone viral almost as soon as it had appeared online.
As for what happened now—well, it was out of my hands. I’d done my job. I’d done right by Jacinta, something so few people had done in her short life.
I think I sat there for five hours before a breathless Skags banged into the place. She always did make a noisy entrance. She was holding hands with Jenny Carpenter, who looked at me with shy eyes.
“Naomi!” Skags shouted, earning her the ire of nearly every other resident of the coffee shop (including my across-the-table neighbor). “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to get a hold of you all day!”
I turned around and said, “Well, hello to you, too.”
“It’s discount day at the record shop!” Skags said. “They’ve got a mint condition bootleg of Liz Phair’s Girly-Sound songs. They said they’d only hold it for us for an hour. C’mon, we’ll split it!”
“Hi, Jenny,” I said.
She looked at me timidly.
“Hi, Naomi,” she said.
“You know she gets like this every single Monday, right?” I said. “Every Monday is discount day at the record shop.”
“I know,” Jenny said, and we shared a smile. Skags rolled her eyes.
“Enough with the femme bonding,” she said. “If we don’t get there within ten minutes, they’re gonna sell it to somebody else and my life will be freaking over. Naomi, get off your dumb computer and live in the real world.”
I took one last look at The Wanted. The hit counter on the post was through the roof.
“Okay,” I said, and shut my laptop. Then I shoved it in my shoulder bag and followed my best friend and her girlfriend out into the late-summer sunshine.