Wesley had to admire the fact that it had taken over a month for them to force Kat into closing down her Twitter profile, suspending her Facebook, deleting her YouTube channel and abandoning Instagram. At first she had fought back, retweeting and mocking them to try and get some support. All it really did was attract more trolls, enough to shut down anybody who came to her defence.
The hardest part had been getting her banned from the official Doctor Backwash fan forums. Wesley had never seen the web series, but all of his favourite YouTubers considered it worse than cancer. In the end, they had targeted a few major players on the forum until they identified Kat as the common denominator and cut her loose.
The only part of her online presence left standing was her personal website, and they’d made the photographs so that they could nuke this last outpost from orbit.
‘Almost ready,’ said Luke, dragging an image into place.
She brought it on herself. Wesley couldn’t let himself forget it. Before the summer, Kat had given a presentation in media studies about misogyny on YouTube and toxic masculinity, calling out a local YouTuber named TrumourPixel who ran a gaming and pranks channel. Everybody at school watched and loved him – she was just too sensitive about his non-PC style of humour.
Wesley had sent TrumourPixel an email about it as soon as the class was over, and couldn’t believe it when he got a response. It turned out Luke and Justin had done the same thing. Did they want to team up to take her down? Wesley had jumped at the chance. While Tru talked about it on his livestreams and made an attack video against her, they had begun to plot together.
This was an opportunity to prove himself. He had to take it.
‘Is that the best picture to use?’ said Justin.
‘It doesn’t matter, blue balls.’
Her website was mainly used for updates on the video game Kat was making. The home page hosted a sort of biography and a video of her, chatting self-consciously into the lens. Luke deleted it all, dropped his chosen image into place, and attached the rest to an email.
He leaned back in his chair. ‘We’re ready to go.’
As soon as the video shuffled to the next in the playlist Kat tabbed to Twitter. Muscle memory. Oops . . . That person doesn’t exist! She could still lurk on her favourite feeds if she wanted, but the well was poisoned now. When the harassment aimed at her had splashed onto innocent people, she knew she had lost.
Innocent people. As if she deserved it.
After the summer, she thought it had all blown over. The video attacking her had stopped being shared. Everybody had gone back to ignoring her.
Now anonymous threats and faceless trolls meant she never felt safe, not even at home. She felt responsible, as if she was at fault for daring to exist in those online spaces in the first place.
Tinker constantly experienced the same kind of abuse, but on a much larger scale. This video was all about why she was supporting the forthcoming women’s march in London, an event Kat wholeheartedly agreed with but was too scared to attend. Story of her life. The topics Tinker spoke about painted a target on her back, but she never let the trolls win. Tinker was kind of a hero.
They would totally probably be BFFs if they ever met. A chronic loner. That’s what Kat’s sister Suzy always used to call her, flippantly, apparently unaware it was her fault Kat had slowly but surely faded into the background of their lives.
The fan forums and online communities had been there for her then. At first she’d believed what Suzy said, that it was all a substitute for real life, that online personas were inherently fake, an idealised facsimile of the truth – who you are online is who you want to be. Online Kat was confident, comfortable expressing her opinions and talking openly about the things she loved. She reached out into the void desperate to make friends and actually succeeded. Friends that loved Tinker and Doctor Backwash as much as she did, who always understood her references and appreciated her gif game. Online, Kat had been everything she wasn’t in ‘real life’.
After a while, she began to think that her online self was the real Kat. The Internet provided a proxy in which she was able to thrive.
Shutting those channels down felt like cutting pieces of herself away. She missed tweeting work-in-progress screenshots of her game and seeking development advice, debating what the heck was up with Esme’s hair in the Backwash Christmas special, playing games online with friends. When she had a bad day it was her only way to purge the negativity from her body, the bracing catharsis of casting a gloomy selfie or grumpy tweet into the social media abyss. Nobody ever replied, but at least it had left her brain.
Last night, with every outlet gone, she’d caught herself leaning into the balmy glow of her blank screen, hoping it might nourish her in some small way like a hothouse plant.
Maybe none of it had ever been real.
Maybe it was pathetic to miss it so much.
Kat had never felt so lonely.
When the email was finished – third-party account, nothing to do with the school system – and they had double-checked their handiwork on her website, Luke and Justin turned to Wesley.‘Want to do the honours?’
This was an audition, and Wesley was determined to pass. He scooted his chair across, almost dizzy with pride and fear and excitement.
The first click saved all changes to the website.
He hesitated, just for a moment, before his second click sent the email.
They all spun their chairs around to watch the fallout.
An email notification popped, and Kat expected it to be from Miss Jalloh, sending through her ‘improvement expectations’. Instead it was from a sender she didn’t recognise, so it had to be the trolls. Usually she deleted without reading, but it was impossible to ignore the subject line: THE WALDGRAVE WANK BANK IS OPEN FOR BUSINESS. The panic in her chest, the corrosive demon of anxiety she always had to fight to suppress, began to stir awake.
It was different to any email they had sent her before. All it contained was a link to the home page of her website. And instead of being addressed only to her, it had been sent to the entire school directory.
With shaking hands, she clicked the link.
For a moment, Kat could not quite comprehend what she was seeing. The trolls had somehow hacked her website and replaced the welcome video with pornogra-phy. A photograph of a dark-skinned woman, naked but for long white socks, her hand between her legs.
And Kat’s face, deftly superimposed over the woman’s own so you could hardly see the join.
Around the room, people began to gasp and laugh.
Wesley couldn’t keep his legs from dancing as they waited for her to react. She stared at her screen, body rigid, before she lowered it from view and spun to look around the room.
All three of them turned away just in time, Luke stifling a laugh in his thick palm. Wesley stared hard at the assortment of paper spread over his desk.
‘She’s going to lose it,’ whispered Luke.
It seemed that everybody had opened the email now, those at the centre tables gravitating to the nearest screen to see what the fuss was about. Most looked shocked, glancing uncertainly at Kat, while others laughed and whistled.
‘Wahey, Waldgrave!’ cheered one of the boys.
Mr Buttercliff looked up from his phone. ‘What’s all this noise about?’
Wesley risked glancing back. Kat was staring at her screen, paralysed, as the noise around her continued to grow. He felt a stab of panic that she might have figured it out, that she would point the finger at him and this would all come crashing down on his head.
It was only when she finally moved to log in to her website that he wilted with relief.
