Men, Women & Children (27 page)

Patricia read the messages, which detailed multiple visits to TimM’s house, lunches eaten with TimM, holding hands with TimM, and TimM’s continued promise to keep their relationship a secret from Patricia, who was conjuring images of TimM as a fifty-year-old pedophile luring her daughter to meet him in a seedy motel where he had no doubt defiled her. Patricia’s worst nightmares were all written in the black-and-white text of a keystroke-log printout.

As she read on, she began to piece together that TimM was likely not the criminal adult that she had assumed he was, but rather one of Brandy’s peers. The many references to events, people, and locations at Goodrich Junior High School, and to spending time with each other between classes, made it clear that TimM was a student, not an adult. This realization made Patricia feel only slightly better. She was still barely able to breathe as she thought about her daughter lying to her, sneaking to this boy’s house when she was supposed to be visiting her friend Lauren, and maintaining a Myspace account she knew nothing about.

After reading the entire keystroke log, Patricia went to Brandy’s room and logged into her Freyja account. She scoured the account’s friend list, blogs, comments, and in-box for anything that might give her a clearer understanding of how exactly her daughter was using this account. Patricia never got the chance to see any of the overly sexual photos or read any of the blog entries about sexual activity that her daughter had posted before deleting them once she began her relationship with Tim. She saw only her daughter’s Freyja account in its final form: a simple painted image of the goddess Freyja as a profile picture, no incriminating comments or messages from any other users, nothing but innocuous and innocent e-mails to and from TimM, which outlined the beginnings of an extremely normal and nonthreatening teenage relationship. And, after seeing Tim’s profile picture, Patricia accepted that he was one of her daughter’s peers, not an adult sexual predator.

From everything the e-mails contained, Patricia concluded that this TimM was likely her daughter’s boyfriend. Patricia found evidence that they had shared their first kiss but no sign that her daughter had engaged in any sexual behavior beyond kissing. Her daughter was merely growing up. Even in the face of this realization, Patricia was unwilling to accept the fact that her daughter was dating a boy behind her back.

It seemed from the pattern of communication that her daughter had been lying about going to Lauren’s house every Friday night for the past several weeks and was, instead, spending her time at TimM’s house. Patricia assumed that her daughter would attempt to initiate the same lie that night, and she devised a plan in which she would confront her daughter, catch her in her lie, and revoke all of her online privileges for at least one month. That would take care of deciding the consequences for her actions.

But the larger issue of what to do about her daughter’s relationship with TimM was more difficult for Patricia to deal with. TimM seemed like a nice enough boy. Patricia knew that her daughter would have to start dating soon anyway, and she thought that a boy like TimM would probably be better than most, at least based on the exchanges he shared with her daughter on Myspace. She was tempted to let their relationship continue, after the grounding ended, of course. But something deep in Patricia’s core, some need to control as many things as she could in her own life and in the life of her daughter, compelled her to end her daughter’s relationship with TimM. Ending it would send the message to her daughter that she wasn’t ready to date, and when she was, the first thing she should do would be to tell her mother.

So, while still logged in to her daughter’s Freyja account, she assumed her daughter’s identity and composed an e-mail to TimM that read, “Can’t come over tonight and I don’t think we should see each other or talk to each other anymore. Sorry. Bye.” Patricia sent the message and thought about deleting the account, but instead opted to change the password to idontthinkso and log out.

chapter

twenty-two

K
ent Mooney, Jim Vance, and Don Truby sat next to one another in the stands of the Goodrich Junior High School football field, just as they had for every previous home game. Kent did not mention his discovery that his ex-wife was getting remarried. Don did not mention his discovery that his wife was cheating on him with a man who went by the moniker Secretluvur and whom she’d met on AshleyMadison.com. Jim Vance opened the conversation by saying, “So, I’m getting a vasectomy tomorrow morning.”

Don said, “Good luck, man.”

Kent said, “Yeah, good luck.”

Don said, “Things going bad with Dawn or something? You seem fucking depressed, man.”

Kent said, “No, things are fine. Just wish Tim was playing in this game. I thought he’d come around at some point during the season, you know—snap out of whatever funk he was in—but this is it, the last game.”

Jim said, “It’s tough when they’re this age. There’s always next year.”

They said nothing else as they watched the opening kickoff, which was returned by Tanner Hodge for twenty-six yards.

Every member of the Goodrich Junior High School Olympians eighth-grade football team understood the importance of a victory that night. Before the game, Coach Quinn had told them all that they should leave everything on the field. He highlighted the fact that some of them might not make the cut when they moved on to high school football, and so, without a victory, this would be the last organized football game that some of them would ever play. For that reason alone, he expected all of his players to give the greatest effort they had ever given in their lives for any single event. Danny Vance knew that he would play football again, no matter the outcome of the game, but he agreed with the basic premise that each player should play to the best of his capability to maximize the team’s possibility of winning. It was with this attitude that he called the first play in the huddle: the Z cut left, a middle-distance passing play, with Chris Truby set up as the primary receiver.

The Olympians approached the line of scrimmage, got in their various stances, and waited for Danny Vance to initiate the play. Once initiated, the play was executed flawlessly. Each member of the offensive line found his block assignment and kept him from reaching the quarterback. The running backs effectively deceived the linebackers into thinking the play was an outside run. The receivers entangled the secondary, except for Chris Truby, who beat his defender off the line of scrimmage to such an extent that the defender twisted his ankle and fell down, leaving Chris wide open. Danny Vance threw a perfect pass to him, which was caught. Having no defender near him, Chris Truby turned up field and ran an additional sixty-four yards for a touchdown.

The play’s result infused the Goodrich Junior High School Olympians with a level of confidence that made them each feel the game’s outcome would be a predetermined victory for them. Danny Vance watched from the sidelines as the extra-point team took the field. Brooke Benton approached him and said, “That was awesome, babe. In my opinion, we should celebrate you guys winning tomorrow by”—and then she leaned in and whispered in his ear—“having sex.” Danny attempted to maintain his focus on the game, on the task at hand, but found it difficult, as thoughts of sex with Brooke crept into his mind. She kissed him on the cheek and then returned to the far side of the sideline area, where the other Olympiannes, including Allison Doss, were in the process of cheering.

Brooke said, “I really think we’re going to win this game. Seriously. Don’t you?” Allison said, “Uh, yeah. Probably.” Allison hadn’t been thinking about the game’s outcome at all. She instead was thinking about a series of text messages she had exchanged with Brandon Lender earlier that afternoon. Brandon had initiated the conversation by sending a text message to Allison that read, “So when can I fuck you in the ass?”

Allison had replied, “I don’t know. When do you want to?”

Brandon wrote, “ASAP.”

His enthusiasm made Allison happy. She wrote “I’m cheering tonight. After the game?”

Brandon wrote, “K. Meet me at my house after midnight.”

Allison wrote, “You live like 2 miles away.”

Brandon wrote, “Yeah, it’s not too far to walk.”

Allison wrote, “K.”

Brandon wrote, “Make sure you shower good and get your ass really clean. If I can smell shit or anything, I’m out.”

Allison wrote, “K.”

Brandon wrote, “Just tap on my window when you get here and I’ll open it for you. It’s the one in front on the left of the front door.”

Allison wrote, “K.”

She had been thinking about her upcoming encounter with Brandon for most of the day. She hoped that she could clean her anus properly. The anxiety she felt about having anal sex for the first time had nothing to do with the pain she assumed would be associated with it, but instead was solely based on her fear of rejection by Brandon Lender for any reason. She hoped it would be over quickly and that he would hold her for just a few minutes before she would have to crawl back out of his window and walk home alone.

Allison tried to calm her anxiety by focusing her attention on the game. The Culler Cougars answered the Olympians’ initial score with an eleven-play drive that resulted in a rushing touchdown. They followed the touchdown with an extra point and the game was tied seven to seven at the end of the first quarter.

Danny Vance found the second quarter more difficult than the first. He couldn’t clear his mind of thoughts of sex with Brooke and as a result was unable to score again before the half. Over the course of two drives he completed only three passes out of seven attempts and the Olympian rushing game produced only one first down. The Culler Cougars, too, had difficulty scoring in the second half, with three offensive drives that combined for a single field goal resulting in a half time score of ten to seven in favor of the Cougars.

chapter

twenty-three

B
randy Beltmeyer had begun to think that her mother was becoming suspicious of her increased time spent away from the house. She and Tim Mooney discussed it at lunch and decided that she would not visit him that Friday night for the first time in many weeks. Nor would she spend her time online talking to him. Instead, she would stay at home and watch television with her parents in an attempt to allay any suspicions about her activities outside the house.

Brandy had just finished eating dinner with her mother, father, and younger brother, when her mother said, “So, are you going over to Lauren’s house tonight?”

Brandy couldn’t identify her mother’s tone. It wasn’t suspicious, and it wasn’t genuine. It was something in the middle. Brandy said, “No, I thought I’d just stay at home and hang out.”

Patricia was surprised. She wondered if TimM had already read the message she sent him posing as her daughter and decided to initiate some kind of fight that led to a breakup. She hoped this was the case. She said, “Oh, yeah, it’ll be nice to have you home on a Friday night for once.”

Brandy helped her mother clear the dishes and then went into the living room, where her father and little brother were already watching
Deal or No Deal
. Patricia was tempted to let the night continue without confronting her daughter. She was tempted to see what would happen in the coming days when Brandy found out that she would be unable to log in to her secret Myspace account because her mother had altered the password. She was tempted to do these things, but instead she came into the living room and said, “You know, since you’re home, we could just do your Internet check right now instead of waiting until tomorrow.”

Brandy said, “Okay.”

They went into Brandy’s room, and Patricia looked through all of her various online accounts just as she usually did. She found nothing abnormal, nothing that was cause for alarm. Brandy said, “Everything look okay?”

Patricia said, “Everything looks good on these accounts. But isn’t there another account that we didn’t check yet?”

Brandy said, “No, that’s all of them.”

Patricia said, “I think there’s one more. Your Myspace account.”

Brandy said, “No, we just did that one, remember? You said you thought that guy named GoofSlop had no business being my friend and we defriended him.”

Patricia said, “Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. But, um, that’s not the Myspace account I’m talking about.”

Brandy could feel the cold sweat forming on the back of her neck. She had no idea how much her mother knew—if she knew anything at all or if this was some kind of psychological trick, an attempt to get her to divulge a secret, with her mother having only suspicion and no evidence of the secret’s validity. She wondered if her mother had been monitoring everything she did on the Freyja account; if her mother had read the blogs she’d written when she first created the account; if her mother had seen the pictures she’d taken of herself in gothic makeup and lingerie. She concluded that if her mother had known about the blog posts and the images, she would have said something a long time ago. If her mother knew anything, it was a recent development, and the only information she could have possibly gleaned from the Freyja account was that she and Tim were a couple, which, she reasoned, wasn’t that terrible.

Brandy said, “I only have one account, Mom. You just saw it.”

Patricia said, “Oh. Because I was under the impression that you had another account, one that you can tell me about freely and maybe avoid some of the punishment that’s coming your way, or you can keep playing dumb about it and get double the punishment. Your choice.”

Brandy still was unable to detect any hint in her mother’s accusation that enabled her to determine if this was all based on suspicion or if her mother had hard evidence against her. She chose to deny everything and hope that her mother had no evidence. She said, “Mom, I only have one Myspace account. I don’t get what you’re doing here.”

Patricia said, “Then I guess you probably also have no idea who TimM is.”

Brandy knew she’d been caught in her lie. She said, “Mom, I’m sorry. I just. I knew you’d never let me go out with him or see him or talk to him so I had to—”

Patricia said, “Lie to me at every turn? And engage in behavior that is absolutely unacceptable and more dangerous than you could possibly even imagine?”

Brandy said, “It’s not dangerous, Mom. I like him and he likes me.”

Patricia said, “Well, you can go on liking each other. But you can’t do it using the service provider that your father pays for every month. I changed the password on your account, so don’t even bother trying to log in. I have your cell phone downstairs, and I’m blocking your computer from the wireless router. And I know you probably think you can pick up the wireless signal from the neighbors, but you can’t, because I blocked their router from your computer. And if you try to set up another network through their signal, your computer will send me an e-mail, so don’t even try. I want you to stay up here and write me an apology—and it better be sincere. You are not to come out of your room for the rest of the night. Is that understood?”

Brandy was crying. She said, “Why are you like this? I wasn’t doing anything wrong!”

Patricia said, “If that was the case, then you wouldn’t be getting punished.”

Patricia left her daughter’s room listening to her cry.

T
im Mooney was looking forward to a night of doing nothing but playing
World of Warcraft
. He had been meaning to raise his reputation with the Oracles for some time, and viewed a Friday night with no other obligations as the perfect time to run a few daily quests with various factions that he had neglected.

His father usually left him money for pizza or fast food, but that wasn’t the case tonight. Tim looked in the usual places that his father normally left money, a note about food, or the food itself, and found nothing. He assumed it was just forgetfulness on his father’s part and made himself a sandwich, which he took into his room and set on his desk as he started up his computer. At the start-up screen, he noticed that the
World of Warcraft
shortcut icon was gone. He opened his hard drive folder, then opened the programs folder to look for
World of Warcraft
, and found nothing. He did an exhaustive search of every folder on his computer’s hard drive in an effort to find
World of Warcraft
but found nothing. Not wanting to reinstall the entire game, and not knowing exactly what was going on, Tim searched for possible explanations online and still found nothing explaining any spontaneous uninstalls of
World of Warcraft
. He reasoned that there must be something wrong with his computer and ran a full scan for viruses, spyware, adware, and so on. The scan returned nothing abnormal. He resigned himself to a fate that he was not looking forward to: reinstalling the entire game, a process he knew would take at least an hour.

He put the first of four disks needed to install the original game in his disk drive and began the reinstallation, eating his sandwich as he waited. Nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary as he ejected the fourth and final disc, having completed the original game’s installation. He accepted the end-user license agreement and began downloading the first of several patches that were necessary to play the game, the last of which indicated that it would take twenty-five minutes to download. Tim left his computer and went to the living room, where he spent twenty-five minutes watching an episode of
Wife Swap
that didn’t interest him. He then returned to his bedroom to find that the patch had finished downloading. He applied the patch and was finally ready to play
World of Warcraft
again.

Tim Mooney entered his username and password, an action that had become a physical reflex for him when he was prompted by the site’s log-in screen, and received a message that read, “This account needs to be converted to a Battle.net account. Please [click here] or go to: [http://us.battle.net/account/creation/landing.xml] to begin conversion.” Tim retyped his username and password, assuming he’d made an error the first time and again received the same message. He had converted his account to a Battle.net account on the first day. It was mandatory to do so in order to play. He was unsure if this had something to do with the game being uninstalled from his computer, so he contacted the Blizzard support center via chat and, after some time spent waiting, finally received a response.

After a minute or so of chatting, the customer-support representative for Blizzard informed Tim that his account had been canceled earlier that day, and that a special request had been made to cancel the account as soon as possible, not even allowing for play to continue through the end of the month. When Tim asked who was responsible for this error, he was told that the account holder, Kent Mooney, had canceled the account.

Tim ended the call and stared blankly at the inoperable log-in screen. His father had canceled his
World of Warcraft
account. He should be furious, but found it impossible to generate anger. He just stared at the log-in screen, feeling detached from it all, having no control of any of it. He watched the “Pale Blue Dot” video on YouTube and found no comfort in it. Where before it had made him feel as though the insignificance shared by all humanity gave greater importance to each individual’s experiences, he now found that that same insight made him feel that nothing mattered. There was nothing anyone could do that would mean anything. The whole of life, of existence itself, was pointless. He went back into the living room and watched an episode of
16 and Pregnant
, waiting for his father to return home so he could ask him why he had canceled his
World of Warcraft
account.