17 s e v e n t e e n : let's get the bitch

"Ooooooow!"

"Relax," Cas sighs.

"Are you okay?" LeAnn asks.

As Claire sinks down to the floor, Cas pulls me aside. "Who the hell is she?"

"Oh, that's Claire. I met her at Marie's Soups."

"Who's Marie?" she asks cluelessly.

I sigh, pinching the bridge of my nose. "It's just the name of the charity organization I'm volunteering for. I told you about this."

"Oh, right," she feigns agreeance.

"So, what's wrong with her?" Cas asks… rudely, I might add.

"She got plastered last night… and here we are," I explain.

"So, I do it, and the National Guard comes to crash the party, but she does it, and she gets to slouch on my kitchen floor?" Sophie asks pointedly.

She had come down the stairs with the world's lightest footsteps.

"Where'd you come from?" LeAnn asks lowly. It was a rhetorical question, but LeAnn meant it literally. Sophie hates that.

"Hell," Sophie replies, deadpan.

Cas giggles next to Claire's limp body. She loves watching them unfold.

"Hey," I pipe up, "I know you've had a rough few days… I mean, I don't exactly know why, but I get that the party you threw was a bit of a spiral—"

"It wasn't a spiral," Sophie snaps.

"What would you call it?" Cas interjects.

"A party," Sophie says, sprinkling some sugar into her coffee.

I stop her sugar-pour as it's getting borderline diabetic. "A party for you is a spiral," I add.

"What would you call what she did last night?" she points to Claire.

"Blowing off steam?" LeAnn shrugs.

As Sophie's now fed up with LeAnn's commentary, I change the subject.

"We need to focus on that bitch," I spit.

"Hmm? Who?" LeAnn asks.

"Whoever runs clarenton secrets." What's up with them today?

"Oh, honey," Cas drawls. "We can't actually find out who runs this account."

This is the last thing I expected. Cas. Cas. Not taking bullshit from anyone, fast-talking, bitch-slapping Cas.

"We're going to find whoever's dicking us all around," I shout. "It's too much this time."

"Who are you to decide what's too much?" Sophie counters. There's her argumentative side… at it again.

I cross my arms, daring her to elaborate.

"What about Katy Schmitt? Danny? Shit, even Matt?"

The evidence is all out on the table. Leaked therapy tapes, screenshots, audio files. Whoever runs that horrific account has it all—the means to destroy everyone in our county. And I never took a stand against it until it was about me.

Suddenly, all of our phones ping, except for Claire's.

Speak of the devil. The newest post from clarenton secrets reads, "Looks like Genny Williams, the belle of Clarenton, has finally exited her shell. The hermit's out and on the town."

Below the text, there's a picture of Claire and me at the park in New York City, a picture of us outside the boutique, and one from that night, at Jake's posh townhouse.

"Wow, bitch is thorough. We have to get her," Cas sneers.

"Or him," LeAnn offers.

Right. The suspect pool just got larger.

"Mmm, let's get him," Claire groans.

She got pretty fucking wasted…

"We need to start from the beginning," I state. They all crowd around me. It's like one of those brain building activities—I'm the big circle in the middle, and they're my branches.

"Cas, scroll down to the first post on the account; take note of the date and the contents of the post." She retrieves her phone with vigilance, swiping vigorously.

"LeAnn, scroll to the posts about people we know of, and make meetings with them. We need to find out how they think their information got out."

From the corner of my vision, I see Sophie scurrying upstairs with her mug. "Soph," I call.

She turns slowly, surprised that she got caught. "Hmm?"

I purse my lips. "Sorry, I'm just too tired to be on a manhunt right now."

My expression softens. We still need to talk about why she went on a bender the other day.

"Okay, we'll handle this," I say, resigned. I just wish I didn't have to lead my own manhunt.

Before long, Claire's jolted awake by a cup of coffee with extra sugar and creamer.

"It's hard to tell," she pipes up suddenly, breaking the silence we've maintained.

"Hmm?" I ask. LeAnn looks up.

"It's hard to tell who the hell could be behind this," Claire elaborates. "They go after everyone—jocks, theater kids, cheerleaders, nerds, chess club, et cetera. The person behind this account has probably posted about themself at some point."

"Wait, that could help," Cas speaks up. "If they have posted about themself, we just need to make note of every poor shmuck that the account has exploited, starting from the beginning," she points to the first post.

June 14, 2016.

Depicted are Matt Driscoll and Derek Whitmore, lip-locked in a supply closet.

"Wow," I gasp.

"This is some throwback shit," Cas exclaims.

"I remember this!" LeAnn says.

Matt Driscoll, star baseball player at our old middle school. I think he beat the state record for home runs completed in a single little league game or something. Yeah, he was that kid—the annoying jock type. He slapped heads as he grazed down the hallway, he pretended to throw balls for innocent passersby to catch, he skipped the lunch line, and much, much more. So imagine our surprise when Matt, who would scream homophobic slurs spontaneously during class, was caught kissing another guy.

There was an uproar.

Everyone, and I mean everyone saw this picture. And that was clarenton secrets' genesis.

Derek supposedly only kissed Matt for clout. Allegedly, his friends dared him to "test" Matt. He did something that most straight guys wouldn't dare. Was kissing Matt just a "test," or was Derek concocting a little experiment of his own? That's the age-old question.

Somehow, Matt got booted off of the baseball team, and his head-slapping days were over. I heard that they're still together to this day… they deserve each other. Anyway, we all graduated and split off into different high schools, but this post was the talk of the summer.

"Yeah," Cas continues, "These two idiots decided to experiment with their sexuality in a supply closet."

"And it was practically national news," I whisper.

"Barely," Cas rolls her eyes.

I continue, "The true scale of the issue doesn't matter. The fact that it was national news for us is what's important. Some kids mess around in a closet, so what, right? But to another kid in the same school, that shit's gold. Some kid who wanted to market this story…" I drift off.

"We just need to find who," Cas looks over the post intently.