I didn't do it.
I never betrayed my friend.
Of course, that's what I'm supposed to say. Expected to say. For the last six months, it feels like all I've said. When you're Jane Borokov, persona non grata, shamed by the media for your role in aiding and abetting three rapists who kidnapped and tortured Senator Harwell Bosworth's daughter, every word you utter in public is repeated.
Ad nauseum.
Just because the press repeats what you say, though, doesn't mean anyone believes you.
I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Santa Barbara, hiding out on the patio. I have a new haircut and color, a frame of layers around my face that glitters in the sunlight. Highlights and lowlights for a redhead make me look older than I am. Long gone is my long hair. I had to shed it, along with my dignity, six months ago.
Along with everything I knew about my life.
If you didn't know any details about me and you observed me right here, right now, you'd see a twenty—three—year—old woman sipping from a small white coffee mug, sitting at a black wrought iron table in an uncomfortable metal chair, watching the surf come in. You'd see a woman in a billowing white shirt over a long jersey maxidress with diagonal stripes, red and white and blue, the colors of the flag.
The colors of true patriots. Of people who defend our government from all enemies, foreign–and domestic.
You'd see she was wearing silver sandals on her feet and big silver hoops in her pierced ears. She'd sip slowly, gazing at the horizon, and you'd think she was the picture of California cool, relaxed and casual, waiting for the next good thing in life to roll on in.
You would be wrong.
You would also miss the guy sitting two tables over, wearing chinos that hug his body just right, a casual, long—sleeved grey lycra half—zip shirt over a tight white t—shirt. The cloth that covers his muscular, athletic body is just loose enough to hide his weapon, and his dark brown hair is longer than most guys like him would wear it.
He's tan, with an almost too upright posture, the kind that screams Mormon missionary or former military. At a glance, he has a slight sunburn on his cheeks, just the tops, like he was playing at the beach yesterday and got a little too much sun.
He looks like an ambitious go—getter, one of the tens of thousands of guys who live on the Coasts, starting companies, managing other people's money, working at corporations in LA and San Diego.
But that hair. It doesn't fit the image.
It's just long enough around the ears to hide his earpiece.
You might think he's on Bluetooth, taking a conference call. Maybe you'd assume he's working for a start—up in Silicon Valley, multitasking while drinking a Red Bull or a trendy Bulletproof coffee.
You would be wrong again.
Appearances are deceiving.
So are people.
My phone buzzes, vibrating in my pocket. I never turn the ringer on now. Never. Anything that draws attention to me has been weeded out of my life. My wardrobe is carefully selected to blend in. I've changed the way I do eye makeup, dropping my Adele—like look. Even my coffee order–a small latte–doesn't have any of the extras I used to ask for.
Before.
Back then.
Life is about blending in now, an impossible task for someone who has more notoriety than Monica Lewinsky. Shame is a booming industry, one with capital and debt, profit and loss sheets, one that trades in the hard currency of humiliation and intrigue. My ringing phone would be a constant reminder of my ongoing debasement, so I turn it off. Pretend there is no sound.
Pretend in order to function, because if I let myself receive a notification every time someone mentioned me, I'd be buried in cacophony, shattered by so much noise I would dissipate, particles of Jane Borokov in the air everyone breathes, and we can't have that.
If I did that, I wouldn't exist, and right now my best defense is just existing.
I'm innocent.
No one believes me.
And as time passes, I see that what people actually believe doesn't matter.
It's what you can manipulate them into feeling that counts.
Media reports about my so—called heinous actions last year are all about stoking the furious fire of public anger. Get them outraged. Get them frothing. Pitchforks and torches are so twentieth century.
Now you tar and feather people with a Share button and a Like. It's so easy. Read the words, feel something, then tap.
Click.
Move on to the next scandal.
It's all part of your life, right?
Until you are the shame sacrifice of the day. Week. Month.
Year.
We're trained to seek high rewards, but the internet lets us do it with low effort. Got to get that dopamine fix somewhere, right?
"Jane."
I start, spilling a bit of the crema from my latte on my hand. The perfect heart at the center of the foamy milk on the surface of my coffee turns into a mangled, jagged mess.
"Jesus! You scared me." I keep my voice to a low hiss, mortified by all of the layers this interruption is breaching. I refuse to look at him, because if I look at Silas Gentian, my newly assigned bodyguard and babysitter, I'll see disgust.
And while I've gotten used to it from everyone else, I still can't stomach seeing it reflected back at me from him.
"Sorry." He's clearly not. "We need to go." His eyes dart left and right, evaluative as he scans the patio.
"You can't tell me what to do. My schedule. My life. My choice." Being blunt isn't in my nature. But nothing about my life is natural anymore, so while it's changed, so have I.
Blunt it is.
"We need to go now."
"No."
His sigh is impatient. It's the sound you make when you really can't stand someone. It's the sound you make when you're barely holding it together for the sake of decency. The sound you make when your least favorite roommate is eating crackers on the sofa and you hate them for no reason.
"There's a credible report that you've been targeted by another internet site. Specific plans for physical acts against you discussed in their forums," he says, the diplomacy jarring. What he really means is that anonymous people on the internet are talking about all the ways to rape and torture me, focusing specifically on actual, actionable plans.
