Innocent until proven guilty—where was that among the good people of East End? And they’d be Channing’s jury. I swallowed and forced myself to continue reading.
East End for Americans,someone posted.
Keep East End safe from migrant criminals.
Was Freddie Lu a migrant?someone asked.
Immigrant, migrant, they’re the same. They used to call themimmigrant but now you can’t say that, you have to say MIGRANT. #Censorship.
Why do they keep changing what we’re allowed to say?
Beneath that post someone had shared a dubious newspaper article about a man named Fred Lu who had confessed to killing a woman, a white woman from the look of her photo. Fred Lu had his face turned, so I couldn’t tell his ethnicity or race.
Is it just me or are we overrun by Orientals?someone posted.
They’re everywhere,someone said.
Our taxes are going to all these Oriental and Asian town events. What about a celebration for Swedish people? Or Portuguese? It’s Kent Choy’s fault.
You mean Kent Cho.
Haha I mean Kiki Choy-me-no-English. Who the f cares? You all know who I mean that’s what matters. He’s the one behind all the ‘celebrations’ of his people. Let’s keep East End American. Is that so much to ask? He’s renovating the park so he can have more party spaces for his people. #KeepOutForeign.
Someone below that replied with#KeepOutForeigners #KeepOutKoreans #KeepOutOrientals.
There were a dozen likes for every one of those terrible comments. I dropped my phone on the couch as if it were on fire. Channing didn’t have a chance. Innocence didn’t matter. They hated her. Hated us. I showed Channing the social media posts later that day, and together we read some that had been added.
“That’s Nora from the beach club,” she said, pointing to the badge of the rose. “She stayed quiet when she could have defended me. Look at those comments about me. I hate this town.”
“She did try,” I said, and pointed to the two I’d seen. “She needs others to help.”
“I guess,” Channing agreed.
“Okay, look at this latest post.” I pointed to one to try to soften the impact of these comments.
Someone had written that Channing’s mom had helped her grandparents sue the town for not fixing a municipal waste line years ago. And she thought Channing was innocent.It makes no sense that she would steal a watch,this person wrote.
Channing recognized the name. “That’s our old neighbor, Mrs. Valerie,” she said. I looked at the name. Grace Valerie. And below it, Nora had “liked” it. No one disputed it. I wondered what kind of social standing Grace Valerie had in East End.
“We need more Grace Valeries in this world,” I said. Then I closed the app. It was better to turn our energy to what we could control. Harabeoji would tell us this if he were here.
“What have you found online about how Kent could have spied on us?” I said to Channing now.
She explained that to obtain the footage, she planned to check Kent’s Wi-Fi and intercept the traffic going from the surveillance camera to where it was stored online.
“Let’s hope it’s cloud-based. That’ll be easier,” she said.
We stayed up all night. Though I started to fall asleep around three thirty, Channing snapped me awake by yelling at the computer. “Too slow!”
I told her to explain. She said, “I used this package captor to intercept the user ID. So now the brute force software can time different tries to correspond with the number of times the account would lock up after a certain number of attempts to break the password. Not sure how long it’s going to take, but it’ll keep trying. Maybe days.”
“Days is okay, weeks would worry me,” I replied.
“The good thing is there isn’t a firewall. Kent’s cheap in ways that don’t show off his generosity. He’s got a weak house security device.”
I had to laugh at that one, and then we nodded at each other. “We have to get him.”
“What can we do with this if we get in? We can’t give it to the police. It’s been obtained illegally,” she said.
