Not enough!!!
Leave it to Di to be the better angel. Anna was content to leave the conversation at that, but her friend wasn’t done.
I’m on my way, the kids are at that methuen trampoline park lol bday party
How many times had Anna thanked her own lucky stars that she hadn’t become a baseball mom like her best friend, since the sport was interminable, and yet on this cold Saturday morning, Di had somehow been strategically relieved of her sports momming duties, just ten minutes down the road and on her way, somehow intuitively aware that Anna was here, alone, staring at theMacBook and not quite sure how to purge the menace from all of her electronics, Gen X Luddite that she was.
One thing Anna was good at: making notes. She opened a Word document on her computer and wrote a stupid little note to herself:
Note to self, February 12, 2022, tons and tons of emails, messages, facebook scam replies, totally and completely unhinged messages on Instagram, and text messages from unknown numbers. Have blocked all of them, disabled FB, changed privacy settings on Instagram, etc., last nite threw phone in bathtub (lol oops it’s me I’m the problem it’s me) but just making a notein case of emergency!!!
She saved the note into a folder on her desktop that was marked MISC., where other notes she had written to herself lived, notes about passwords and about what she wanted to do if she ever won the lottery and about her hopes and dreams for her children and about where she had buried the time capsule in the backyard, because she was certain that she would forget (and it was true; she had forgotten).
Di let herself in without knocking. She was tall and ruthlessly thin, about six inches taller than Anna if she stood without hunching, which she rarely did. Ever since they were younger, she possessed the kind of unaware beauty that made people stop and look at her. She could command attention in a pair of Adidas track pants and an old ratty sweatshirt, which was equal parts infuriating and admirable. Today she wore loose jeans and a hooded sweatshirt from American Eagle that she must have brought along with her from the Dark Ages, from before they had kids, from college, even. She looked like a teenager despite two unmistakable diamond earrings peeking out from beyond a blond bob.
“Well, I know what we do first,” she said, marching into Anna’s office.
“You could bring coffee, you know,” Anna said.
“How do you know that wasn’t the ‘do first’ part?”
“If it was, it had better include a donut, because I’m starving.”
“Fine, but don’t tell my kids.”
It was more like Don’t Tell the Hamilton Mommies, because they would be horrified to know that anyone would go to get a chocolate glazed donut at Dunkin’ rather than apain au chocolatat Honeycomb, but girls from the North Shore, they knew better. Di got her coffee iced and light, no matter the season (“regular,” actually, in Massachusetts-speak, which meant cream and enough sugar to kill an adult from diabetes if they drank it every day, and Di swore she didn’t, but she ran pretty regularly, so who knew if it was exercise or just genetics that kept her looking like she wasn’t drinking bad coffee and sugar in her free time).
“So what’s next?” Anna wanted to know. She had a feeling she was not going to like the answer, just like she hadn’t liked the answer when they were teenagers, borrowing her mother’s Mercury Villager minivan for what was just supposed to be an hour and ending up across the border in New Hampshire with a carton of P-Funks for under twenty dollars, smoking butts in the back of the car, legs up on the sea wall at Hampton, home late, her mother smelling the smoke, getting caught even though she had set the clocks back a little, always getting caught because her mother knew to watch the 11 p.m. news.
“The truth is, we gotta report it,” Di said. “Simple as that.”
“Report what to who?” Anna said. Big ideas, always, Di with her big ideas.
“The calls. The messages. All of this shit. You havegotto file a police report. If you’re not going to talk to Denny about it, well that’s one thing. I can’t talk you out of that, I guess. Your marriage, your mess. But you can’t just put your head in the sand here. These people are doxing you. How do you know someone isn’t going totake things to another, crazier level? It’s just stupid to let this go.” At Dunks, they had parked in a space designated for takeout orders, but the lot was mostly empty. Anna’s Volkswagen ticked. She had gotten in an accident, side-swiped by a pickup truck on 113 in Newburyport in the fall, and ever since, the car made all kinds of bad noises. Unholy noises. Rattles. It shook on the highway. She sometimes wondered if a tire would just shimmy loose from the friction. Right now, the ticking felt like some kind of warning.
“It’s ridiculous, all of it,” she said. “You don’t really think these adult women are responsible for this, do you? And, let’s be honest. It’s not scary as much as it is immature. My address . . .” Anna paused and laughed, because, truly, it was actually almost funny. “I mean, all of this stuff is public information! If these people are people who know me, they already know where I live. Plus, this shit is all on the Internet anyway. What is the fucking point?”
“I think the point is to scare you.”
“It’s not scaring me. It’sannoyingme. I’m annoyed. Mission accomplished.”
“I still think it’s worth going to the police,” Di said.
“Is that really necessary?”
“What is it that people always say?” Di said. “When people show you who they are?”
Anna knew the expression. Believe them. When people show you who they are, believe them. Mimi’s face, twisted up, like the knot from a balloon. Believe them. Believe that they are who you think they are, she said to herself, but believing something like that meant stepping into a place where terrible things were possible, things that Anna didn’t want to accept.
“I know what you’re saying,” Anna said. “It’s not like I’m trying to be generous. I’m just trying to be realistic. I don’t think these are serious threats. The only thing I have to fear is fear itself.”
“And maybe the Hamilton PTO,” quipped Di.
“It seems unlikely that the PTO is going to plot my untimelydemise, Di. We’re talking about women who don’t even do their own nails.”
“So, realistically,” Di asked, “do you think that timing is an accident?”
Accidents. Were there any accidents? Anna thought it was possible—possibly possible—that the attack, if it was, in fact, an attack, had been planned to coincide with the dance. But what if it wasn’t that? She could hear Denny in her head still. What was more likely was that thiswasjust a kid. That thiswasjust a prank. That thiswasjust some stupid overreaction.
