I called Monica once we were on the outskirts of Minneapolis to let her know I w
I called Monica once we were on the outskirts of Minneapolis to let her know I would be home soon. “You’d better use the back door,” she said. “I got mobbed by reporters this morning.”
“What did you say to them?”
“I must have had too much coffee. I got a little carried away. I told them the story wasn’t at our house, it was in the jail cells at the federal courthouse. It was in the laws that gave the state free rein to revoke our rights in the name of defending them. It was so weird to have reporters ask me what privacy had to do with free speech. I felt like I was giving a community ed talk to reporters who didn’t know one goddamn thing about their own history.”
“That sounds kind of awesome.”
“It was dumb. If they use any of it, it’ll just be one line that fits their narrative. I just hope I didn’t do any harm. I tried to avoid saying anything that would be damaging to Wilson if taken out of context, but now I’m nervous.”
“How did they find out about you? About us?”
“– Facebook.” She added a word before “Facebook” that I had never heard her say to me before. (She’s very careful about not being a bad role model, and apparently has no idea how kids actually talk to each other.) “Sorry. It’s just – gahh, somebody posted something, and they were all over it. What a crappy way for journalists to do research. It’s like they’re hanging out in a middle school hallway hoping to pick up some gossip. And Facebook is like a petri dish for growing egos. Somebody gets likes for having some remote connection to someone who was on the evening news. That was the last straw for me. I deleted my account.”
“No you didn’t.”
“What do you mean? Can you still see it?” She sounded horrified, not so much that she still had an account but that I would read her most private thoughts, shared with just her closest friends and the Surveillance-Industrial Borg. (I would never actually look at Monica’s Facebook. That would be creepy.)
“You probably deactivated it,” I said. “To actually delete it, you have to go through a bunch of steps and then you have to not touch it for two weeks. I’ll show you how.”
“Thanks. And thanks for not saying ‘I told you so’ even though you did. Did you have fun in Sibley County?”
“Yeah. It was great. I feel much better now.”
“I’m glad. Look, I have to go teach, but—”
“That’s fine. I need to get some homework done.”
She hesitated for a moment, probably wondering what “homework” was code for, because we both knew I wasn’t about to waste time on algebra at a time like this. “Well, don’t work too hard.” That was her code for “don’t do anything that will get you arrested or seriously hurt.”
“You too. See you later.”
I asked Nikko to drop me off a couple of blocks from home. I waved as I rode off, and they waved, too, and I realized it didn’t bother me anymore that they were being so adorbs together.
I made it home without spotting anyone lying in wait and made myself some coffee before getting to work, using the time it took the kettle to boil to inspec