Girl Gone Viral Read online

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2019

  Copyright © 2019 by Arvin Ahmadi

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE.

  Ebook ISBN 9780425289921

  Version_1

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  Part One: Girl ExposedChapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Episode 005

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Episode 006

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Part Two: Girl in the Deep EndChapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Episode 020

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Part Three: Girl Fully LoadedEpisode 021

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Part Four: Girl RedeemedChapter Thirty-one

  Episode 032

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Part Five: Girl with the TruthChapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  I can’t stand this terrible uncertainty.

  —Ursula K. Le Guin

  “Schrödinger’s Cat”

  My dear family:

  I must leave you.

  I don’t wish to be found.

  The world is complicated,

  The future even more so;

  I don’t wish to complicate it further.

  Yours,

  Aaron Tal

  PART ONE

  GIRL EXPOSED

  Chapter

  One

  I swear, I’m not usually this creepy. I’m not the kind of person who gets off on eavesdropping, and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve stalked a crush on social media. But right now, I’m sitting next to a celebrity couple at an expensive Manhattan restaurant, and it’s impossible not to stare.

  The afternoon hangs still. No breeze, just the faint heartbeat of the city around us. If you didn’t glance up at the glimmering skyscrapers, you would think we were having lunch on a sidewalk in Paris. You would think nothing could go wrong.

  I turn toward Hailey Carter, the star of the hour. Her face practically demands attention: flushed cheeks, messy golden-brown curls, those curious blue eyes. I’m surprised she’s not wearing sunglasses. It’s the kind of painfully bright day where nothing can hide—not the loose thread in Hailey’s whimsical sundress, not the puddle of blood beneath her filet mignon, and especially not the fact that her boyfriend has no interest in being with her. As my gaze drifts to him, he manages to slouch even deeper into his wicker chair and focus even more intently on his phone’s screens.

  Hailey’s lips move, though I don’t hear what she says. Whatever it is, Timmy doesn’t reply. His jaw tenses, and he runs a hand through his perfect brown locks, but he doesn’t offer her any real attention.

  Everyone says Hailey is lucky to be dating Timmy. She’s a constant fixture in the tabloids, the love child of two washed-up pop singers, and he’s the young Grammy winner with a fan base so rabid it sometimes feels like a parody. She dropped a tennis shoe from her balcony last year and almost killed a man; he drops platinum albums.

  Hailey Carter pipes up again. This time it’s not her lips but her throat. A deep and demanding “ah-hem.” Timmy finally looks up from his phone, his face peeking out from the shade of the large overhead umbrella, and his eyes narrow on the nervous girl across the table. I hear their next words clearly.

  “What?”

  Hailey frowns. “Are we really doing this again?”

  As I stare, a paparazzi drone swoops down and flies past my nose. More of them descend like vultures, smelling the blood of a juicy tabloid story, just like they swarmed me seven years ago when word had gotten around that my dad was missing.

  “Get out of my face!” Hailey says, swatting one of the drones away. “Out!”

  “Hailey, stop it,” Timmy hisses. “You’re causing a scene.”

  “Oh, I’m always causing a scene, aren’t I, Timmy? You get to be the calm, cool, collected one, and I’m just crazy.”

  Once, I broke down in front of those flying cameras outside our home. I poured out my ten-year-old heart to them, and my mother ran and grabbed me by the wrist, pulling me inside and slamming the door shut. She told me my father was gone. That there was no point in looking for him after the police found that cold, heartless note. I told her the drones could help, because if he was out there, he needed to know we were hurting.

  When you’re desperate, you’ll do whatever it takes to be heard.

  “You are crazy, you know that?” Timmy spits at Hailey. He looks nervously in my direction. “You’ll never change.”

  My dad never did turn up, and eventually the drones outside our house moved on. On to the next girl’s tragedy. The next juicy headline.

  I wish I could say I moved on too, but certain memories are like shadows. You catch one glimpse, one fuzzy reminder of your dark past, and you realize it’s been following you this entire time.

  “Get out!” Hailey Carter screams. She leans across the table and shoves Timmy with her ring-studded fists.

  Timmy stumbles out of his seat. A waiter rushes from inside the restaurant, though he stands a safe distance from Hailey. She picks up the steak from her plate and looks like she’s about to hurl the slab of meat at Timmy, whose delicate fingers are curled around his chair like it’s a shield. The waiter gasps, extending an arm toward poor, beloved Timmy.

  “GET OUT,” Hailey screams again. The veins in her neck pop.

  Timmy doesn’t move. He glances out of the side of his eye at the whirling drones, his chest rising and falling. He can’t come off like a coward when he’s being recorded. His fans think the world of him; they’re expecting him to be brave. I look down at the piece of steak in Hailey’s hand. I can se
e every detail. The crimson streaks running through the pinkish brown meat. Hailey’s fingers digging deep into the flesh.

  I look back up. Hailey’s face and mine are so close we could melt into one. I’m looking inside her, and I see a girl who can’t show the world her multitudes because it refuses to see more than one dimension.

  She says it once more, with absolute finality. “Get out.” This time, Timmy listens—he jumps over the sidewalk fence and takes off down the street. That’s when Hailey begins murmuring to herself, “Get me out of this world.” Over and over and over. Whether she means her personal life or her mental health struggles, or this modern world where the lines between reality and fiction are blurring every day—it doesn’t matter. Because everything freezes, and the Manhattan streets dissolve before my eyes.

  I’m not really there.

  Chapter

  Two

  I rip off the headset.

  I can’t tell which is beating harder, my head or my heart.

  It takes a second for my eyes to adjust from pixels to reality. From the mess of Hailey Carter’s life to the spotless white halls of the Palo Alto Academy of Science and Technology. From her floral-printed sundress to the track sweatshirt in my lap . . . and Dr. Travers’s brown loafers right in front of me.

  Given the fact that Dr. Travers doesn’t usually leave his desk when he lets us work outside the classroom, this is less than optimal. I look up at Dr. Travers. His arms are crossed.

  “You’re supposed to be on Instagram, Ms. Hopper.”

  You’d think the sudden presence of my History of Social Media teacher would freak me out more, that the slow tap, tap, tap of his foot would intimidate me into getting back to working on the assignment. Instead, my heart calms down. Hailey Carter’s voice drains out of my head. I’m back.

  “Sorry,” I reply sheepishly. Dr. Travers gestures at my headset. I slip it into the pocket of my hoodie. He gestures again, this time to my side. I pick up the class-issued iPhone.

  He smirks. “Back in my day, if we wanted to be delinquent, we just checked that little phone under our desks. Headsets weren’t quite in vogue yet.”

  A few of the other kids in my class are scattered throughout the hall, holding back snickers.

  “Now, I know it’s smaller, heavier, and much slower than what you’re used to,” Dr. Travers says, “and it only has one screen. But I thought the experience of scrolling through Instagram on an iPhone would make the assignment more authentic.”

  “Mhmm.”

  “Like digging up fossils, or setting foot in the Colosseum.”

  “Just like that.”

  I’m waiting for Dr. Travers to leave, but as if he’s just seen my private thoughts, he crouches and lowers his voice. “Your mind’s stuck on that contest, isn’t it?”

  My eyes jump and meet his square glasses.

  “I swear that’s not what I was doing—”

  “Of course it was. You were on WAVE. Besides, I’ve seen you and your friends with your cameras, filming Ms. Lee around campus.” Dr. Travers chuckles, and I realize he might actually be watching our channel. “You know, Opal, I fully expected some of our students to enter. Kara Lee, absolutely. We have so many ambitious minds at this school, and where better for lofty dreams than virtual reality? But I never would have expected you. You’re taking quite the risk, aren’t you?”

  My breath tightens, like someone’s gripping my lungs. Dr. Travers isn’t knocking my ambition; he’s acknowledging my past. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in high school, it’s that people talk. And when it comes to my attempt at winning Make-A-Splash, there’s plenty for people to talk about.

  “Now get back to work.”

  Dr. Travers disappears into the classroom. If we went to a normal high school, my classmates would take his departure as a cue to ditch the iPhones and mess around. It’s a Friday afternoon, after all.

  But nothing is normal at PAAST. Everyone gets back to work.

  I swipe to unlock this ancient phone, astonished at how tiny the screen used to be before they made them retractable and foldable. I open Instagram. Our assignment is to look at formerly popular accounts and identify patterns in how they posted: time of day, ratio of selfies to non-selfies, frequent themes. Dr. Travers likes to joke in class that if he’d been born with six-pack abs instead of early onset male pattern baldness, he could have used those tactics to be “Insta-famous.” Instead he settled for Twitter and teaching.

  But I can’t focus on the assignment. My mind is still lingering on that viral Hailey Carter breakdown. That line. It’s ringing in my ears. Get me out of this world.

  Maybe that’s why it caught me off guard when Dr. Travers brought up the contest. I mean, everyone at school knows I’m entering—but they also know better than to bring it up around me, because winning would mean returning to a world I was supposed to have left behind.

  My senior year was all set before this contest. I’d worked hard these last three years at PAAST, piling on extracurriculars and good grades to get into Stanford. The plan was to apply early decision and create new memories there. But then I heard about Make-A-Splash. Join the WAVE, I read on the official page after I’d come out of the shower, my hair dripping over my shoulders. If you’ve ever thought about hosting your own channel, now is your chance . . . The winning team will be rewarded with $1 million, flights to Palo Alto Labs’ headquarters, and an exclusive meeting with Howie Mendelsohn . . .

  Seven years ago, when I needed him most, Howie Mendelsohn couldn’t give me the time of day. News of the contest brings all those memories flooding back, a wave of emotion crashing into my perfect sand castle of stability.

  At the end of the period, I mosey into the classroom to drop the iPhone back in the bin on Dr. Travers’s desk.

  “Earth to Opal? You look like you saw a ghost.”

  It’s Moyo. His puffy vest jacket brushes the back of my hand, and he smells faintly of autumn leaves. I turn around.

  “Oh, wow.” Moyo’s eyes pop. “I amend my statement. You look like you asked the ghost to prom and it turned you down.”

  I muster a playful smile. “Ghost prom sounds a lot more interesting than the crap we’ve been airing on WAVE.”

  “Just wait until you see what Kara asked me to design for Monday’s episode. You’ll wish we were doing ghost prom.”

  “I swear, if it’s another shopping trip to Paris . . .”

  “Mon chéri! Un béret, s’il vous plaît!”

  My expression sours as I think about how badly I’d misjudged Kara’s star power. I learned the hard way that just because she’s been a fixture on Zapp since the days when it overtook Instagram on multiscreen phones, it doesn’t mean she’s any good in VR. Kara’s Zapp brand is best described as Lifestyles of the Rich and Almost Famous. (Sample caption: “Another trip to St. Barts, ugh.”) I never bought the whole rich-kid self-deprecation act, but plenty of other people did. I assumed her two hundred thousand followers would appreciate a fully immersive look into her life, so we started Kara Lee: Behind the Scenes on WAVE. But three-second snippets don’t translate into full episodes. Kara’s clunky. She’s awkward. She said “such that” twenty-seven times in one half-hour episode. I counted.

  I nearly tore Kara’s hair out last weekend. She’s driving our chance of winning Make-A-Splash into the ground. I keep trying to bring up data—what do her fans want, what are they clamoring about in chat rooms—but Kara’s convinced she knows her brand better than the numbers do.

  I should have known she wouldn’t listen. Kara’s the star, and I’m essentially tech support. That was the arrangement. She gets her way.

  History of Social Media is our last class of the day, so Moyo and I head back to the dorms together. He tells me about some of the absurd Instagram captions he saw during the assignment, and when I bring up a particularly bad pun involving Middle Eastern fo
od, Moyo hunches over and pretends to vomit. “I falafel,” he groans. In the senior hall, we pass his soccer teammates, who raise their eyebrows and nudge elbows like they always do whenever they see us together, even though Moyo and I have been friends, just friends, since freshman year. We stop outside my door.

  “What are we doing this weekend?” Moyo asks. “There’s a new taco place on University Avenue I kind of want to check out.”

  “I’m staying in,” I say.

  “Again?” Moyo lets out a disappointed sigh. We spent all of junior year dreaming about senior off-campus privileges, and so far, I’ve spent the first three weekends holed up in my dorm room.

  “I want to see if I can do something to pull our numbers up. You know the contest ends next week, right? Monday’s episode is our last chance.”

  Moyo shrugs. “Won’t do any good with Kara treating us like we’re invisible. But your call. Let me know if you need a break.”

  I enter my dorm room, which is even messier than Hailey Carter’s life. The school year started barely three weeks ago, and my floor already looks like a post-apocalyptic war zone, complete with Red Bull shrapnel and dirty laundry debris.

  My walls are checkered with glowing “You May Also Enjoy” tiles from WAVE, years’ worth of Hailey Carter meltdowns in XP form, ready for 360-degree consumption. Because WAVE wants you to experience as much as possible in their world, anytime, anyplace. “If you liked Hailey’s epic lunch meltdown, then you’ll love the time she threw a hissy fit in the middle of Times Square!” I’ve experienced them all, though. Hailey’s bizarre antics are virtual reality gold. She’s the joke that keeps on giving, and there are rumors that she’s been so good for WAVE that they’re going to sponsor her rehab.

  Get me out of this—

  There’s a knock at the door.

  “Come in!”

  As soon as the voice-activated lock pops open, Shane barges into my room. He’s wearing a white undershirt that looks like it hasn’t seen a washer in eons. His brown hair is chaotic, even messier than it was on the first day of classes, when Dr. Travers called him out for having “Bieber hair.” No one really understood what that meant, but it annoyed Shane enough that he dropped the class.