Page 33 of Taste of Addiction

“I’ll ask, ma’am. And if there is nothing, I will send out for it immediately.”

“Thank you.”

* * *

It doesn’t take Collins long to knock at my bedroom door. I squint from the light filtering into my dark room from the hallway. It makes my eyes burn and my forehead pulse from the ache. I look into his hands that hold three bottles of painkillers and smile weakly.

“You’re in luck. Owen has a full stock here after he had some dental surgery done last week.”

“Thank you,” I say, taking the Motrin, Extra Strength Tylenol, and Aleve out of his hands. “This should give me some relief.”

“He said you can just keep them. He had a prescription for Tylenol with Codeine so he ended up not needing these. Had them just in case.”

I give him a single nod, extending my hands to collect the bottles. My head is throbbing, and I need to get the pain under control before I can feel human again. I close the door, not bothering to turn the light on.

I pop off the lids to the pill bottles and take one of each. Surely something will start to work soon. I crawl back onto my bed and rest my eyes, hoping for some relief.

It is just after eight in the morning, and I’m already frustrated with the day. But today is Saturday, and if I’m going to transition back to real life on Monday, I better have something to show for it.

When the tension in my head starts to ease marginally, I roll to my side and turn on my phone. No new messages. No new voicemails. Nothing.

I log in to my Bad Advice email and scan through the messages until I find one that is intriguing.

Dear Bad Advice,

I think I may be in love with a figment of my imagination. I have been infatuated with a girl online for eight months. But we never met. She always has an excuse as to why it is not possible. I want to just give up on her. But what happens if this is the love of my life, and she is just being shy?

-Potential Victim of a Catfish

Hmm… This one is tricky and super interesting to me. I can understand the need to physically see a person in order to verify love. But to start falling for it initially? It would be realistic to think that it starts in the mind and the heart first—before physical attraction takes root. It is hard to be my sarcastic self on this one, but I try. It’s the theme of my blog, and I have to stay in character. However, I really want to follow up with the question asker and see how this all gets resolved. The obvious solution would be to make the girl video chat.

Dear Potential Victim of a Catfish,

This girl (or dude) may be playing you, but why not have some fun and play her back? Add some fun filters to your pictures and jazz up the upper body muscle virtually. Face swaps can be fun too. Get her to buy into the new revised version of you… So when she breaks up with you before seeing you or reveals she really is a man, then at least you have some amazing photos—and the experience—to use on the next girl.

-Bad Advice

Knowing that Sophia is no longer lurking in the house, taking over my favorite rooms, I am able to move about freely once again. I carry my laptop into the library and set up shop on the desk in the middle of the room. I walk back to the kitchen to prepare a mug of coffee and use it to help with the swallowing of three Tylenols and one Motrin. Surely the caffeine coupled with the painkillers will help me cope. I have a lot of work to get done and lost time to make up for.

I wonder what Graham and Sophia are doing right now. It’s like he went off the grid, and I’m too stubborn to reach out first. Are they sharing a mimosa on the private plane? Reminiscing about old times? Talking about the jewelry industry? I think the not knowing aspect is the hardest part. My mind jumps to worst-case scenarios easily when she is involved. So, maybe she is napping on his shoulder, or moved down into resting her head on his lap. Ugh.

When I get back to the library, I decide to start consolidating all of my research into one document. I need to have something solid to show to Dr. Williams if I want to pass the class. I open up my secret email and copy and paste all of the photos I have taken into one blank document. This helps me to analyze any similarities between them. I will not be able to include the photos of people in my printed article, but I can at least use them to help me to push forward with my investigation.

Graham already thinks that Mark is not the only key player in all of this drug mess. He thinks someone else is pulling the strings. I doubt it is Paul. He seems too young to have that type of authority. After all, he is a frat boy in college. I am nearly positive he is just the middle guy, helping to drug the girls, run interference, or act like the hero to push suspicion away from himself. However, it is best not to completely eliminate him from my prime suspects list.

The series of photos involving Benjamin, Samson, and Edward all seem bland. Nothing stands out. They are the men who like to speak in non-English languages. I type in voice translators into my Google search engine and try to find the best one that may help me transcribe the low quality audio tracks of the video recordings I took when I would go on dates with Mark. Graham confiscated some of my footage that I was trying to collect from the Halloween party and the Maylord Hotel incident, so I am missing a lot of data as is.

Through my random research, I come across a blog post that catches my eye and reminds me of theBad Advicepost I just published. This particular one is on how a US citizen discovered that her foreign boyfriend was catfishing her for a year on the Internet. He was getting her to send him nude photos by sending her some of his own for encouragement—except they were not his. They were stock images that were boosted from a porn site. Her post talks about the devastation she went through and how she wasted eleven months of her life by believing the person she was messaging was someone he was not. She proceeds to share how she used a reverse image search to discover that the photos her supposed boyfriend was sending her were, in fact, fake.

I type out some personal notes on how a picture can be uploaded online and searched on the web to see if there are matches. I can feel the break of her heart in her personal blog post where she bares her soul for anyone willing to read it. Ugh, that sucks.

I doubt I would be able to do the same thing she did with the photos I gathered. For one, I know they are not stock images. For two, the quality is mediocre at best. However, this whole searching the web for similar photos has driven me to the idea that maybe I could use software to see if facial features match with any other photos from the Internet.

I google the words “facial recognition” in quotes and get a dozen search topics on software that specializes in analyzing faces in photos and pairing them with already stored images on the web. This is a potential game changer, assuming the quality of mine are good enough.

I sit back in my chair and kick my feet up to ponder over this revelation for a minute. I take a sip of my coffee and pinch the space between my brows with my fingers. My headache is still present, but not nearly as painful as it was an hour ago.

I grab my phone and open the App Store to see if this type of software is readily available to the basic consumer. I type in the search bar and discover that twenty different apps exist. I find the one with the highest star rating, but also with a decent amount of reviews, and then I click on it to download to my phone. I walk myself through the tutorial, then start putting photos into the database. The software targets each face individually and then scours the Internet for potential matches.

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