Page 59 of Seven Percent of Ro Devereux
My computer pings again, then five more times in quick succession. Miller cranes around to look at it, flinching when he tweaks his shoulder.
“Jesus,” I say, climbing off his lap. “What is goingon?”
The texts are from Maren, each more frustrated than the last.
Have you seen this NYT article?
I want to make sure you’re ok so please respond.
Haven’t heard from you all afternoon and starting to get worried.
Ro??
LOOK AT YOUR PHONE RIGHT NOW.
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“It’s Maren.” I reach for my backpack to dig out my phone. “She said there’s someNew York Timesarticle?”
Miller walks over to the desk, leaning close to read my computer screen. “New York Times?” He looks up at me. “About Josie and Hayes?”
“I have no idea.” I plug in my charger and set my phone on the desk, waiting for it to power up. “You haven’t heard anything about this, either?”
Miller shakes his head and runs a hand through his hair, already sticking up from my fingers raking through it. Looking at him, I think of that line fromWhere the Wild Things Are, a book Dad and I read all the time when I was a kid.I’ll eat you up I love you so.Miller’s pink cheeks, and his lips a little swollen, and the span of his shoulders under the sling. I could swallow him whole. I could murder myself for missing out on this.
“What?” Miller says, when a minute’s passed and I’m still staring at him.
I blink. “Nothing. I just—” I step toward him, rise onto my toes to kiss him again. He steadies me with a hand on my waist, and I feel him smile under my mouth.
“Your phone’s on,” he says.
I clear my throat, drop back onto my heels. “Right.”
The screen fills immediately, a string of texts and missed calls from Maren, Sawyer, Jazz, Felix. And mixed in, the most sinister of all: Evelyn Cross.
Evelyn’s text is right at the top, so I see it first.Do not post publicly. Same goes for Miller. Wait for direction from Jazz.
“What the hell?” I mutter, opening up all the others. There’s a frantic stream of back-and-forth between Jazz and Felix in our group with Miller, mostly the two of them talking each other off the ledge and then demanding to know why we aren’t responding. In the middle of the thread, Felix has asked a question that goes unanswered by Jazz:I thought they agreed not to run this?But there’s no article link, just an incoherent rush of panic. Sawyer’s message is an incredibly unhelpfulWTF is going on??
It’s Maren, when I finally open our text thread, who’s managed to explain.
She texted me for the first time at five, when the article dropped and we’d already left the airport with our phones off.Have you seen this??she’d sent, with a link.MASH has bigger problems than Josie and Hayes.
When I open the link, the article’s title crashes into my silent bedroom like a tree felled in the woods. It splinters over my skin.
The Insidious MASH Effect, it reads, in huge black letters.
And then, below it:The Dark Underbelly of America’s Favorite App.
“What?” Miller breathes over my shoulder. Wordlessly, we sit down on the bed and read.
Much has been said over the last few days of MASH’s impact on existing relationships, after the very public demise of Josie Sweet and Hayes Hawkins’s years-long partnership. Everyone knows by now of the Monday-night protest at Rockefeller Center that turned violent and left Alistair Miller with three broken bones. Everyone knows of—and almost unanimously adores—America’s oracle, eighteen-year-old Ro Devereux. What many don’t seem to realize is there’s something more sinister at work in the high-tech halls of Denver’s MASH HQ.
My interest in MASH’s inevitable dark side started, I’ll admit, at home. I have a niece—she’s fourteen. Since she was a child, since before she could even read, she knew she wanted to be a veterinarian. When kids are small, we tend to write them off. “Maybe they’ll grow out of this.” She didn’t. My sister’s home was a hospital for stuffed animals and, as Lara got older, real ones. Neighborhood strays, a one-eyed frog she found in the creek, eventually their own adopted dogs. Lara has always knownwhat she loves. And then, in September, she downloaded MASH.
This app, purportedly built on “science” that MASH has staunchly refused to attribute to any person or institution, told Lara she was going to be a marketing manager. Lara does not know what that means, only that she will never achieve her dream. You can imagine, maybe, what’s followed since then. In case you can’t, I’ll spell it out.
In the time since my niece received her MASH results, she’s stopped combing her neighborhood for injured frogs and hobbled birds. She’s given up her volunteer position at her local animal shelter, once one of her greatest sources of joy. Her mother—my sister—has watched her retreat so far into herself she is unreachable.
