Page 3 of Make Them Cry
There’s a photo, too. Grainy. Taken through glass. My living room window, blinds half-closed. The angle is wrong, like someone held their phone against the pane and hoped for focus. I can make out the corner of my couch and the plant I keep forgetting to water.
My hands go cold and hot at the same time. I chew the inside of my cheek until it stings. I put the phone face down on the desk like that will make the messages go away.
“Everything good over here?” a voice trills, and I almost vault out of my skin. It’s Helena from People Ops, wearing a sweater the color of therapy and a smile I don’t trust.
“Peachy,” I say. “If peaches were allergic to sunlight.”
She laughs like I told a joke and not the truth. “Don’t forget about our ten o’clock. We value you. This is just a quick chat so we can all get on the same page tone-wise.”
“I look forward to aligning my vibe,” I say, and she air-guns me. I air-die.
Gage drops into his chair across the aisle with an unnecessary amount of leg. He clacks his keyboard like it owes him money, then glances over the top of his monitor at me. He does this thing sometimes where he watches me type like he’s trying to learn my muscle memory. It’s creepy. It’s flattering. It’s both.
I open the repo, because I am here to do a job even if the internet is trying to push me out of my life. The build failed overnight, because of course it did. I roll my chair in, tug my cardigan around me like a hug from a wool ghost, and start fixing what the night broke.
Three commits later, HR pings me again:We’re excited to connect!The exclamation point is a hate crime.
I take a breath that tastes like printer toner and cinnamon gum and tell myself not to cry. I am not a crier. I am a fixer. I am a woman who gives bugs dumb names so the men on my team will stop acting like they’re wrestling dragons when it’s just a missing semicolon named Biscuit.
My phone buzzes against the desk. I don’t look. It buzzes again. And again. I glance. Different numbers, all unknown. One of them sends a link to a public thread where people are debating whether my chin is “too confident.” Another drops my neighborhood like a cursed Yelp review. Another sayssee u in the lobbyand my stomach falls through my shoes.
I stand without deciding to. Gage’s head tracks the movement like radar.
“HR meeting,” I say to the air, and he nods like I’m reporting in.
The hallway smells like lemon cleaner and stress. Our HR suite is down the hall, glass-walled, full of plants that are somehow thriving. I push the door open and the receptionist beams at me like a lighthouse.
“River!” she chirps. “Tea?”
“Do you have anything that tastes like a restraining order?” I ask.
She blinks. “We have chamomile.”
“Great.” I sit on a couch that was not built for humans with hips and fold my hands so they’ll stop performing Swan Lake at the ends of my arms. Helena appears, still therapy-colored.
I stand from the couch and head toward the office, noticing Mark, head of HR, and Doug, another HR team member, standing in the room as well.
“Hi River,” Mark says like this is all totally normal. “Please come in.”
“We value you,” Helena says again, ushering me into the office. “Let’s talk about tone.”
“I’d love to talk about safety,” I say, sitting in a chair across from the three of them, and pull my phone out of my pocket. “I’m being harassed again. Doxxed, nearly. Look.” I shove the screen toward her.
Helena does the HR face: concerned, neutral, legally noncommittal. “Oh no,” she says. “That must feel very… challenging.”
Doug shifts in his chair uncomfortably. “Yes, very challenging.”
“It feels dangerous.” I flip to the window photo, to thesee u in the lobby, to the one that saystonight ;)“I need help. We need better security downstairs, and I need—” I stop, because what I need is a different world.
“We take online conduct seriously,” Helena says, which is not the same as taking my safety seriously. “Have you tried disengaging?” She gestures at the evil rectangle like it is both the problem and the solution. “Sometimes when we stop responding?—”
“I haven’t responded,” I bite out. “I don’t even post under my full name anymore. They don’t need me to engage. They just need each other.”
“Well,” Doug says, smile tightening into company policy. “We can offer you time off to reset. And we’d love for you to attend our Digital Civility workshop. It’s really empowering.” He smiles at Mark like they’ve thought of the greatest idea since sliced bread.
Which sidenote: Is slice bread really such a great thing? Sometimes you want to slice your own bread, right? Thicker slices for French toast. Smaller slices for a quick healthy sandwich. Right?RIGHT??
I try to regain my focus as I give a polite smile. “Is there a segment on ‘what to do when someone sends you a photo taken from outside your window’?” I ask. “Or is that more of an advanced module?”
