“It’s gone!” Samantha said, her voice triumphant. “Thank God. What the hell happened?”
“I don’t know, exactly.” Regardless of the fact that leaning against a subway window was never a good hygiene choice, she needed the support. She sagged backward. “But it doesn’t matter how. It did and I seriously don’t want to think about how many people saw it.” Given the commonality of instant notifications on status updates, it could be a lot. Everyone on her friends list. Including her mother.
Her phone dinged in her ear. And then again.
Katrina smacked the back of her head into the window so hard she actually managed to garner a side glance from the man sitting next to her, no small feat in New York, where eye contact on the subway was a social no-no. “I’m going to die,” she told Samantha.
The man looked away again. He so didn’t care.
“I’ll meet you at your place,” Samantha told her. “I’ll bring wine.”
“Thanks.” It was something.
“We’ll strategize damage control. Don’t freak.”
Yeah, too late. “All right, thanks. See you in a bit. Bye.” Tucking her hair behind her ear, Katrina bit her lip and gave her phone a sidelong tentative glance as it rested in her lap on her red skinny jeans, afraid to see who the latest texts were from.
Except one was from Drew Jordan, her best friend at NYU, her secret crush for four years, then her onetime lover after a boozy night at an art exhibit. Her throat caught as she frantically read the text, all too aware of what he must have seen.
Magnificent penis huh? I’m kinda speechless.
And with that, her humiliation was complete.
Because while there were quite a few BootyBook entries she remembered only in the vaguest sense, she distinctly recalled what she had written about Drew in the first flush of morning-after bliss when he had left her apartment. She had rated him a nine, skimping on a full ten because they weren’t in an actual dating relationship and because she had coaxed him into bed only after many vodka tonics. For kissing she had given him a ten, along with the description “dreamy.” His penis had been rated, well, magnificent, as he had noticed.
And she had written, “Now I understand what everyone is saying. Sex with someone you love is better. Happy sigh.”
But that happy sigh had turned into weeks of misery when it became apparent that neither one of them knew how to deal with the sexual aftermath of crossing that line in their friendship. She had acted weird, texting him too much. He had pulled away. She had flaunted a guy in front of him at a concert. He said she drank too much. Then came that fateful day when she realized that he was avoiding her altogether.
And she had absolutely and utterly humiliated herself by drunk texting him that she missed him.
So really, in the context of that text, she wasn’t sure she’d made it any worse.
God. Her life was over. No man was ever going to want to date her again.
* * *
An hour later, Katrina felt as though she was on a QVC infomercial. But wait, there’s more!
Just when she thought nothing could be added to her shopping cart of suck, yet another text or email came in, proving that it could always get worse.
“Who is James again?” Samantha asked.
“He’s the guy who didn’t have a condom and when I insisted he find one, he came back with a sandwich bag and said he could make that work.”
“Oh, gross, that’s right.”
There was a moment of silence where Samantha contemplated the horror of that moment, and Katrina relived it. At the time it had seemed like possibly one of the worst things ever to happen to her. Oh, the naïveté. This was so, so much worse.
Spending the rest of her life dateless and sliding into crazy cat lady status one litter box in her apartment at a time was the veritable tip of the awful iceberg. Because apparently not only had her BootyBook information posted to her personal social media site, it had uploaded itself as a spreadsheet to her business page.
“How does that even happen?” Samantha demanded, popping the cork on their second bottle of pinot grigio. It was that kind of night.
“I must have hit the share button when I was setting up my phone and it uploaded to all of my accounts,” Katrina said, wishing she had a shovel to bash herself in the head with. She’d even settle for a gardening trowel.
But this was Brooklyn, not her hometown upstate. There were no tools of any kind hanging around her apartment, unless you counted the guy who lived next door who went tanning three times a week.
The palms of her hand were numb from squeezing her hands into fists. “I don’t remember setting it up that way, but you know how it is. You get efficient. You start clicking and connecting and the next thing you know, you’re Facebook friends with your ex-boyfriend’s mother. We’re always just one tap away from complete and utter disaster.”
Samantha pushed up the red frames of her glasses, her fringe bangs starting to brush the top. She was into the granny chic look, with Peter Pan collars and lots of floral patterns and blouses, and she was smart enough not to have a BootyBook account. “Trina, you need to do damage control.”
“How do I do that?” she demanded, wanting her glass refilled but unable to get off her couch and walk the three steps to her pseudo kitchen. It was really just a three-foot space in the corner outfitted with appliances better suited to a leprechaun family, but she didn’t cook anyway. She had created a makeshift island in front of the row of cabinets and the minifridge out of an old dresser, and Samantha was leaning on it, having poured herself a fresh glass of wine.
Katrina removed her purple scarf from around her neck and threw it on the coffee table. It was too tempting to strangle herself with it. She had already gotten several emails from clients demanding an explanation, and the truth was, she didn’t have one. No one was going to buy that she had been hacked. The information was too detailed, and it would serve no purpose for a hacker other than to humiliate her, and that generally speaking wasn’t their MO. No, everyone was going to know it was her screwup and hers alone.
“Well, you need to issue a statement, both on your personal page and your professional page. I mean, it worked for Kristen Stewart, right? She apologized within hours and RPattz was hers again. She’s not unemployed, either.”
“I’m not sure it’s the same thing. And they didn’t end up together ultimately anyway.” But Samantha was right. Katrina sighed. “I guess I should do that before I get drunk.”
“Yeah, let’s not compound the problem. We’ll write the statement, post it, then we’ll go out to dinner and try to pretend none of this happened. You can leave your phone at home.”
It was a plan, though not much of one. Katrina was debating using the phrase “sincerely regret” versus “deeply sorry” as her phone continued to blow up. In the end, she went for “deeply regret an unfortunate technical error that caused private data to appear in a public forum.” She went on to say the information seen was neither accurate nor factual in any way, but merely an opinion based on personal observations and that she apologized sincerely for any embarrassment caused.
Awful. Plain and simple. “I’m done. Shitty damage control, but there you have it. I’m a social media manager. That’s my job. But I just proved that I can’t manage my own. Great endorsement for my business. Fabulous.”
Samantha sat down beside her. “It was up for about three minutes. Probably none of your clients even