He had seen the photos from when they were kids. His father was fat, with a swept fringe and gauged ears, towering over Auntie Jessica and Uncles Kieran, Isaac, and Shaun, ears and fringes all gauged and swept. His mother too. They all used her hair straightener, Dad said, like it was cute. He was fatter now. All of them were, except Jessica, who looked like a bog mummy with humongous tits. Cade hated her the most. There she was in the living room, an ornamented parrot shrieking at nothing over a choir of toads. Dad was turning thirty. They were playing Dungeons & Dragons.
Cade peered. It was an exercise in disgust. He could see all five of them through the crack in his door, plus a couple of girlfriends he didn’t recognise, crammed into the leatherette sofa with Dad in his special chair. He could see the Nintendo games and anime figurines arranged like a library collection. He could see the sword display and the full-sized Totoro. The TV was out of view, but he heard an opera singer shattering glass over heavy metal guitars. You enter the weeping mausoleum. Cade backed away. He needed to lie down.
His update was accumulating hearts, open mouths, upside-down faces and traditionally sad ones. Be careful. Do you want us to call someone? This was the best case. Nobody’s humour phased bilious. He was a saint of fortitude and they would venerate the holiness of his suffering. Searbear would grace his inbox, baring her shoulder, and they would pass the evening in a cardiac massage that melted his fear into a still blue lake.
The chat server had found him circuitously: a classmate gave him the username of a girl from an adjacent school, who shared his username with her friends, one of whom invited him to the group that became Donaldson’s Dairy. One day, when he learned to fear the space reflected in a mirror, the way the dots were joined would hit him like a sniper’s shot. For now it was marvellous. Dad’s got friends over. Sometimes he needed to escalate, but he had to admit that those times were the most exciting, and he always had something to escalate with.
On another axis, the escalation had already taken place. He no longer avoided posting to the Dairy at school. It used to terrify him that his private world could be punctured so easily, but everyone else was buried in their phones, and once the teachers surrendered that hill his world became impermeable. It helped when he started wearing his suit. The suit distinguished him and got the message out that he was too potent to be fucked with. Everybody said this. When he posted videos of himself unbuckling his belt and snapping it against against his mattress, the Dairy told him he should wear the suit every day.
The opera singer grew louder, as if there was any reasonable volume of music that could occlude the noise of seven people packing up their character sheets and moving to a different room. They were doing it again, he told the Dairy. Reactions were muted now. Searbear told him that while she was sorry about what was happening to him, it was cringe to make things up. This pinched, but Cade did not believe it was wrong to cry wolf as long as you were able to produce a wolf when it mattered. He chose a medium-length video of Jessica being fucked on all fours by a man in a mask. It was his Dad behind the camera, he guessed, having stolen the video from Dad’s phone. He told the Dairy he had filmed it himself.
They knew Jessica like they were her fans. Cade characterised her between villain and victim, a zombielike vessel for Dad’s orgy cult, mentally young and lacking the power of moral distinction. He was careful not to disambiguate what Auntie meant. The Dairy’s balance of power skewed towards people like Searbear, who were sensible enough to let Cade tie his own rope, but others would ask if Jessica had any new stuff. Some badgered him for videos in which he starred. He once claimed ownership of a large, faceless POV cock, but his audience was unconvinced. He span into a rage that night. What was it that they wanted to see so badly? What sort of person would want to see that?
The truth was that it went over his head. There was a certain state of mind he understood, an acquisitive drive that captured him when Dad was showering or gaming and left his phone on the sofa. He felt it in his DMs with Searbear, when he blazed from one vivid torture to another, shooting dice for the words that would make her say she loved him. But all the thrusting and moaning, the sizing up of bodies and declaring what you’d like to do or have done to you by them, had no meaning to Cade. He felt silly when he imagined it.
He heard the sink run, and the drag of bare feet on carpet, and a rapping of acrylic fingernails. Auntie Jessica took her usual seat at the foot of his bed and asked what he was doing. She wore one of Dad’s dressing gowns and smelled like weed and bourbon. He said he was talking to friends, and she asked why he never brought any over. None of them live here, said Cade. They all went to different schools.
It had been the same for her, she said. The people at her K-10 had not liked her, and she did not try to be liked. It took until senior high for her to find her people. His Dad, yes, but especially his Mum, whom Jessica knew already from MSN and Critticage, and who introduced her to the kindred souls who would one day choose each other as family. Cade was one of them, because she had known him for nearly as long. She held him in the hospital, and comforted him during Maths Applied 2 when his mother threw a TI-83 at the teacher and screamed dog cunt up and down the echoing hallway. They were closer than sisters, and Jessica hoped she would be allowed home soon, because she loved her and missed her like part of her mind was gone. She would be proud to see her baby looking so smart in his slim-fit suit, like he had plans and a future. Jessica started to cry, which was unusual, and she gripped Cade in a crushing hug.
The worst things we do are not measured in moral weight but personal consequence. Cade could not explain why he kissed Jessica, nor why he put his hand on her breast. He hoped that a heavy enough storm of apologies would spin time backwards. She said it was okay, but avoided his eye while she cinched Dad’s gown tighter and backed out of the room.
Cade ripped off his suit, which he felt shouldered most of the blame. It imparted an aura of dominance whose effect was stronger on the wearer than on the people it was supposed to influence. He needed reassurance, but there was only Searbear, and he could hardly expect a girlfriend’s comfort after striking out with another woman. The inversion: she came onto him, he ran away, and was himself now wandering the suburbs experiencing trauma and flashbacks. Searbear had heard this story before, however, and was not forthcoming with the sympathy. So he widened the field, addressing his tragedy to Donaldson’s Dairy at large, but those online were glib creeps who reckoned he’d have enjoyed himself if only he hadn’t been such a wilting pussy about it. Cade was backed into a corner with no choice but to announce his intention to kill himself.
Cry-laughs, party poppers, nails being polished. This happened sometimes, at his worst moments, as if losing control was the greatest achievement he was capable of. It went over his head like sex did, and like with sex he felt that his strongest play was to double down. He cry-laughed and celebrated back, interpolating knives and droplets of blood. He said he was going to do it on the front lawn with fire and petrol, and only regretted that he couldn’t take some of you fuckers with him.
Donaldson’s Dairy maintained its composure, feeling no heat it had not safely stoked before. It was only Searbear, whose real name was Michael Bower, who was not a girl from a different school but a Student Leadership Council delegate from the year above Cade, whose legs started to wobble. Michael habitually elected himself for the hardest challenges, but was sometimes known to chew more than he could swallow, so when the opportunity came to shed the role of Cade’s long-distance girlfriend he was motivated to indulge his faculty of compassion. He crept in socks to the end of his parents’ driveway before slipping his running shoes on and booking it to the old phone box in the park. His conversation with the emergency operator stalled gruesomely while he searched his DMs for Cade’s address. When the operator pushed for more information, he did not know what to say, so he said everything.
Jessica slept in custody that night, and Cade was questioned in his room by a little policeman with a thin moustache. I don’t know anything gave way to I was joking, over and over, until the policeman confiscated his phone and drove away. His father, whiplashed and confused, sent the Uncles home and went to bed, afraid of a world where he had to hate Jessica.
Confusion clung to him when he met with Cade’s teachers, who were doing their best to untangle the knot. Whatever the full scope of what happened turned out to be, they all agreed that the boy should be protected from learning it. This left Cade with the impression he had fallen in with a delinquent gang, or an organised ring of sex abusers, or ISIS. He adopted a self-important strut, having kept dangerous company and survived, thereby becoming dangerous himself.
Jessica left a note, badly spelt and scarcely legible, wishing for all their sakes that none of it had happened. It lived on a bookshelf between two volumes of manga, and Dad revisited it like the last known location of a missing person, searching for an interpretive cue that made it mean none of this was your fault. Elsewhere he searched for the names of diseases that could be genetically dominant on the mother’s side, or behaviourally caused by a mother’s neglect, to explain why his family kept shedding parts and twisting into uglier shapes. It strained his eyes to watch him, tied and jacketed in the height of summer, stiff with self-belief, swinging a death’s-head cane on what he called his constitutional. He did not see himself in his son. He saw a faded copy of something distantly human, resembling what it thought it needed to look like, expanding to fill space. He too wished that none of it had happened.