Instafamous Read online

  I turned around, opened the front door and ran outside, putting the phone back to my ear. “Listen to me Ben, don’t do anything stupid now, okay?” I ran down the street. Ben lived on Deerfield Street, only two blocks away.

  “It’s too late. Everything I’ve done was stupid. I must end this now, Noah. I’m sorry.”

  Ben was a mess. He was sobbing and wailing now, and he kept telling me how sorry he was and how he had to end it now, whatever ‘it’ was. I was scared, and I had to keep him on the phone.

  “Where are you, Ben?” I said, panting heavily as my feet kept pounding the ground. “Are you at home?”

  “I just want it to be over. I want everything to be over.”

  “Ben, listen to me! I’m coming over. We’ll talk about everything and we’re gonna figure something out, okay?” There was no reply, but I could still hear him sob and wail. “Ben! Stay with me now! Don’t hang up! I’m coming over and we’re gonna figure everything out!”

  “I’m sorry, Noah,” he wailed, and then he hung up.

  “Fuck!”

  By the time I entered Deerfield, I felt the cold evening air stinging in my lungs with each deep breath I was taking. When I reached Ben’s house, all the windows were dark except one on the upper floor under the gabled roof. I rang the doorbell and started pounding my fists against the door.

  “Ben!” I shouted. “It’s Noah, open up! Ben!”

  I kept pounding the door and ringing the bell for maybe half a minute to no response. Then I took a few steps back to look at the lit-up upper floor window. There was no sign of life, so I raced around the house to the back garden. When a motion sensor detected my presence, the patio lights came on. I shielded my eyes from the bright light with my hands and pressed them against the large window front to peer into the living room. All was dark and quiet inside. Without even thinking about the consequences, I grabbed a garden chair from the patio and smashed in the glass door. When I had made a large enough hole, I cast the chair aside and climbed inside.

  “Ben!”

  The leg of my pants got caught on a shard sticking out from the bottom of the glass door and I stumbled forward. My hands stopped my fall, but I fell right onto pieces of broken glass scattered across the living room floor. I got back on my feet and dashed across the room to the dimly lit hallway. I ran up the stairs, and it wasn’t until my right hand slipped on the wooden railing that I noticed how bad my hand was bleeding.

  “Ben!”

  When I reached the landing, I heard a chair toppling over behind one of the doors lining the corridor. The first door I tried led to what seemed to be the bedroom of Ben’s parents. It was dark and empty. The second room was a bathroom. When I opened the next door, my heart exploded and I gasped as my kidneys released an adrenaline overdose into my bloodstream. Ben was dangling from the ceiling, a power cord that was tied to the ceiling beam wrapped around his neck. His legs kicking the air, he was squirming and writhing. His eyes bulging in their sockets, he was making gurgling, choking sounds as he frantically tried to loosen the cord around his neck with his hands. I lunged forward, wrapped my arms around his thighs and pushed him up to ease the tension on the power cord around his neck. At first I had a hard time holding on to his legs because he kept kicking, but when I tightened my grip around them and found my footing, the kicking eventually subsided although his torso still kept writhing. Accompanied by his terrifying death rattles, Ben was still trying to loosen the cord around his neck, but it was too tight. Holding on to his legs, I looked around, desperately trying to figure out how to cut Ben down. There was a pair of scissors on his desk, but it was too far away for me to reach. The toppled over chair lay close to my feet, but there was no way for me to right it without letting go of Ben’s legs, and I couldn’t do that because I didn’t know how long he would last if his full body weight were to pull on the cord again. After many endless, agonizing seconds, I finally heard footsteps on the stairs.

  “Help!” I shouted at the top of my lungs. “Up here! Help!”

  The footsteps hurried closer. My back was facing the door, so I couldn’t see who it was, but I immediately recognized Jordan’s voice as he uttered, “Fucking hell!”

  “Scissors!” I said. “On the desk!”

  Jordan lurched toward the desk and grabbed the scissors. Then he picked the chair off the floor, stood on it and started cutting the power cord. Ben’s body writhed harder and he started kicking his legs again as I was trying to keep my grip. It took Jordan six or seven attempts to cut through the thick power cord. When it finally snapped and Ben’s full weight pushed down on me, I went to my knees. Jordan dropped the scissors, jumped off the chair, pushed it aside and helped me lay Ben down on the floor. Still kicking and gurgling, his bulging eyes were staring at me in mortal panic. Jordan and I both tried to loosen the cord around Ben’s neck but it was too tight, and our desperate attempts to untie the knot only seemed to make things worse, so Jordan grabbed the scissors again. He tried to put one blade between the cord and Ben’s neck, but Ben was shaking his head violently left and right. I grabbed his head with both my hands to keep it in place, but he was too strong and I just smeared my blood all over his head, so Jordan knelt behind Ben and locked his head between his knees. While I pinned down Ben’s shoulders with my hands, Jordan finally managed to put the scissor blade between Ben’s neck and the cord, and he started cutting. Once again it took him several attempts to cut the cord. When it finally snapped, Ben gasped, and as his kicking and writhing quickly subsided, he took a series of deep breaths that triggered violent coughs. As Jordan removed the cord from his neck and tossed it aside, I knelt next to Ben, put my hands under his arms and pulled him up to help him breathe. He grabbed one of my arms and turned toward me, his body rocked by powerful convulsions as he kept coughing and trying to catch his breath.

  “Easy now,” I said. “Easy. You’re gonna be fine.”

  “Noah,” he croaked, followed by more coughs and convulsions as he wrapped his arms around me and squeezed me hard. “Noah.”

  “Shhh,” I said, putting one of my bleeding hands on his head, the other under his arm, pulling him closer. “I’m here. Don’t talk. Just breathe. I’m here.”

  As he started to catch his breath, nestled up against me, his coughs turned into sobs. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry, Noah!”

  I held him tight, putting my lips on his head and stroking it gently with my bleeding hand. “Shhh, it’s okay.” My eyes found Jordan. He was sitting on the floor, leaning against the frame of Ben’s bed and wiping sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. When our eyes met, he blew up his cheeks.

  “I’m sorry!” Ben wailed.

  “It’s okay. I’m here. It’s okay.”

  Ben kept on sobbing, his body rocked by a heavy crying fit as his wailing blended with the wailing of the ambulance sirens that emerged in the distance. “I’m sorry, Noah!”

  “Shhh! It’s okay, Ben.”

  Jordan got to his feet and said, “I’ll show the medics in.” As he left the room, I nodded, continuing to hold Ben’s rocking body, kissing and stroking his blood-, snot-, and tears-covered face as he dissolved into a series of uncontrollable sobs, coughs, and wails chilling to the bone.

  ELEVEN

  I was sitting on the sofa in the living room when Mom came home from her late shift at the supermarket. When she saw my bandaged hands and my bloodstained clothes, she freaked out, so I told her to sit down and listen up. It took a lot of effort to get started, but then the words just kept flowing. I told her everything, every single detail, from my secret relationship with Ben to the blackmail to Ben’s suicide attempt and how we had saved him. The only thing I lied about was Ben’s parents. They were on a weekend break to Lake Tahoe and wouldn’t be back until Sunday night. Being eighteen years and two days old, Ben insisted that the medics honored their doctor-patient confidentiality and not tell his parents about his suicide attempt. I told Mom his parents had come home shortly after his suicide attempt and that the
y were taking care of him, because I didn’t want Mom to get involved and rat him out. The harder part was to convince Mom not to go to the police and report the blackmail. I told her that by the time the police obtained a warrant and hunted the blackmailer down, our deadline would have long since expired and he would already have exposed us if that was what he chose to do. But if for whatever reason he chose not to expose us, we’d still have all the time in the world to call the cops. I could tell it wasn’t an easy thing for my mom to do, but in the end she reluctantly agreed. Then she told me how proud she was of me and how I had saved Ben’s life, and then we hugged and cried until we fell asleep in each other’s arms on the sofa.

  I was a nervous wreck throughout the rest of the weekend, both before our midnight deadline on Saturday and even more so after. I had deleted most of my social media apps, because I wasn’t interested in the fallout that would be inevitable once our blackmailer set his Instagram account to public. Nevertheless, I wanted to know if and when it happened, so I kept checking Instagram every other couple of minutes on Sunday, but nothing happened. My mom was having a hard time refraining from asking me how I was doing every five minutes, so she resorted to asking me how Ben was doing at regular intervals throughout the day.

  FUBSTRD: Noah, please. I appreciate the concern, but for the fifth time: I’m ok.

  NoahSimm: My mom insists I keep checking on u.

  FUBSTRD: Why did you even have to tell her? :/

  NoahSimm: I’m sorry u can’t talk to ur parents, but I will talk to my mom as I see fit. I can’t deal with this whole shit on my own. I know u think u can. How’s that working out for u btw?

  What followed was a long period of silence, but when I no longer thought he’d reply, he did.

  FUBSTRD: I’m sorry I’ve put u thru all this.

  NoahSimm: Apology accepted. I’m glad we made it to u in time.

  Another long pause.

  FUBSTRD: Me too.

  I was about to compose another reply when the doorbell rang. By the time I made it to the door, my mom was already hugging and squeezing Jordan. When he noticed me, he looked at me with panic-stricken eyes.

  I cleared my throat. “Uh … Mom?”

  “Oh!” she said, letting go of Jordan and wiping away a rogue tear. “Sorry. I just wanted to thank you for … everything that you did.”

  He nodded. “Sure.” Then he cast me a helpless look, silently begging me to get him out of there.

  “We’ll be in my room,” I said, grabbing his arm and dragging him away.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” Mom called after us.

  “No, thank you, Mrs. Simmons.”

  I closed the door behind us. “Sorry about that.”

  “That was scary,” he said with an awkward grin. “But also kinda sweet. So you told her, huh?”

  I held up my bandaged hands. “Difficult to hide these.”

  “I see,” he said and sat on my bed. “So how are you holding up?”

  “Wait, let me check.” I grabbed my phone off my desk and checked Instagram. “All right, I guess.”

  “Still nothing?”

  I shook my head. ”Not sure what to make of it, to be honest. I mean, it’s almost seventeen hours past the deadline, so … I don’t know.”

  “And Ben?”

  I sat next to Jordan on the bed and leaned my back against the wall, letting out a sigh. “I’ve been texting him all day yesterday and today. You know, to make sure he’s not doing anything stupid. Again.”

  “And?”

  I shrugged. “He says he’s okay.”

  “And you believe him?”

  “I guess. I mean, at least he’s acknowledging that what he’s done was pretty stupid, so that’s a start.”

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Who is this?” I said, winking at Jordan.

  “What do you mean, ‘who is this?’” Mom said through the closed door. “How many people live here?”

  “Come in!”

  She opened the door and cast me a mildly annoyed look, trying hard to conceal a smile. She knew that if I was cracking silly jokes, I was doing all right. “I don’t know about you guys, but I could totally do with some pizza. What do you think?”

  I looked at Jordan. “What do you think?”

  “I think it would be incredibly rude to say no to pizza.”

  Mom looked at me and silently mouthed, “I like him.”

  “Mom!”

  After she had scurried out of the room and closed the door behind her, Jordan and I exchanged about a dozen furtive glances between us, and I assumed my head was glowing just as brightly red as his was, so I picked up one of my Xbox controllers, offered it to Jordan and said, “Play?”

  With a relieved look he grabbed the controller and said, “Jeez, I thought you’d never ask!”

  TWELVE

  When I approached Jordan’s house on my way to school on Monday morning, Jordan was already standing outside on the sidewalk, waiting for me and scrolling through his phone. I took that as a very bad sign. I had been avoiding all social media except Instagram where I supposed the bomb would drop, but what if I was wrong? What if our blackmailer had decided to expose us somewhere else? Facebook? Twitter? YouTube? What if shit had already hit the fan and I was still blissfully oblivious of the fact?

  As we fist-bumped, I cast Jordan an anxious look.

  “Still nothing,” he said.

  I shook my head. “Not exactly nothing. He messaged us late last night.”

  “Really? What did he say?”

  I pulled out my phone and read the message out loud.

  BenHynes01: Guys, guys, guys. I’m very disappointed. U missed ur deadline! U know what that means, right? U didn’t stick 2 ur end of the bargain but I will have 2 stick 2 mine. But hey, maybe u had computer problems or no Internet access? I’m gonna give u the benefit of the doubt because I’m not a monster, u know? I’m extending ur deadline. U have until midnight on Monday. If u miss that deadline too, u’ll have a Tuesday morning in school that u will never forget. #instafamous

  “Wow,” Jordan said. “He’s totally bluffing.”

  I nodded. “I know.”

  “Just ignore him.”

  “Yeah, well …”

  Jordan looked at me with furrowed brows. “Well what?”

  “I couldn’t help myself and replied to his message. I told the asshole to go fuck himself.”

  “Ooh, sassy. But I like it. Any reaction?”

  I shook my head.

  “Like I said, he’s totally bluffing,” he said as we went on our way.

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  I shrugged. “Sure.”

  “What’s gonna happen with you and Ben now? I mean … you know what I mean.”

  “You mean are we still gonna be a thing?”

  He nodded.

  “No idea,” I said. “Not sure if I’d even want that. I mean, he is pretty hot and everything, but honestly, he’s not exactly the nicest person I’ve ever met, and he’s got so many issues going on. And I have my doubts if he’d even be up for it. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he’ll never want to see me again.”

  “I think you’re wrong.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  He nudged me with his elbow, and when I looked at him, he flicked his head. “Look.”

  I followed his gaze to the corner of Deerfield where Ben was standing, waiting for us. When we approached him, he buried his hands deep in his pockets and looked at his feet. He was looking miserable, and he was wearing a scarf to hide the marks on his neck.

  “Hey,” I said when we reached him.

  He looked at me and said, “Was that really necessary? Telling him to go fuck himself?”

  “Sorry.” I scratched my head. “Couldn’t help myself. I figured we didn’t have anything to lose anyway, so yeah.”

  He pursed his lips.

  “You got a cold?” Jordan said, looking
at Ben’s scarf.

  Ben stared at Jordan with a blank look for a few long seconds until he finally said. “No.”

  I looked at him. “So you haven’t told your parents, have you?”

  “What do you think?” he said. “Hi Mom, hi Dad, how was Tahoe? By the way, I tried to kill myself.”

  I shrugged. “Suit yourself. So what are you doing here?”

  “I didn’t want to arrive at school all by myself,” he said in a low voice. “In case … you know.”

  “In case he drops the bomb ahead of the extended deadline after all?”

  He nodded. “I swear I’m about to set the account to public myself.”

  I scowled at him. “Why the hell would you want to do that?”

  “Because the waiting and the insecurity are driving me insane. I just want this whole thing to be over and done with.”

  “Stop being stupid,” I said. “You don’t walk a batter when the game is tied with bases loaded at the bottom of the ninth inning.”

  He looked at me. “Are we having a tied ballgame?”

  “Absolutely. Look, I’ve had a lot of time to think over the weekend, and I think we’ve been focusing too much on ourselves and what’s gonna happen to us when people find out. But if this whole thing goes viral, it’s inevitable that not only our parents find out but, you know, our teachers, the school board and whatnot.”

  Ben pursed his lips again, clearly not enjoying the prospect.

  “What I’m saying is, even if we choose not to call the cops, somebody else will. Most definitely. And the police will have ways and means to track that asshole down.”

  “And how is that gonna help us?” Ben said, shaking his head. “We’re still fucked.”

  “I think I know what Noah is getting at,” Jordan said. “If that blackmailer dude is not completely brain-dead, he’ll figure this out too. Unless he’s super sophisticated when it comes to covering his online tracks, the cops will track him down and he’ll be in much deeper shit than you two.”

  I nodded. “Exactly. Honestly, I’m beginning to think he was never seriously planning to expose us. Maybe he was just trying to see how far he could push us. And we fell for it.”