Chapter 12: Glare

By Monday, the video had four million views.

People had found my name.

People had found my old tutoring page, my graduation photo, and my new Ashford email.

My inbox filled up with strangers.

"Gold digger."

"Hope your fancy degree keeps you warm."

"He drove eleven hours for you, you heartless witch."

Some of them were worse.

I stopped reading them and made a filter that sent anything with his name straight to the trash.

On Tuesday I walked into my machine learning seminar.

It was twenty people around a long table.

The room went quiet in the specific way that meant they'd been talking about me.

A guy at the end had his laptop open.

The video was paused on it. Ryan on one knee.

He closed it too slowly.

I sat down and took out my notebook.

The girl next to me slid her chair six inches away.

The professor came in and started talking about loss functions.

For an hour and a half nobody looked at me directly, and everybody looked at me.

On the way out, the guy with the laptop said, "Hey. Did you really take his money?"

"No."

"Then why'd you throw out the flowers?"

"Because he wrote to my fellowship and said I cheated."

"That's not in the video."

"No," I said. "It isn't."

It went on like that for three weeks.

In the dining hall, in the library, at the bus stop.

A girl in my dorm asked if I was the one from the internet.

A professor I'd never met stopped me in a hallway to say he was sure it would blow over.

I didn't post anything back.

Every time I opened the app to type an answer, I closed it again.

I tutored two Ashford undergrads for cash.

I went to class.

I kept Grandma's money exactly where it was.

At night I lay in my narrow bed in Pell Hall and ran the voice back in my head.

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