Doxxing Shayna

"Man, what's taking so long?!"

"I just need a few more seconds," Pete grumbled, "this is an art, Davey, not a science!"

Davey groaned in exasperation and flopped onto Pete's bed, not that Pete paid him an ounce of attention. One hundred percent of his brainpower was laser focused on his computer screen, and his task at hand. His fingers flew across they keyboard at Mach 5, weaving a tapestry of ones and zeroes so beautiful that it would make the old Dutch masters weep. Or, at the very least, his computer science teacher.

"Almost... aaaaaand... done," Pete tapped one last key, and a new window opened on his computer. Davey was at his elbow again in seconds, hooting like a howler monkey at the image it displayed.

Shayna Carmichael - Roosevelt High's head cheerleader - in her bedroom, wearing a towel... and not much else.

"Duuude!!" Davey giggled, shaking Pete so hard his coke-bottle glasses fell off his face, "you did it! You, my friend, are a genius! I bow to your greatness!"

Pete caught his glasses in a clumsy dive, snagging them out of the air before they could bounce off the desk. When he put them back on, though, he immediately turned away from the screen; his pimply, ghostly white face turning red. When he'd agreed to hack into her webcam, he'd failed to consider that Shayna might not be dressed when the feed went live.

He didn't regret his actions a bit, of course. Shayna Carmichael was the Queen Bee of the entire school, and that "B" stood solidly for "bitch". She'd risen to the top of the social food chain by crushing everyone else under her stiletto heels, especially guys like Pete. Shayna had this coming for a long time... but now that he was here, watching her through her laptop's camera without her knowing about it, Pete couldn't help but feel a little scummy to say the least.

The girl he saw seated at her vanity table didn't look a bit like the Chief Mean Girl of Roosevelt High. It was the same girl, all right; her long blonde hair hung in her face, still damp from the shower, but Pete could see it very clearly. She just didn't seem at all like herself. Gone was that permanent sneer she always wore and that "holier-than-thou" glint in her pea-green eyes. The girl Pete was looking at was shy; quiet; pensive. And on the verge of tears.

"She looks so... sad," Pete murmured, his face moving closer to the screen automatically. "Wonder what happened?"

"Who cares?" Davey scoffed, shoving Pete out of the way to get a better look, "nobody's gonna be looking at her face anyway. Just hurry up and get this streaming already!"

Pete shook off his nerves with a nod. Davey was right; if they wanted to bask in the full glory of their revenge, this feed had to be uploaded to Instagram yesterday. As his hands moved over the keyboard again to do just that, though, he hesitated. Shayna was looking directly into the camera. For half a second Pete feared they'd been caught, until he realized her OBS was open and recording. She must've opened the software herself, and a few moments later he realized why.

"Today has been... honestly awful," Shayna muttered, tugging up her towel to keep it from slipping. "My stepdad is such a dick, I swear. Graduation night cannot come soon enough. As soon as I step off that stage with my diploma, I am outta this hellhole for good."

Pete settled back in his chair, fascinated by the scene unfolding before him. Clearly Shayna kept some kind of video diary, which was a goldmine in itself. The scheming, vindictive, vengeance-thirsty side of him was already making plans for what to do with the files, as they'd only take a few keystrokes to access. The longer he heard her talk, though, a realization slowly settled on Pete: this was in no way, shape, or form the Shayna he knew. This Shayna was nervous, sweet, vulnerable, and heavily insecure.

This was the real Shayna Carmichael... and honestly, he liked her.

"Dude, what are you waiting for?!" Davey snapped, shaking Pete back to reality. "Link the feed already before we get caught!"

Pete wet his lips, scratching his unruly dark curls for a second or two. After another few minutes of thought, he just shook his head. "Nah, Dude," he murmured, "I'm out. This was fun at first, but I'm pulling the plug."

"Are you shitting me right now?!" Davey spun Pete's chair around so fast, it nearly gave the shorter teen whiplash. The bigger boy's moon face was almost as red as his hair, fire flashing behind his watery brown eyes. "This girl - no - this she-beast has made both our lives a living hell since Pre-K! Don't you dare puss out on me now, Bro! Not when we're this close to putting this snobby bitch in her place!"

"I said, I'm out," Pete insisted, "She might be a horrible person, but this is taking things too far. Stooping down to her level isn't the answer." His blue eyes flicked back to his computer screen, gnawing on his lip, then he sighed through his nose. "...neither is invading her privacy. Suddenly, it just feels... wrong. And I'm pretty sure it's illegal, so-"

Pete's hand hovered over the keyboard as he spoke, ready to kill the connection in a heartbeat. Before he could, Shayna's bedroom door flew open behind her without warning. Both Pete and Shayna stopped talking with a gasp, their eyes drawn to the man in the doorway. Pete recognized him right away as Shayna's stepfather, but - just like Shayna - Pete had never seen him like this before.

Mr. Carmichael usually showed up at school functions in a suit and tie; the picture of coifed perfection and professionalism. The man on Pete's screen, however, was clad in nothing but an old football jersey and a pair of stained boxer shorts. His usual, charismatic grin was gone, replaced by a deep, ugly scowl. As he stared at his stepdaughter, that frown sunk deeper into his features, aided by the beer bottle he took a swallow from.

"You shuttin' doors on me now?!" he slurred, "ungrateful lil' whore! I buy you all your damn shoes 'n' makeup 'n' shit, an' you dare to shut a door in my face?!"

"Get out of my room, Steve!" Shayna shrieked, her arms covering as much of her towel as she could reach. That tone of voice was the one Pete had grown accustomed to - snobby, whiny, and dripping with spite - but it didn't match the look on her face. A look of pure terror.

"Don' you tell me whadda do!!" Mr. Carmichael spat.

Without warning, he tossed his bottle across the room, shattering it on the floor of her closet. The noise was so loud and so sudden, Shayna covered her ears with a shriek and Pete jolted in his gaming chair. Half a second later, Mr. Carmichael stormed into the room and dragged Shayna off her vanity stool by the hair.

It was horrifying to watch. Shayna kicked and screamed and fought with all her might, trying to get him to let go. With a foot and seventy extra pounds on her, though, Mr. Carmichael had her woefully outmatched. Pete's palms sweat profusely and his breathing turned ragged, watching helplessly as Mr. Carmichael hurled her across the room. Then, he started hitting her.

Shayna's screams and the nauseating, repeated smack of bone on flesh was too much for Pete to handle. He couldn't just sit idly by and let this continue; something had to be done to stop it before the unthinkable happened. But what could he really do?

Pete's fingers flew across the keyboard again, moving on autopilot while his panicked brain hurried to chug out a solution. Before he knew it, Pete had taken full control of her laptop's speakers and media player. With the clicks of a few keys and a quick scroll through his own library of pre-recorded sounds, Pete found a clip of a police siren. Which he played through Shayna's speakers at full volume.

Mr. Carmichael immediately froze, his blue, bloodshot eyes wide in alarm, and whirled toward his stepdaughter's computer. Now that he had the drunken brute's attention, Pete powered on his microphone, adding a voice changer for extra oomph.

"This is the police," he barked, "back away from the girl, and put your hands up! Officers are en route as we speak; they'll be on the premises any second! Give yourself up peacefully, or we will use force to detain you!"

Mr. Carmichael was either too drunk or too stupid to realize Pete wasn't actually a cop, because he scrambled out of the room before Pete's improvised threat was even finished. The second he was gone, Shayna stumbled to her bedroom door, shut it, and braced it with a chair. When she was done, still shaking with tears and traces of blood dripping down her face, she cautiously approached her laptop again.

It was Pete's turn to freeze. His throat tightened with a dry swallow as Shayna studied her webcam, like she was trying to see him through it. Both Pete's hands immediately clamped around Davey's face to keep him quiet, as his microphone was still on, a task much easier said than done. While Davey shouted muffled insults into his palms, Pete didn't even dare to breathe. He just sat there, braced for the verbal assault he knew was coming, now that Shayna realized she was being spied on without her consent.

"Thank you," she whispered, "whoever you are... y-you just saved my life." After a few seconds of sniffling, her eyes narrowed in a scowl as her Queen Bee persona settled back over her like a well-worn Halloween mask. "...now get the hell off my computer, Creepazoid."

Pete did not have to be told twice. He broke the connection immediately, patching up the back door he'd so artfully created to get into her operating system. And he beefed up her security with a new firewall while he was at it, so other hackers wouldn't be able to exploit the same weakness he'd found. Five minutes later, he pushed back from his desk and laid his head in his hands, still shaking from the whole ordeal.

"Dude," Davey murmured, "that was... super freaking cool! You're, like, a real-live a hero! It's just too bad you had to waste all that heroism on a toxic bitch like Shayna Carmichael."

Pete chose not to comment, mostly because he didn't know what to say. He certainly didn't feel like a hero. Sure, he'd done a good deed, but he'd only been able to do it because of a horrendously bad deed that he already regretted heavily. Maybe Davey was right; maybe Shayna didn't deserve to be saved. Shayna also didn't deserve to be beaten to death by her drunk stepdad, though, no matter how awfully she'd treated Pete.

From that day on, whenever Pete saw Shayna at school putting on her meanest of Mean Girl acts, he saw right through it. No matter how catty or spiteful she got, Pete could never forget the sweet, vulnerable girl he'd seen through her webcam that day. He knew who Shayna Carmichael really was, deep down. And he couldn't wait for the day he finally got to meet her face to face.