Tracy1186, pt 1

(The names have been changed to protect the innocent. And the guilty)

A former co-worker of mine, named Tracy, found out that one of her friends from high school is not really her friend, but someone much closer, and she was more angry than I had ever seen her. This ‘person who was much closer’ was smart, and for that she was embarrassed and hurt as well.

It was Thanksgiving, and she had gone home to see her family and friends. It had been a long time since she had seen her parents because her job as an attorney required a great deal of travel to and from Asia, a bit more than when she was promised when she was hired at the firm. Since she was in Singapore more than she was in her home in Baltimore Maryland, she bought an apartment there.

This trip was going to be a total surprise to her family. She told her friends, flesh and blood and even Facebook- that she was coming to Knoxville Tennessee to see her parents. One Facebook friend in particular, Dana Turner, from her class of ’86, was excited to see her when she came to town. They weren’t friends while in high school because she was very shy at the time and had no friends. They had planned on doing some partying and drinking and smoking some weed etc., but the evening before Tracy’s flight, Dana called to say she had to go to Memphis to see her father who was in the hospital. Tracy understood why Dana had to see her father but she was disappointed.

So, when Tracy showed up at her parent’s doorstep that Thanksgiving morning, her parents were pleasantly surprised to see her. Her father greeted her at the door, and she removed her coat and left her luggage in the living room, and they went in the kitchen to see her mother, who was mashing sweet potatoes in a bowl.

“Tracy!” her mother shouted. “What a surprise! I’m so glad to see you!”

And after they hugged, Tracy washed her hands and took over the making of the sweet potato pie while her mother went to preparing a pot roast. Tracy went back in her ‘guarded mode,’ where she only told her mother what she wanted her to know, and kept up the façade of her being a good Christian girl that never smoked or drank and attended church every weekend, whether she was in Silver Spring or Singapore.

Dinner, and conversation with her brothers, their wives and children were good. While waiting for the meal to digest before for cutting into the cakes and pies, Tracy asked if she could use her mother’s computer.

When she typed ‘www., and then the letter f on the browser, it began to prefill with ‘www.facebook’ all by itself; it occurred to Tracy that someone in the house, perhaps her mother or father, had a facebook account. No one else lived there, and her brothers all lived out of state as well. It’s not like they were coming to Knoxville to use her parents’ internet.

On the facebook site, below the box checked ‘keep me logged in,’ was Dana’s email address, prefilled. The password was blank. Then Tracy clicked the “forget your password” link. Then she opened another to get to the yahoo site that prefilled with Dana’s email address and password. Once she accessed the yahoo site she received the password for facebook. The password was Tracy1186. Tracy’s name, and November ’86, the month and year she was born.

Tracy was getting heated. She felt violated. She couldn’t believe that someone in the house was sneaky and conniving enough to pretend to be a high school classmate to get information about her, information she would more readily confide to a friend than a parent. It was her mother that she suspected was the guilty party. She was a housewife , the type that always wanted to know what other people were doing, who would get upset when no one would confide in her. Her father was a corporate attorney, who, Richard, her oldest brother suspected cheating on their mother; neither did he have the time to pose as someone else, nor the brain power to even think the idea up.

Tracy thought about all the secrets she had told ‘Dana’. She felt naked, and she was ashamed. She was wondering how she was going to show her face when she returned to the dining room table. She suddenly began to worry about her mother’s opinion of her. She considered confronting her mother, but she decided to seek revenge.

She wanted to be creative with her revenge, so she called the most creative, the most dramatic person she knew---

She called me.



To be continued….