Preceeded with caution

what in the hell did just happen

i take my coffee and go back to my room where my fluffy feather comforter is in a ball on my mattress and last night’s clothes lay scattered across the floor. I never bother to clean on my days off.

The light on my phone is flashing on my bedside table. Picking it up and swiping to reveal my home screen, I see that there are several texts from Stephanie and an equal amount of missed calls. What the hell? I was gone fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. She never calls me unless there’s a dire emergency.Suddenly I’m thinking car wreck. Please tell me she wasn’t messaging and driving. Especially in the evening when the temperature begins to dip and streets ice up. I worry about that girl sometimes and her bad decisions, but I don’t think she would be that thick-headed.

She didn’t leave a voice mail, so I check my texts. There are five of them and they all say the same thing: Check your freakin computer, damn it!

I frown at the screen. If she were hurt, she would’ve said so. My relief is subdued by the annoyance pricking my nerves. This is too needy, even for her.glance at my computer where my Instant Messenger is closed. Weird. I don’t remember closing it. I just sent her a message before I got up. I open the app and see her frantic words in all caps.

HOLY s**t. LOOK AT TWITTER.

Really? Is whatever’s happening on Twitter worth scaring the s**t out of me with all those phone calls? Figuring she’s following the same story I was, I go to Twitter—which I thought I closed along with the pop-ups, but apparently didn’t—and see that I have over three hundred ‘likes’ and one thousand shares.

Shares? I haven’t posted anything recently, not since announcing the coming snow storm in the local forum, which, obviously has already happened. Not exactly a post newsworthy enough for likes, and definitely not for shares. All you’d have to do was turn on the news for that kind of info anyways.

I look at my previous posts to see what’s going on and my stomach lurches. Suddenly the room is too hot. My feet are burning inside my comfy socks, socks that aren’t feeling so comfy at the moment.

Instead of sending the message about my orgasm—or lack thereof—to Stephanie on Instant Messenger, I sent it to my Twitter feed. A very public Twitter feed. To my five thousand followers—three thousand who live in my very town. I guess I’m no longer invisible to them after all. My omission is displayed like some lewd flasher in the mall, exposing myself.

What. The fuck.My phone rings. I pick it up. Stephanie’s voice on the other end, high and frantic: “You are punk as f**k,” she says in her high, brassy excited voice. “I can’t believe you just told the entire Twitterverse about your bedroom tragedy after you swore me to secrecy. I thought you didn’t want anyone to know. Doesn’t everyone we went to high school with follow you in the local forum?” She doesn’t stop talking long enough for me to reply. “You’re seriously my hero.”

At first I just stare at the computer screen, my mind spinning in circles. Finally, I find my voice. It comes out meek, scared. “I didn’t mean to.” I clear my throat, and when I speak again it’s less pathetic. “That was meant to be a private message to you! I can just delete it, right? Pretend it didn’t happen.”

Stephanie can’t hold back her laughter, even though I know she hears the distress in my voice. She’s probably thinking, ‘better you than me.’ Actually, I doubt she would care if it were her. Most likely she’d find her own admission funny too. She would love all the attention. Sometimes I wish I were more like her.

“Deleting it would be a little obvious, don’t you think?” she says. “Leave it. That way, if people think you did it on purpose, you’ll seem like some kind of rebel. You know, f**k the world. Like some brave bloggeress who’s confident enough to tell the world about her sad vagina.”