Red 1-2-3

12

It took great strength for Jordan to concentrate during the afternoon basketball practice. Every cut she made, every screen she set, every shot she took felt as if it was somehow misshapen or distorted. When she clanked an easy layup, rolling it off the front rim on a wide-open shot, there was the usual hooting from her teammates and a quick reprimand from an assistant admonishing her, “Take your time, Jordan, and finish!” But she imagined-even though the stands were completely empty-that someone else was watching her and that even the momentary lapse of a missed shot in the midst of a practice scrimmage meant something far bigger.

She believed that she should display no outward flaw. None whatsoever. Not even a momentary failure. Any weakness might be the route that the Big Bad Wolf used to catch her. Somehow, she had to be perfect in all things, even when she knew she was far from it, in order to keep the Big Bad Wolf away. This might make no sense whatsoever, but it pressed on her shoulders like a weight. She wondered whether the Big Bad Wolf was preventing her from jumping for a rebound. Maybe he could hold her down when he wasn’t even nearby, just by making her think he was.

Close, but not too close. Near, but not too near.

Jordan clenched her fists.

An idea came to her. She was running down the court, doing obligatory “suicides” at the end of the session: baseline to foul line and back, baseline to mid-court and back, baseline to far foul line and back, baseline to baseline and finish strong. Everyone hated the conditioning runs and everyone knew the value they held. Jordan typically finished first and prided herself on being able to make that extra effort. Her mind should have been cleared of everything except the pain and short-breath of exertion, but as she bent down to touch the far foul line, she realized that she had to find a way to contact the other two Reds, even if that just might be exactly what the Big Bad Wolf wanted. And she thought she knew how to do it.

She did not know if there was truth to the cliché Strength in numbers. She doubted it.

Jordan waited until late that evening before she opened up the YouTube video showing her walking to her dormitory. She had ignored most of her homework, spending hours staring at the computer’s background screen-a picture of the Earth taken from space-letting the minutes flow toward midnight. She told herself that even the Big Bad Wolf had to sleep sometime, and besides, what did he have to worry about? She and the other two Reds were the sleepless ones. The wolf probably slept soundly each night.

In one corner of the screen that displayed her video, there was the views counter. It seemed stuck on 5-which indicated the number of times she had watched it. She kept her eyes on that number. “Five five five,” she repeated to herself.

With a deep breath and the sensation that she was stepping into something unknown, Jordan reached for the keyboard and started typing rapidly.

First, she did a quick search using the keyword Red and ordering them by date. A menu arrived on her computer screen, a series of frozen images and a YouTube address. There was a punk leather-and-tattoo rock group and what she guessed was a family vacation and an avant-garde and probably pretentious artist in front of a vibrant red painting that was of something but she couldn’t tell what. But in the stack of potential answers to her search were two videos that showed nothing except a forest-like the beginning of hers.

The first opened in the trees, and then blended into a woman wearing a physician’s long white lab coat smoking in a corner of some anonymous parking lot at some distance. The woman looked to be about her mother’s age. Jordan waited until the video ended. It was short, as short as hers was. Then she clicked on the second and saw the same rush through the woods blurring into a younger woman coming out of a liquor store. This woman seemed to be distracted. She watched the woman get into her car. Jordan’s fingers were hovering over the keyboard, about to stop the video, when she saw a new image pop up in the box screen. It was slightly out of focus, but she saw two names on a headstone.

She grabbed a pencil and paper and wrote down everything she could before the picture faded away. Then she replayed the video a second and a third time, to make sure she had all the information from the grave.

Two names. One date.

Then she went back and watched the white-jacketed woman a second time, trying to make out a street sign or a business, anything that might tell her something. But a white-coated woman smoking in a parking lot could be anyone and anywhere. She did not have to read the web address to know she was looking at Red One and Red Two.

The red hair told her that.

Her first instinct was to whisper to the screen, “I’m here! I’m right here!”

She hesitated.

For the first time, she really understood: I am not alone.

Before, it had seemed abstract. Two other women? Where? Who? But now she could see them. And they could see her, if they tried.

She tried to control her thoughts. For a moment she imagined that everything in her life was whirling about out of her grasp but that this one thing was the only important thing, and if she couldn’t do anything about everything else, she knew she had to be disciplined and smart about what she did in this single arena. There is only one school, one family, one world, she told herself. The Big Bad Wolf and you and you and me. He will know what we are all doing. He’s watching. You can count on that.

She minimized the YouTube window and opened up Gmail. It took her a few minutes to create a new account with a new electronic address: Red3@gmail.com.

Then she returned to YouTube and posted the same message beneath each video:

It’s Red Three. We must talk.

She posted a link to her video and hoped that Red One and Red Two would see what she had done and mimic her. She tried to send mental waves of thought out to the two other women: The Big Bad Wolf will see this. Don’t imagine for an instant that he hasn’t tapped into these videos and isn’t monitoring them every minute, expecting you to do what you’ve done.

She tried to encourage herself but wondered whether she was opening up some door that she did not want to see inside. A world of shadows, she thought.

She did not have to wait long for an answer. The counter on her video suddenly clicked to 6.

She held her breath counting the seconds it would take for someone to watch her video.

Then her computer pinged with her “new mail” sound.

Karen Jayson watched.

She gasped as the shaky camera left the forest and focused on a distant figure. She whispered out loud, “But she’s just a child!” as if there was something inherently unfair in the age of Red Three.

She told herself to be cautious, that it could all be a trap. But even as she warned herself, her fingers were flying across the keyboard, tapping out a message on the computer she used for her comedy. It wasn’t as if she really imagined that switching computers afforded her any new security, but she was happy enough with the illusion that this side of her might still be secret from the Big Bad Wolf.

She followed suit. She created a new e-mail address. Red1@gmail.com.

Then she wrote:

Who are you?

And who is Red 2?