The Ace Up My Dress

Can you keep a secret? Yes, you. I’m talking to you. You look like someone who’d listen, and you should. This one’s a good one - you’d never be able to tell if you saw me. My name is Arya, and I’m a receptionist at a beauty salon in the city. You probably wouldn’t notice me twice on the street if you saw me. Well, maybe I’m being a bit modest. I’ve been told my entire life how blessed I am in the looks department. I do, at times, wonder how my 5’7” balding father and pale (also kind of balding) mother produced me, with my long tan legs, perfectly arched eyebrows and thick chestnut brown tresses that have earned me more than one offer from advertisement casting directors. I’m now aware of how vain I sound, but I’m just trying to paint you a picture. 

I will recount this story the same way I just did to the courthouse, though perhaps without the tears and shakiness this time. It started three years ago, when I attended a rooftop promotional event for one of the haircare brands newly launching across all our salons. It was a perfect, clear, and breezy night at The Nest in midtown Atlanta, and I had been there only twenty minutes and had already received about six compliments on my emerald green plunge-neck dress. All of the company’s key stakeholders and brand representatives were there, and it was a one-off scenario that I was invited to an event at this scale at all. I tried not to appear too out of my element. I caught sight of my supervisor, Quinn and exchanged a few words with her about the grandeur of the decor and variety of hor d'oeuvres served before she was whisked away by someone too influential to be in the same conversation as me. I walked across the seating area to one of the standing tables and sipped my drink - somewhat nervously - hoping I looked like I was waiting for a companion to return from the restroom or from getting a drink at the open bar.

I saw someone approaching me out of the corner of my eye and instantly tightened. He was tall, with brown skin and an in-style buzzcut - or at least, his manner suggested he certainly thought it was. 

“I hope you don’t work for VinePro, because I’d hate to have to refrain from flirting with you because you work for our rivals.”, he said, with a smirk. I smiled, admitted I was just the receptionist, and then shot back, “but I’ll stop promoting their products so hard to the clients if there’s something in it for me!”. 

The night progressed smoothly, and Kieran’s comments turned more risqué. He even made a bold comment about the cleavage I revealed. A drink or two later, I found myself having my hand lightly grazed by his on more than one occasion. Kieran left with my number, and I left with a goofy smile I’m sure he saw and politely didn’t mention. 

He didn’t play games, he texted me promptly the following day, and then two days after that, and then consistently for the days and weeks after. The first two months were smooth-sailing between us. He was a mid-level executive at Jewel, the company that hosted the event we met at, and was clearly ambitious and hardworking. He was also falling in love pretty quickly, with simple, living-in-a-tiny-studio, snorts-when-she-laughs, silly Arya Temple. 

The most bizarre things seemed to happen after that. Kieran’s luck just seemed to…. fade. And with it, ours. At first, it was tiny things. His burglar alarm malfunctioned, and one day he noticed the automatic locks on his doors were failing. He didn’t even know how long that had been going on for. Anyone could have entered his home, though he was never robbed - at least he didn’t seem to think he was since most of his valuables were accounted for. Around that same time, some risky investments he’d made took a downward turn and he tried to maintain composure and tide over the losses, but didn’t seem to recuperate. Later in the year, a colleague threatened to expose him over some confidential information he knew but never shared. Caught in a web of lies and deceit Kieran had no idea how he even landed in the middle of, he eventually had to take the equivalent of a demotion, and no longer held the hope in his eyes of climbing up the corporate ladder he was trying so hard to scramble up when I met him.

The events in his life trickled into mine too. Unable to bear how everything around him was slowly crumbling, he shifted his focus in its entirety onto me. If I was taking an afternoon break to go to the local farmer’s market, somehow he was there. If I mentioned in passing something I was potentially interested in buying, it arrived in a giftbox a few days later. The attachment grew in intensity, and turned into an obsession. I began to receive messages from him that very honestly, frightened me. They spoke of loving me, never letting me go, how I was the only thing worth sticking around this world for, and how I could never leave him or he’d harm himself.

I didn’t know who to share this with. Anyone reading all of that would understand fear being the natural response to it. The final straw came in the form of a phone call from his workplace one day. Kieran had gotten upset at my request for him to give me space, and shared some pretty exposing pictures of me on his social media which included his coworkers and some of my friends. I called the authorities to report harassment in a state of hysteria. 

It’s been three months since then, and today Kieran Petris stood up in court, tired but seething, as I recounted all these events and the reasons why I was uncomfortable with such a man not paying for harassing a woman, as well as expressing concern about him hurting himself. To make a long story short, I don’t think I’d need to worry about the man troubling me any longer.

That’s the end of my story. That’s the end of my… public story. I walked out of the room, head hung low, but my mind exploding with laughter. This one was the most satisfying one yet. Ah, how people read me wrong, and don’t for a moment imagine that contained in this body is a mind that knows how to hack any system. I began learning to do this in the dull hours I felt my brain rotting away behind a desk booking clients in and out of their balayage sessions at the salon. I began coding up little projects, then learned to web-scrape, and soon, data injection. It was the most magical thing, but even more magical was society’s skewed perception that someone who looks one way would never behave in any other. Every time someone complimented my appearances or my beauty, insinuating that it was all that comprised me, it just made me that much more excited at the prospect of delivering them a blow with my intelligence that they would never see coming, and that is exactly what Kieran provoked in me with his objectifying remarks the first night we met. The sweet taste of inflicting torture actually came to me during the first week of meeting Kieran. 

It was really simple actually, and I used that technique multiple times over the next few months - a tracking pixel. It’s an invisible pixel you can send in a blank text to someone that then basically follows them and their activity on the internet. I expanded the usage of this to fit multiple little projects later on - I made it a location tracker to tell me his whereabouts (something that made it easy to put up appearances that he kept ‘bumping into me’ wherever I went, where I would appear startled to see him), I made it tweak his session identities on e-commerce and other ad-based websites to target all his advertisements to items I had just mentioned in real life, so he’d know to buy them for me. Of course I was the one who hacked his locks - that was just a fun side project since I hadn’t dabbled in hardware hackery before. As you can guess, all of it was me. The social media hack was probably the easiest one, and I didn’t mind throwing myself under the bus and having a picture or two of mine exposed for it.

I felt a thrill, a rush, a high. I wanted to cackle gleefully at how no one would ever point me out as the first suspect - even my coworkers knew me as the girl who struggled to open an Excel sheet sometimes and cross-booked clients by accident. There is something innately satisfying about being underestimated. It feels powerful. It feels like an ace up my sleeve, that only I know is there. Well me, and now, dear reader, of course, you. But the future all depends on whether you can do this for me. Can you keep a secret?