As I did deeper into the story hoard in my hard drvie I am beginning to stumble upon stories that I can no longer remember the origin to. This is one such story. This is also a story that, upon reading today, I feel tempted to expand and rewrite.
This is a 5 minute read.
I am sp!d3r888. I am not the first sp!d3r, and I know I won’t be the last, but in Grayson High School I am the only one that matters. I am a paid spy who crawls the web to let you know what others are saying about you. It’s a great gig for a first real job. Mom was all like, “You need to make some money! Go to Dick’s Deli and see if they need help!” and I was like, “Oh hell no! I ain’t trying to smell like cold cuts all day!” So I had to think fast.
I built a website, made a fivrr listing and a craigslist. I only work with kids from Grayson High and my fee is five dollars for five minutes of web crawl. Though I’m listed in multiple places, the instructions are simple: Venmo me @sp!d3r888 the name of the subject and a dollar amount of your choosing, and I spend the paid amount of time researching what the web has to say about you.
Alyssa Fischer was the first person to hire me. I got the message the day after I put a poster up in the bus shelter. It was three days after the big fight happened there that school security had to come clear out the human wreckage. She followed instructions to a tee. “Alyssa Fischer $10.”
Short, simple, and I got to work. I set my timer for ten minutes and began to crawl across the web, gathering gossip, snaps, tiktoks, and, surprisingly, facebook posts. Alyssa must have known that our little world was a-buzz with her name, I can’t imagine she was discussed like this on a daily basis. The buzzer on my alarm rang and I set to writing my report. That took about one hour. I sent her the results and, as part of my fine print, I posted the results on a Patreon page I set up as well. I wasn’t sure this would work, but I thought maybe I could hook some curious classmates with the potential to read about classmates they didn’t request.
It was just a hunch, but it was spot-on.
A number of things happened in the days that followed Alyssa hiring me. First of all, Alyssa and her girls had a massive falling out -- based on what I discovered, Alyssa would be the better for it. A bunch of backstabbing, gossiping, biatches, if you ask me. Second, word got out that the throw down at the bus shelter was about Alyssa and she confronted someone in the dean’s office with “new Information” that lead to a suspension for Trinity Heller and James Reynolds. Also, Alyssa broke up with James Reynolds, which seemed like the right move to me based on my findings. Finally, I got two new gigs -- Lee Blunt ($10) and James Reynolds ($15) -- and ten patreon supporters by the end of the week.
It was like a massive domino effect. In the following week the patreon was up to 32 supporters and I had five more web searches ranging from as little as $5 (I started to love the challenge of those), all the way up to a couple of pain-staking $60 requests. It became clear that the fee paid was directly linked to the client’s ego. Whoever thought people were talking the most about them, they would pay the most for my fees. The opposite was usually true. Kelly McIntyre tried to get a refund from me because she claimed that I “didn’t find enough” for the hour I had searched. Thankfully, I conduct a full screen capture of the web crawl for each client, so I sent her the one hour of footage of nothingness about her. I think the whole process helped her gain some perspective. She was easier to be in class with after that.
By the end of the month Patreon was up to 56 subscribers, after ten clients -- most of whom I recognized from the Junior class. When Felicia Graws of the senior class hired me, the whole thing blew up. I had 91 subscribers by the end of the next day and it was clear why. Felicia had been mentioned by Lil’ Marshmallow. It was Grayson High lore that Felicia had dated/hooked up with/went on tour with Lil’ Marshmallow, but no one really believed it. In all the typical press coverage of him, Felicia was nowhere to be found, but, luckily for me, his team did a terrible job of wiping his private messages from the servers and I was able to pull a string of messages that not only proved that Felicia and Lil’ Marshmallow, (Marshall Grendle, to his mom), had been dating for a year, but that she had dumped him. Also, he wasn’t over it yet.
What happened in the weeks following was nuts. My Patreon went up to 3,042 patrons. And the requests for web crawls was just as astronomical. The temptation was real, but I had declared myself a spider for Grayson High only, so I had to turn down any requests outside of our student body -- even siblings. When I made that stance clear, and after Lil’ Marshmallow’s fan base trickled away, the Patreon settled at just under a thousand, but, at 16 years old, I was raking in the dough. I told mom I had picked up a gig at the Geek Squad and I did leave the house for a couple of hours each night to do my crawling in different places, just to mimic the patterns of a normal part time job, but I knew it couldn’t last like that forever. Mom was too interested in me. She would visit the Geek Squad soon enough. I started to come up with how I was going to break this to her.
At the same time talk started to center around the screen captures of my crawls and people started to request if I could share them in the Patreon as well. I thought twice about it. I suspected a sharp eye could pick up my techniques and start their own sp!d3r business.
After the fourth month, I decided that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, if the price was right. I set up a VIP Patreon level of $50 per month to view the web crawls, promising to reveal one crawl every week to those high-paying patrons. I received seven upgrades (I couldn’t believe so many of my classmates had the money for this), and four brand new subscribers that I did not recognize. In month two of that, a lot of things happened, but, really, only one of them mattered.
Someone sent me the following request “Jason Blake $75. Real talk.” The client was listed as “A-n0n”, but they put a spider emoji next to their name and I knew something was up. I didn’t want to take on this job, but it didn’t violate the terms and conditions I had set up. Jason Blake was a student at Grayson High. It’s just that he was… well… me.
I let the gig sit for a full twenty four hours before I got started. I was sure there was going to be something revelatory to me on this quest. A-n0n wanted me to feel something, see something, or just show that they knew who I was. Seventy-five minutes was a damn long time. I wasn’t the most popular kid in school, not like sp!d3r888 (who no one -- except A-n0n, evidently-- knew was me), so such a long crawl meant A-n0n wanted me to dig deep. I didn’t leave the house for this crawl. Mom was doing a night shift at the hospital, so I was free and clear to do this crawl in the privacy of my room with no interruptions.
Sp!d3r888 was a great idea, in theory. For months it made big money, dispelled gossip as a weapon in Grayson High, built the confidence of some well-deserving kids, and grounding some kids that were already flying too high before graduation. But it had all been child’s play. Nothing too dramatic, life-altering or scathing to be found in my reports or my Patreon. I didn’t learn about the power or pain of secrecy until the seventy-second minute of the crawl back into my past. It was at that exact moment that I had eased back in my chair and I could glimpse the finish line as the timer rolled close to a zero out. My shoulders had dropped into their normal position when the screen before me seized all of my muscles at once.
George Henderson Adoption Agency transfer records for James Blake, aka Baby John Doe, aka “Little Engine That Could.”
I didn’t know.
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Do you feel cheated with an ending like this? I know when I first started writing short stories, I did things like this all the time. Is there too much left unsaid, or do you feel satisfied that Sp!d3r888/Jason Blake is a changed person based on the final discovery revealed at the end?
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