On the second day after the thing, Carly’s gym teacher started calling her BK Liddell. BK stood for Butt-Kicker, and she liked it. She laughed along with everyone else. Carly figured that under his mostly gray buzz cut, Coach Marshall was really thinking Ass-Kicker, but he made a big deal about being a deacon in his church, so he wouldn’t say ass to a bunch of eighth graders.

The next day, her math teacher had hugged her on her way into the classroom. The principal knew her name all of a sudden, and the janitor high-fived her and called her Girlie when he’d never called her anything before.

It didn’t matter that the police had scrubbed her face out of the video. The neighbors saw the cops and the fire truck and the news vans on their street. Her friends recognized the rest of her—her hair and clothes and her backpack, and her house. Then those kids showed their parents. It didn’t matter that it was over so quickly. It wasn’t hard to put together. The next day it was all over the place.

The thing spilled over the borders of the school grounds. The desk clerk at the Y asked her if she was the one, and Carly had to try to not giggle because it sounded so high drama, like THE ONE, in her head when she heard it. The high schooler at the ice cream kiosk in the grocery store kept checking her recognition against Carly’s actual, not-blurred face by staring and trying hard to look as if she weren’t.

Every several hours that passed from the thing to whenever she noticed again, it seemed that the catalog of new reactions had grown by half. So many variations on a theme. It got to the point that she could feel the eyes on her, scuttling over her like butterfly feet, but soon she didn’t need to turn to find the source. It didn’t matter who it was. They needed to look, but she didn’t need to look at them looking.

Just looking was good enough for most people, but some kids, and even some of the grown-ups, insisted on more. They were positively itching to see what Carly was about in real life. And it wasn’t enough just to stare. It needed to be a circuit with Carly actively looped in while they checked what they could tell about her with their naked eyes. They measured her to see if she matched up to the video.