A rustling in the bushes, then a limb and after that another limb steps out of the trees surrounding the backyard. A pubescent boy, one of the neighbor kids, comes ambling into the tableau. Is it the kid she almost ran over with her sister’s diabolical electric car? The woman can’t remember—these venture capitalists’ kids all look alike. He inspects the food laid out like a buffet, lifts up a cheeseburger, sniffs it, tosses it, then he finds a bag of chips, opens it, and starts crunching. When he peers inside the house, he notices her slumped against the wall opposite the sliding glass doors, observing him like he’s the Mountain View mountain lion. That privileged prick smiles, unzips his jeans, pulls down his jeans and boxers, aims his ass toward the sliding glass doors, and shits. He takes an enormous dump on the deck. Nature has heard her plea and provided the spiritual communion she needed, though not the spiritual communion she wanted. It’s a sign. No one will save her. Nothing is going to magically make it better. The woman has to figure out her life.

camp jabberwocky for recovering internet trolls

Clayton Wheeler just wanted to go home, smoke a joint, and compose kinky love letters in longhand to his girlfriend overseas, but here he was, helping track down a cyberbully on the run from his camp counselors. Lately, Camp Jabberwocky, a summer retreat on Martha’s Vineyard for troubled teens in need of an attitude adjustment and a healthier relationship with social media, had been receiving more than its usual share of drive-bys. The perps were a bunch of townie jock douchebags, scum of the island, who rolled by in an Infiniti—or some other car with satellite radio and a navigation system—and shouted obscenities intermingled with lines from the famous Lewis Carroll poem. They were trolling the trolls, so to speak. “Beware the Jubjub bird! Suck my dick!” they would shout. “All mimsy were the borogoves, you fucks!” These incidents had especially gotten to Rex Hasselbach, the aforementioned escapee. Afterward, he would take to sulking in his bunk or instigating a round of pelt-the-indigenous-wild-turkeys-with-rocks. That wasn’t like Rex, who adored animals. The day their little band of internet tyrants went on a field trip to a local no-kill shelter, Rex was in heaven, helping to medicate cats with renal failure and dropper-feeding baby squirrels, even when the rest of the group took breaks to relax outside.

Tactile activities were the general order of business for the campers, so as to keep their minds occupied and provide them with positive outlets for their feelings. Trust falls and team-building exercises were on the schedule, as were afternoons of arts and crafts. However, despite the fact that devices of any kind were strictly forbidden, and that the camp was legally equipped with a signal jammer, the brats still found ingenious ways to troll. Michelle Gallant, for instance, of the billionaire pharmaceutical Gallants, main contributors to the opioid crisis, had spent weeks painstakingly coloring individual pieces of macaroni and then gluing them on a canvas to spell out NO FUGLY BITCHES above a field of bright flowers. She was the most popular girl in her elite East Coast prep academy and, rumor had it, her repeated insults on the topic of appearance, along with Wikipedia links to forms of suicide, had driven some poor girl to slash her wrists. It was inevitable that alliances of power be quickly established among the Jabs. They all recognized their own: the hot girls hung out with other hot girls and insulted the less-hot girls, while the politicos carved swastikas and slurs into lunch tables and the sides of buildings, and the gamers, led by an evil MMORPG nerd who had started a not-so-well-hidden website for his high school featuring “The Titties of Eagle Crest,” invented a completely new language that they found hilarious but seemed mostly to refer to outrageously humiliating sex acts.