His video was six seconds long. It was shot from the side and a little behind, at a distance of about forty feet, through drizzle, at an angle from which the nozzle and the woman's hands on it were almost entirely hidden by the rear corner of the gray SUV. In it, a tall Black woman in a leather jacket stood at a gas pump. A small blonde white woman in a red outfit stood very close to her. The blonde woman said something that might, if you turned the volume all the way up, have been make me. And then the tall woman lifted her leg and kicked the blonde woman in the chest, hard, and the blonde woman flew backward across the forecourt and crashed into the hood of a bright orange sports car.
He posted it on his lunch break, at twelve-fifteen, with the caption: Wild morning at the gas station lol. Then he went back to work and did not look at his phone again until six o'clock that evening, at which point it had been viewed four million times.
By the next morning it had been viewed nineteen million times.
Dara found out at six-forty-five, from Jasmine.
She was at Coach Imura's lake cabin, three hours north, where she had driven the previous afternoon after the police let her go and she had called Priscilla Ng to cancel the photo shoot and listened to Priscilla say oh no, oh honey, are you okay, oh my God, eleven times in a row. She had driven north in silence with the radio off, in the rain, in her grandmother's SUV with its tank full of gas she had never finished paying attention to, and she had arrived at the cabin after dark, and Coach Imura had met her at the door and looked at her face for a long time and then said only, have you eaten, and she had said no, and he had made her soup. They had not talked about it that night. He had said they would talk about it in the morning, when she had slept. She had not slept.
Now she was sitting on the dock at the edge of the lake in an old sweatshirt with a mug of tea going cold in her hands, watching the mist come off the water, when the door of the cabin banged open behind her and Jasmine came running down the slope in her pajamas with her phone held out in front of her like something that might explode.
"Dara," she said. "Dara, have you seen this?"
Dara had not seen it. She saw it now.
She watched it three times. Six seconds. Her own body, from the side and behind, small and blurred in the drizzle. The blonde woman, close to her, saying something. Her own left leg coming up. The kick. The woman flying backward. The orange car.
It looked terrible.
That was what she kept thinking, watching it, with Jasmine standing over her breathing hard and the mist curling off the lake. It looked terrible. You could not see the nozzle. You could not see the woman's hands. You could not see the gasoline. You could not hear back up, or the scream of the spout grinding in the filler neck. You could not see that it was a push and not a strike, that it was the sole of the foot and not the heel, that there had been no follow-up, no second kick, nothing. You could not see the minute afterward, kneeling in the puddle. You could only see a tall, strong, athletic woman in black leather kick a small, slim, blonde woman in red across a gas station.
Under the video were the comments. Two hundred and sixty thousand of them. Jasmine had not wanted her to read them. Dara read them anyway.
Some of them were on her side. Quite a lot of them, actually. Some of them had seen the woman grab for something before the kick, and said so. Some of them pointed out that the blonde woman had been screaming in her face. Some of them said, honestly, that they would have done the same thing, and some of them said that she looked amazing doing it, and a disturbing number of them wanted to know where she had bought the jacket.
But many of them were not on her side. Many of them said she was violent. That she was dangerous. That she should be arrested. That she should be in prison. That she was an animal. Some of them used words about her that made Dara's hands go cold around the mug, words about her skin and her hair and her body, words she had heard before, in hallways and on buses and in the stands at tournaments in towns where she was the only Black girl in the gym, but never all at once, never from so many people, never from strangers by the hundred thousand who had watched six seconds of her life and decided they knew exactly what she was.