Underneath the video, among the thousands of comments calling her names, there began to be other comments. Not many at first. Then more. Comments from people who said they had done something like that once, lashed out at a stranger in a parking lot or a grocery store or on a train, on the worst day of their lives, over nothing, and had never told anyone, and had never been able to take it back. Comments from people who said that they, too, were eleven weeks behind on rent and pretending everything was fine. Comments from people who said they had been sitting on a bathroom floor at two in the morning with their phone in their hand, more times than they could count, and that watching her talk without makeup in a hospital bed was the first time in a long time that they had felt like somebody understood. Comments from women who simply wrote: thank you for telling the truth. Thank you. Thank you.
And comments, by the thousand, that said only: now show us the full video.
Theo Navarro had been waiting for that.
He had not posted the full video. He had thought about it, many times, in the day and a half since the man from pump four's six-second clip had gone around the world. Every time he saw it on his phone, shared by somebody else, with another comment calling the tall woman an animal or a thug, his thumb had hovered over his own video, his forty-one seconds, and he had thought about posting it. And every time, he had not. He had given it to the police. That felt like enough. That felt like the right thing. He was a nineteen-year-old from the apartments on Linwood Avenue and he had learned, a long time ago, that the safest thing to do on the internet was nothing. People like him did not go viral. People like him got their names dragged into things and then got doxxed and lost jobs they didn't even have yet.
But then he watched the blonde woman's video, sitting on his bed in the apartment above the hardware store, with his little sister doing homework at the desk across the room in her old glasses that were too weak. He watched her say, there is no girl in red, there's just me. He watched her say, I'm sorry, Dara. And he looked at the comments underneath. Show us the full video. Show us. We don't believe you. Prove it.
"Theo," his sister said from the desk, without looking up. "You're doing the thing with your leg again."
He was. His knee was bouncing so hard the bed shook.
He opened his camera roll. He found the video. He watched it once more, all forty-one seconds, from the blonde woman getting out of the orange car to the two of them kneeling in the puddle, the tall woman's hand on the other woman's shoulder. Then he posted it, with no caption at all except the time and the place. Linwood and Fifth. 8:37 AM.
And then he went downstairs to the hardware store and bought his sister a candy bar with the last two dollars he had, because he did not want to be alone with his phone.
By the next morning, the full video had been seen by thirty-one million people.
It changed everything. Of course it did. That was the thing about the full video that Theo had understood, standing between the pump islands with his milk and his bread, long before anybody else. In the six-second clip you saw a kick. In the forty-one-second video you saw a story. You saw the orange car come roaring in. You saw the blonde woman get out with her face full of panic. You saw the tall woman not even turn around. You saw the screaming. I'm still fueling. I don't care, hurry up. You saw the blonde woman lean in until her face was inches away. You heard, if you turned the volume up, a low voice say back up. You saw two small pale hands with red nails reach out and grab the nozzle. You saw it jerk. You saw, if you looked very closely, a thin bright splash of liquid jump out of the filler neck. You heard the laugh. Make me. You saw the kick, from a different angle now, from the front, where you could see that the tall woman's hands never left the pump, that her foot came up tight and pushed instead of struck. You saw the blonde woman fly back against the hood of the orange car and slide off it onto her knees. And then you saw what the six-second clip had cut off. You saw the tall woman put the nozzle away. You saw her close the fuel cap. You saw her walk over and kneel down in the puddle in her leather shorts. You saw her lean close and say something. You saw the blonde woman breathe. You saw her start to cry. You saw the tall woman reach out, slowly, and put her hand on her shoulder.