The Last Kid Left by Rosecrans Baldwin

Author:Rosecrans Baldwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

THE CLAYMORE KIDS

Three days after Justin Johnson’s DROP story breaks, Claymore High School blasts an urgent email out to staff, students, and parents, instructing them to forcefully deny, please, any requests from nonstudents or non-CHS personnel in the coming days to borrow old yearbooks, school newspapers, telephone directories, photographic or video footage of school events, any digital archives of the school website or class materials, and/or any materials featuring pictures of students or any information about them.

The announcement, the first in school history, follows three confusing days of disturbances that crash over Claymore’s shorefront defenses, which the town is by no means equipped to handle.

When, within thirty minutes of an early-morning run time, the DROP story is shared more than a hundred times. DROP is a new print and web magazine, Brooklyn-based, nine months old. It’s a big investment by social media royalty in old-fashioned journalism, of both the high-end adversarial and gossip varieties—like Spy in its heyday, people say—which may or may not prove profitable but still seems cool for the present moment, even gutsy. So the story is soon prominently featured on an assortment of gatekeeper websites, whether or not their editors actually read the full thing, or even part of it.

Within three hours of publication, social shares number close to one thousand.

Testifying how broadly and mysteriously the DROP story will appeal in the coming weeks, it is throughout the day paraphrased, teased, wondered about, sneered at, and otherwise promoted as the read of the moment, the day, the week, for its dirty pictures and breathless pulp, and also because of that distinctively rare event in online media when someone breaks actual news, or what looks like actual news.

Before sunset on the East Coast on publication day, a summer day of above-average temperatures from Maine to Florida, the DROP story acquires more than three thousand likes and almost a half dozen seven-hundred-word responses, via opinion writers from different publications, who alternately praise and criticize Justin Johnson’s account, even if they don’t agree on a single reason to discuss it.

If anything, what appears to be the burning broad consensus is that it’s too soon to know whether to embrace or rebuff the vision presented. Or just flat-out mock it. Or take the dispatch on its own merits and analyze the crimes discussed, with more expansive questions about the fourth estate and humanity in present-day America. Or use the spring-back of the account’s metaphorical diving board to address other issues, like the perils of unsafe sexting. Or fourth-wave feminism and the value of consent in an age of livestreaming and “sextortion.” Or the evolution of women’s sex-positive expression, from de Pizan/Hesse to Rihanna feat. Lorde. Or the history of phrases like “benevolent sexism,” “hegemonic masculinity,” “pussy affluenza,” and why they remain in quotes for public digestion. Or the tragic history, regarding both female eroticism and rape culture, that is specific to New England, sacred turf of Louisa May Alcott, Shirley Jackson, and other chroniclers of the northeastern bloc’s transgressed young women.

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