Still, we loved it.
Watching the bids notch toward ludicrous was its own spectator sport. As soon as Market Catch went up, we waited for the Balladeers’ Auction to go live. The big question was whether Noah Landry had, in fact, volunteered as a Balladeer, as some people were saying.
Of course, that was the hope—and, we suspected, a reason for the enormous volume of ticket sales. On the one hand, Noah Landry was devoted to charitable works, and the raffle nominally counted. We knew him as a devoted church kid, an Eagle Scout, and a member of the school’s United Service Club, even if he was always busy training and never actually went to meetings, at least according to Evie Grant, whom we suspected had joined only after she saw that Noah Landrywas listed as a member and who, to our knowledge, didn’t give a shit about homeless people.
On the other hand, Noah Landry was, outside the pool, averse to the spotlight. He was quiet—possibly even shy—and avoided most social events. In fact, the biggest proof that he was interested in Lucy Vale was that he’d bothered showing up at her Halloween party. Swimming, church, homework, and a little bit of sleep—from what we could tell, that was Noah Landry’s life. Some of us doubted that he would come to the Winters at all, even though the Sharks were its centerpiece.
It all depended, we felt, on Lucy Vale—whether she would go and whether she’d enter her name in the raffle.
We placed bets on how much money a dance with Noah Landry might rake in and joked about how salty Alec Nye would be when Landry torched his going price. We imagined their rumored rivalry might break out into open warfare. We made puns about Alec Nye going off the deep end.
But in the end, we never had the chance to see it.
The night before the Balladeers were due to be listed online, Scarlett Hughes sent a worried message through Discord. Market Catch had vanished mysteriously from the internet; the site was returning an error. At first we assumed that a rush of traffic had temporarily crippled the server.
But the following day, Market Catch was still offline, and our suspicion coalesced into certainty: we’d been hacked. The flurry of contradictory and apologetic statements from Administration confirmed it.
Spinnaker speculated that one or more bad actors were assaulting the server with invalid requests. Valiantly, the coding club offered their help to defend Market Catch from attack. Typically Administration rebuffed them, claiming some obscure series of technical glitches was responsible for the outage.
We knew better. And soon we had our proof.
At first we celebrated the email blast alerting us that the Market Catch website had been restored. It was a few hours before Olivia Howard raised the alarm; the offerings now included hardcore pornography, a handgun, and, even more shocking, information concerning Nina Faraday’s whereabouts, listed for the price of one hundred dollars.
We were panicked. We were outraged. We were paralyzed, watching bids pour in on the counterfeit items. We discussed mounting a sting operation and frantically tallied whether we could find enough cash to place a bid ourselves.
We couldn’t.
We debated calling the police or the FBI. We hunted for clues to the hacker’s identity in the descriptions of the foreign items, which Skyler Matthews pointed out contained many of the same grammatical quirks. All we determined, however, was a propensity for semicolons.
It was a cataclysm.
We reached out to Alex Spinnaker and the coding club for help, then had to endure a lecture from him about penalizing cybercrime.
@gustagusta:so let me get this straight
@gustagusta:What I’m hearing is
@gustagusta:You’re not going to do shit
@spinn_doctor:of course I’m going to do shit
@spinn_doctor:I already told my dad
Nate Stern claimed to have heard from his cousin that the sheriff’s department would have to investigate the false tip, even though we were sure they would only find a giant time suck. On the plus side, Nate further insisted that whoever had posted the porn and the gun for sale might end up in federal prison. We prayed that it might turn out to be one of our most vocal rivals—like the Wolverines’ head coach, who’d been insinuating for years that the Sharks dabbled with performance enhancers, or the captain of the Elgin High School football team, who’d spat on Noah Landry in the parking lot after a meet.
As restoration of the Market Catch website stalled, the Student Leadership Department scrambled to salvage the Balladeers’ Auction. In the end, Mrs. Steeler-Cox, working with the Student Council, determined that the slow dances should be sold by student raffle. We were pretty outraged by the change until Skyler Matthews, who was back on Discord, reminded us that auctioning off human beings had connotations that our ancestors, who had proudly supported the Union against the Confederacy, would have been ashamed of.
It was a logic we didn’t dare contradict.
Still, we grumbled, especially the girls. There was no way to guarantee a danceorbid on a specific Balladeer. The nineteen volunteering members of the swim team weren’t identified. For twenty bucks, a girl could buy her name onto a raffle ticket and the chance to dance with the Shark who pulled it. It was, we had to admit, a far more democratic system—at least superficially.
Of course, the Student Council Mafia still had a way to tilt the odds in their favor. There was no limit on how many times one girl could enter her name into the raffle, provided she was willing to shell out. The bulletin board outside the cafeteria was refitted daily with a tally of tickets sold. Beneath was a table where two Student Council shills rotated time with school iPads, heckling everyone who passed to get in on the action. In the days leading up to the dance, we attempted to identify which swimmers had volunteered by voyeurism, observing those trying to persuade all the cute girls to put in for more tickets and falling stonily silent whenever a bottom-feeder shuffled by.Eight hundred ticketssold within the first week, more than double the entire female population of the school. And the numbers kept climbing.
The raffle system, we soon discovered, was bedeviled by the problem of all new democracies; we suspected that the results would be manipulated. There was no way that the Steeler-Coxes would keep their clutching hands out of the ballot box—or the ticket roll, in our case. If no one was monitoring and controlling the entrants, the logic went,what was to stop any of the boys on our server from snapping up a block of tickets and scoring a dance with one of the Sharks?
@gustagusta:besides the fact that SLD would murder us?
@nononycky:if Nye didn’t get to us first
