Fakebook by Dave Cicirelli

no lightbulbs.)
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    I looked at what I wrote. It was desperate. I looked at the picture. It was terrible. The bomb kept ticking, and every second was another opportunity for someone to stumble upon the photo and put it all together.
    It killed me. All afternoon I weighed the risk of keeping the photo up and the risk of pulling it down. I changed my mind a hundred times before the workday ended.
    After work, I found myself sitting on a bench outside the Flatiron Building. It was starting to get dark earlier and earlier, and the buildings were lit up. I faced north, looking at the Empire State Building over the trees in Madison Park. There was a chill in the air that my jacket wasn’t keeping out. I just sat there in a cold daze.
    I thought for a second that maybe the photo wasn’t that bad. Maybe I was overreacting. I told myself it would be fine. Then I pulled up the photo and looked at it again. It was even worse than I’d remembered. So I pulled it.
    Dave Cicirelli
Yikes. Jonathon didn’t realize I put his daughter’s picture on the internet. He’s making me pull it—he thinks Facebook is some sort of pornography.
    What a nightmare.
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    Matt Campbell How did he find out? Do the Amish employ net-able people as spies?
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    Dave Cicirelli I know…I keep half expecting to stumble onto the Bat Computer. Gossip man, like anywhere else. They’re an insular people, and I’m this big X factor around here. Plus I’ve been flirting with Kate (the girl in the pic and Jonathon’s daughter) like crazy. People talk man…people talk.
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    I sat there, staring at the screen until it went to sleep. It was a clunky, transparent fix.
    I found myself back at square one. Amish Kate was off the table, over before it began. Fake Dave was still on the farm. I was back in the boring holding pattern I’d been trying to break out of, in even worse standing with my audience than before. Sensationalism was off the table for the foreseeable future.

    A week after I’d pulled the photo of Amish Kate, I met with Elizabeth at the mega-deli on the corner of Madison Park. Her office was around the corner from mine, so on the rare occasion that we shared a slow day, we always made an effort to grab lunch.
    I was still reeling and had spent the week rereading the boring FarmVille posts I’d put up to defuse my Photoshop photo bomb. At least they felt safe. There was no momentum to Fakebook anymore. My thoughts were scattered and my heart wasn’t in it. I was scared to make another wrong move, and for the first time since I’d started, I wasn’t getting any reaction—there were posts with no likes and no comments.
    Fakebook lived on voyeurism, and disinterest was the worst end of this project. As Oscar Wilde once said, “If there is anything more annoying in the world than having people talk about you, it is certainly having no one talk about you.”
    Elizabeth grabbed a container of lettuce and handed it to the guy working the salad station, ordering the usual—beets, cranberry-raisins, walnuts, goat cheese, and balsamic.
    It was too healthy for me and the funk I was in, so I grabbed a tray and wandered around. Sushi, pizza, Korean barbecue, tacos, wraps…all of it looked pretty good.
    â€œPretty good” is a low standard in a town where the “very good” version of anything is just a few blocks away, but variety is what made the Manhattan food courts an easy compromise. Besides, the cafeteria setting was appropriate for lunch with a school friend.
    The art school bond is a special one. You spend thousands of hours together working on projects, exchanging ideas, helping each other figure them out. You live with each other’s frustrations, triumphs, and failures, as you try, as Van Gogh put it, “to break through that iron wall between