Free Sad Desk Salad by Jessica Grose Page A

how about you give me some sugar?” the guy says to her.
    At this suggestion, Becky smiles a shy little grin. “Okay,” she says. She stands up, so her face is out of frame. She lifts off her bra in one swift motion and walks toward the camera.
    The video ends and for a minute all I can do is sit there and stare at the screen. Then I look Becky up on Facebook.
    I start clicking through her photos—her settings are so lax I can see everything. At first they’re staid and boring: Becky standing hand in hand with the robot she made; Becky with her arms wholesomely slung around her sisters’ shoulders; Becky riding a roller coaster at the Nebraska state fair. She certainly resembles the girl in the video, but her corn-fed good looks are so generic that I need something more substantial to prove that it’s really Becky blowing all those lines.
    After a few more clicks, I find exactly what I’m looking for. In the background of one of the photos, clearly taken in a dorm room, is the telltale Laura Ashley bedspread. The sweet pink flowers nearly throb through my screen.
    My first thought is: This is going to be the biggest page-view bonanza in the history of Chick Habit.
    My second thought is: This is really going to tank Darleen’s nascent political career.
    My final thought is: Do I really want to ruin this poor kid’s life? Becky West’s only worldly significance at this point is that her mother is a fame-seeking missile. It’s not her fault that Darleen has cast her as a superior being in a national morality play. Sure, she’s been happy to fill that role when confronted by Ann Curry about it—but I’m sympathetic to the desire to please one’s mother and to look like a princess on national TV. But it’s not just her good-girl status that’s at risk here. I’m no lawyer, but I wonder if she could be prosecuted for the sheer amount of coke strewn around her dorm room. I guess she could always take the Miley Cyrus route and argue it’s an “herbal supplement.”
     
    When I was a kid, I would never have dreamed that I would earn my living investigating the allegedly drug-addled children of semi-celebrities in order to write about them on the Internet. For one thing, the Internet didn’t really exist when I was little. And for another, I wanted to be an actress before I wanted to be a writer.
    I always got the leads in the local theater productions in our small Connecticut town, but mostly because the competition wasn’t especially fierce. I was Charlotte in Charlotte’s Web in first grade because I was the only precocious kid who could memorize all the lines without faltering (though I must say, my spider dance of death at the end of the E. B. White story was worthy of Sarah Bernhardt). My being an actress was a fantasy my mother always encouraged, even though my talent was middling at best. She supported any and all of my creative pursuits. Probably because deep down she felt like she had shelved her own.
    My parents moved to Stanton in the late seventies, right after grad school, where they had met. My father had finished his Ph.D. in chemistry at U Conn but hadn’t fared well in the university job market. He had too much pride (and too much debt) to keep putting himself out there at the collegiate level. When he was offered a job teaching advanced chemistry at Manning prep, he took it.
    Dad finished his degree before my mother did. She had already completed all her coursework toward a Ph.D. in comparative literature, so she decided to come with him to Manning to write her dissertation on the realist works of Spanish novelist Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. As my parents told it, she set up a workspace with carefully thrifted lamps and cozy fluffy chairs in the attic of the lovely old Greek revival that Manning had provided my parents.
    While my father adapted to the rhythms of the school year and the excesses of his wealthy students (“Donny will not be able to take his chemistry test this week because he must